Joe Farris, who has sold over 10,000 cartoons to The New Yorker and other publications, has a new book out from National Geographic titled A SOLDIER'S SKETCHBOOK. Here's a video preview of the book, with the cartoonist narrating:
Joe ("Most people call me Joe.") served from October 1944 to January 1946 as a private in the 398th Infantry, Company M. The 304 page hardcover book highlights his 800 letters home, and drawings and paintings he did while in France.
From the National Geographic site:
Farris wrote more than 800 letters home, and he hewed his artistic talents with sketches and paintings along the way. He also secretly copied officers' notes and, once back home after the war, collected clippings and battlefield accounts, which form a sobering counterpoint to his reassurances to his parents that everything is "swell."
This book chronicles a young soldier's experiences from October 1944 through January 1946 in France and Germany. In words and pictures, it tells of Christmas in the trenches, long walks through the rain and mud, landscapes of fear and despair, lost friends and leaders, changing beliefs about human nature, God, and the Jerries (as he calls the Germans).
Transcriptions of many of the 800 letters Joseph Farris wrote home sit side by side with the real thing, reproduced in facsimile on the page. Snapshots and color sketches, painted in moments of reprieve during battle and carried home by this earnest young man and fledgling artist, help us see the world he saw.
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