By Paul Varnell

Contributing writer

Newspaper cartoonists Bill Mauldin and Jules Feiffer were both highly regarded craftsmen who used their art for political and social criticism, usually laced with wry humor. An exhibition of nearly 20 large-size examples of each man’s drawings at the Jean Albano Gallery in River North gives people a welcome opportunity to become better acquainted with their work and see why both were so popular.

Mauldin began his cartooning career as a soldier during World War II when he drew cartoons for the U. S. Army newspaper “Stars and Stripes.” He depicted the war through the lives of two typical soldiers, Willie and Joe. Mauldin’s work was extremely popular with fellow soldiers who felt that someone understood and was publicly expressing the dangers, the pain and the bone-wearying fatigue they experienced.

In one cartoon, Willie and Joe are creeping along the ground below enemy fire and one is explaining that he can’t get any lower because, “There’s a button in the way.” In another, the two are sitting in the rain beneath a scraggly tree, while one observes regretfully, “This damn tree leaks.” In a third, not in this exhibition, one of the men reaches the head of a line to receive an award and says, “I already got a purple heart. Just give me a couple of aspirin.”

In a cartoon that would make its point even without a caption, one of the men, shaking out his boot sock, sees a large, unpleasant-looking insect fall out. The expression of surprise and dismay on his face is priceless. But even funnier, the other soldier says, “Merry Christmas,” poignantly reminding readers that this is the way soldiers spend Christmas.

Several years after the war Mauldin got a job as the editorial cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and in 1962 he came to Chicago as the editorial cartoonist for the Sun-Times, where he stayed for almost 30 years. At the Sun-Times his cartoons ranged from acidly political—for instance, decrying bloated campaign costs—to gently whimsical. One cartoon satirizing New Left revolutionary Jerry Rubin’s comment “Don’t trust anybody over 30” shows two infants in baby carriages, one saying to the other, “I don’t trust anybody over three.”

But perhaps his best-known cartoon is the widely syndicated one published immediately after Pres. John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It shows the Lincoln of the Lincoln Memorial holding his head in his hands, weeping. Wordlessly, it caught the sentiments of the nation, even those who had opposed Kennedy politically.

Jules Feiffer first became well known as the cartoonist for the New York weekly Village Voice, a fashionable voice on popular culture and emerging trends in the arts during the 1950s and 1960s. Later Feiffer also wrote books, plays and film scripts.

Although both Mauldin and Feiffer were men of the political left, Feiffer was more interested in satirizing the insecurities, anxieties, miscommunication and over-psychologizing of their lives by people who considered themselves educated and progressive—particularly focusing on the tensions between men and women.

In his essay “Radical Chic,” social critic Tom Wolfe described a typical Jules Feiffer cartoon as, “Rejection, Security, Anxiety, Oedipus, Electra, Neurosis, Transference, Id, Superego, Archetype and Field of Perception, that wonderful game, beloved by all educated young men and women in the East who grew up in the era of the great cresting tide of Freud, Jung, Adler, Reik and Reich…”

But unlike Mauldin’s cartoons, in which drawing and illustration were interdependent, many of Feiffer’s cartoons are only minimal sketches to provide the excuse for a long dialogue which could have stood on its own. Often the drawing differed little from panel to panel.

In one cartoon, a woman grills a man about why he loves her when she is so mean to him. She accepts none of his answers until, backed into a corner, he finally declares that he loves her “Because I am sick.” This seems to satisfy her: “I can accept that,” she says. Another cartoon presents a monologue by a woman who says she stopped going out with sensitive men because they were threatening. Now, she says, she only goes out with macho jocks because “They make me feel like a woman—Superior.” In a third cartoon, another monologue, a woman explains that after every crisis in her life she goes shopping because after four years of psychotherapy she has learned that the answer to every problem is a sale.

In one of Feiffer’s few captionless cartoons, this one drawn for the New Yorker, a silly-looking man is walking along engrossed in a book titled “Theories of Humor.” He is wearing the huge floppy shoes of a circus clown, a safe is about to fall on him from above, and he is about to step into an open manhole. Comment hardly seems necessary.

The exhibition also includes some of the sketches Feiffer drew for “The Long Chalkboard,” a book of three charming stories by his wife Jenny Allen, and “Henry, the Dog with No Tail” by daughter Kate Feiffer. But as with most of the cartoons, the illustrations need the story to give them meaning and point. Feiffer’s real craft was creating clever verbal vignettes.

Prints and drawings by cartoonists Bill Mauldin and Jules Feiffer are at the Jean Albano Gallery, 215 W. Superior, through Jan. 6, 2008. Gallery hours: Tues.-Fri. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sat. 11 a.m.-5 p.m.