Bill Mauldin - Back Home - 1945

Artist: Bill Mauldin (All)

5 Comments - 3,606 Views - 1 Like

Bill Mauldin - Back Home - 1945 Comic Art

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Artwork Details

Title:	Bill Mauldin - Back Home - 1945
Artist:	Bill Mauldin (All)
Media Type:	Pen and Ink
Art Type:	Comic Strip
For Sale Status:	NFS
Views:	3,606
Likes on CAF:	1 2
Comments:	5
Added to Site:	1/1/2014
Comic Art Archive:

Description

My new year started nicely by welcoming a new Bill Mauldin cartoon into the collection. This piece is from September 20, 1945, just four months after Mauldin returned home from the Mediterranean Theater. Mauldin did not want to bring his characters into civilian life, preferring to kill them off in war, but the syndicate that helped bring him fame and money wouldn't hear of it. Besides that, had a contract with United Features until 1948. It was a rough time for Mauldin personally, and he had a very rocky relationship with UFS. The quality of his post-war cartoons with Willie and Joe ebb and flow, but I'm glad to have run across a nice one, which features Joe trying to get a slew of kids to leave him alone. He was so used to telling kids how to scram in foreign languages that he forgot what to say in English. Any of Mauldin's WWII work is very scarce, and I've never run across any of this early civilian work until now. The panel ran under different titles, including Willie and Joe, and Back Home.

Addendum (9/15/14): I was very pleased to discover that this cartoon was pictured in Mauldin's book, "Back Home", which followed up his Pulitzer Prize winning "Up Front". Mauldin wrote about the cartoon when he wrote about Willie's single friend Joe: "...and once I had him besieged with sidewalk urchins who behave in America very much like their counterparts in Europe. The principal difference is that even poverty-stricken kids in America are in rather better shape than European children, who have been robbed of every vestige of their innocence and naivete by the war, and who had been schooled, by privation and hunger, in the fine arts of pimping, bootlegging, and armed robbery before they had lost their first milk teeth."

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About the Owner

	Rob Stolzer Premium Gallery Owner
Joined:	September 2004
Last Login:	September 2025
Ebay Id:	robart
Website:	https://freeassociationfunnies.com/
Country:	UNITED STATES
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Comments on this Artwork

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Ben Samuels
Member Since 2006

Posted on 1/2/2014

What a cool addition to your collection! But what I find most interesting about this piece is that a couple of those kids are smoking cigarettes! (Which is totally not the point of this gag.)

Dale E Withers Peck
Member Since 2006

Posted on 1/2/2014

Great piece! I think the 3 kids on the right side are African American - true to the time this was drawn, they would be the ones doing shoe shines.

Kevin Stawieray
Member Since 2004

Posted on 1/2/2014

Congratulations! Nice brushwork throughout on this rare piece.

Dan F
Member Since 2004

Posted on 1/6/2014

Glad to see you got one of these too! Whatta find.

Ron S
Member Since 2007

Posted on 1/11/2014

This is spectacular...

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