From Booklist*Starred Review* To the generation that lived through World War II, Mauldin's iconic infantrymen Willie and Joe personified the beleaguered, resigned dogface who won the war. Mauldin began drawing for his division's newspaper shortly after joining the army in 1940. Three years later he landed in Sicily, and his work began appearing in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes as well as on the home front. His bristle-faced foot soldiers endured life on the frontlines with heavy-lidded weariness and resigned humor. Mauldin's ink-laden drawings conveyed the harsh conditions the troops endured, although military censorship prevented him from showing the true horrors of combat. While his cartoons were beloved by the soldiers, he frequently ran afoul of the brass, most famously General Patton, who thought that Mauldin's goal was to "create disrespect for officers." His battlefield efforts were recognized stateside when Mauldin became the youngest Pulitzer Prize winner in history, and they launched a career as an editorial cartoonist that continued four decades after the war. These two lovingly designed, khaki-green, slipcased volumes collect all 600-plus Mauldin WWII cartoons. They're an essential complement to editor DePastino's Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front (2008)--and to every good WWII collection. --Gordon FlaggReviewWillie & Joe is an extraordinarily compiled and presented tribute to Bill Mauldin, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist who chronicled life in the U.S. Army from 1940 to 1945. The set is bound in army green canvas and typeset in the font of an old manual typewriter, the kind an army clerk might have used during the Second World War. The collection is a sensory delight, pleasing to touch and beautiful to see. ... For the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, for the man who was once America's most celebrated enlisted man, Willie & Joe is a fitting, and wonderful, tribute. (David Mitchell - BiblioBuffet )This compilation of his cartoons helps bring Mauldin's talent and his life at the front lines both to historians and a new generation. (Samuel M. Baker - ARMY Magazine )The cartoonist's humanistic brush paints a sober picture of war that a news camera can never achieve. These GIs resonate with real pathos; each cartoon, however jocular, emanates weariness and resignation. (James Sturm - Print Magazine )[A] terrific two-volume collection of the legendary Bill Mauldin's 'GI Joe' cartoons from 'the last good war'... Fantagraphics gives us a comprehensive collection of the cartoons that fellow enlisted man Mauldin created during the war, both for civilians and fellow soldiers alike... [T]his compendium is both a great time capsule, and a fitting tribute to an American original. (Mark London Williams - The SF Site: Nexus Graphica )Bill Mauldin was my first artist hero, and Willie & Joe: The WWII Years reminds me why. (Steven Heller - The New York Times Book Review