For many years, Charles Schulz would have a special Veterans Day comic in
Peanuts. Many of them involved Snoopy heading over to Bill Mauldin's house to quaff a few root beers. Maudlin, of course, was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist himself, who became for his "Willie and Joe" cartoons in
Stars and Stripes. Schulz managed an original joke pretty much every Veterans Day, despite them all pretty much centering around that same notion of Snoopy walking over to Mauldin's.
I wanted to call out this one, though, since it reference a specific piece of Mauldin's work...
That first ran in 1983, roughly forty years after the comic Linus references was originally published. For as memorable as Schulz may have found that cartoon, though, I suspect many people reading the newspaper that day didn't know what comic Linus was talking about. I'm sure the ensuing few decades haven't helped in that regard. So, here's Mauldin's original...
"Beautiful view! Is there one for the enlisted men?"My understanding is that Mauldin never considered himself much of a writer. He drew and drew and drew, and would only sit down after the fact with a pile of cartoons and come up with captions afterwards. (At least during his
Stars and Stripes tenure; many of his post-war political cartoons strike me as being more creatively conjoined in that regard.)
I can't find if Schulz and Mauldin actually sat down for "root beers" on anything resembling a regular basis, but Schulz kept paying annual tribute almost until his death in early 2000. Mauldin survived Schulz by only a few years, passing away in 2003.
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