By Michael Miner

What we might call the Mauldin original appeared in the Sun-Times in 1964. That’s a long time ago, but the past is never safely behind us. Mauldin’s cartoon–mocking Charles de Gaulle and honoring two generations of American soldiers buried on French soil–was reprinted in McLaughlin’s old junior high school history text. He’d liked it so much he’d cut it out and framed it.

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I don’t think so. Higgins and Toles have both won Pulitzer Prizes, and Toles is in my view the best political cartoonist now at work. “I was in high school when the original drawing was done and I have no recollection of seeing it,” Toles told me, and added, “Certain themes recur in cartooning and Mauldin is certainly a pioneer in unearthing many of these themes.” Higgins said, “That stuff happens.” He said he “wasn’t aware that somebody else had drawn that before,” and I’m sure he wasn’t. But Mauldin’s 37-year-old cartoon was so perfectly conceived that if Higgins saw it even once there’s no way he could have totally forgotten it.

In 1975, during the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment, he dusted off the old idea and applied it to a barfly describing his spouse: “My woman’s okay. She don’t wanna be my equal.” And what can be said about Toles’s and Higgins’s cartoons is also true of Mauldin’s second draft: the first one was better. It came to a sharper point. The 1960 and 1964 cartoons show Mauldin at his best.

“It’s a different way of making thunder, I agree,” says Brown. “There have been some other gags in Non Sequitur where the hand of God is doing something, and they’ve been borderline, and I probably erred on the side of being liberal–but this one, I wasn’t comfortable with the notion being inflicted on our readers.

Says Wiley Miller, “This pretty much says it all. He personally thought it was funny and, guess what, so did the vast majority of readers with a measurable IQ. Do you think we would have sent it out otherwise?”

bronze bas-relief panels along the ceremonial entrance balustrades…two 43-foot arches….Bronze baldachinos are an integral part of the arch design…’”