Ten cartoons a day. I was flabbergasted when I read that. I considered myself a bright person, but one with little creativity. Right after reading about ten cartoons a day, I paused and tried to dream up a cartoon. Nothing at all. I tried again two hours later. Zilch. In the afternoon I created nada. In the evening niente.

I could not come up with one idea for any sort of cartoon in a day, but Bill Mauldin said that while learning his craft, he forced himself to create at least ten new cartoons every day. That remarkable regime stuck in the recesses of my mind long after I had read about it in his bestselling book, The Brass Ring. However, it popped to the surface again when I recently saw a two-hour documentary about Bill Mauldin, If It’s Big, Hit It. The directors Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce were in attendance and said that their film had not yet found a distributor. They had bad timing, having finished the movie at the beginning of Covid. They explained further that few people today knew of Mauldin, and memories of World War II had faded.

Mauldin had gained fame for his World War II cartoons, meticulously drawn, featuring Willie and Joe, the unshaven, cigarette-dangling, front-line infantry dogfaces. First published in military newspapers, the cartoons were later syndicated in the United States. I knew from my reading that Mauldin was with the Army as it slogged north through Italy and was frequently at the front lines. And I knew that after the war, he was an editorial cartoonist for the St. Louis Post Dispatch and later for the Chicago Sun-Times. I had seen many of his cartoons before but saw them regularly in the Sun-Times when I lived in Chicago in the 1960s.

However, I learned much more from the documentary. I learned about a hardscrabble childhood in America’s southwest. He moved out of the house when barely a teenager; his cartooning began with a high school newspaper even though he did not graduate from that school. (He was given an honorary diploma many years later.) He enlisted in the National Guard before the attack on Pearl Harbor, at least in part because it was the only job he could find. The syndication of his WWII cartons made him a wealthy young man and a darling of the media. He had multiple marriages and had children from each of those unions. He drank too much and died of Alzheimer’s disease.

I did not know that the title of the film — “If it’s big, hit it” — was his own quote. It fit; His cartoons often lampooned and skewered the powerful. His World War II cartoons often satirized the brass, getting Mauldin in trouble with George S. Patton. (Mauldin’s work continued to run in the military papers because Patton’s boss, Dwight D. Eisenhower, maintained they were good for morale.) His satirization of the Bigs continued in civilian life; one of his post-war cartoons caused the FBI to open a file on Mauldin, under the frequently applied theory that if someone criticized the United States, he was communist inspired. He not only advocated hitting the big, he also, quite literally, got hit in return. When the police, instead of giving tickets, protected illegally double-parked cars of friends of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Mauldin took pictures of the license plates. The cartoonist was rewarded with a fist to the nose, and photographs of his blood-smeared face ran in the papers.

The movie showed many of Mauldin’s cartoons. Some were classics that had burrowed into my memory, but others were new to me. Many of these were frightening; cartoons about racism, homophobia, suppression of rights, and other topics published a half-century ago could run unaltered today and be equally relevant and insightful. The United States has changed, but not as much as it should have.

I was impressed with Bill Mauldin before watching the movie, and even more so after the screening. Mauldin was unique, but he also fits into that category of creative people who amaze and mystify me. First there is the drive. Writers write; painters paint; and as Mauldin showed, cartoonists cartoon. They may desire and even achieve wealth and fame, but that is the byproduct of their creative urge. Ten cartoons a day. That came from a drive to be a cartoonist, not from a drive to be rich.

I understand that such creative drive exists, but as a non-creative person, I wish I better understood the source of creativity itself. How did Brian Wilson create “Pet Sounds” or Gabriel Garcia Marquez create One Hundred Years of Solitude? I know that creative people almost always work hard at honing their craft (ten cartoons a day), just as Usain Bolt spent much effort at perfecting his craft of running fast. While I feel as though I can grasp the concept of the ability to run fast, I can’t fathom artistic talent. For stretches of his career, Bill Mauldin published editorial cartoons six days a week. How is that possible? Maybe you could figure it out for me if you could see If It’s Big, Hit It. It is well worth seeing, but since it does not have a distributor, you won’t be able to. However, with a little effort on the internet or a little more looking for used books, you can still find Mauldin’s cartoons. Do it not to keep his memory fresh, but because it will help keep your mind and sense of humor and outrage more alive.