In a provincial community where Jim Crow held sway, our house in South Arkansas was stocked to the rafters with national magazines, newspapers and periodicals of all kinds. If I wasn't running in the fields, fishing, riding or tagging along with my dad around the farm, I was reading short stories and news articles, and devouring the cartoons and illustrations scattered through the publications, studiously going over every line and caption.

Dad, a five-year World War II veteran, had brought back some old copies of Stars and Stripes. He affectionately showed me Willie and Joe cartoons that won Bill Mauldin a Pulitzer Prize. This pair of shaggy, slump-shouldered, war-weary GIs gave comic relief to millions of soldiers, and I could see Mauldin's early works side by side with the cartoons he drew after Dad came home. My early impressions were that cartooning was an honorable endeavor and that even a former officer and farm taskmaster like my father could appreciate a little irreverent humor aimed in the right places.

Mauldin died Wednesday at age 81 after a long battle with Alzheimer's. It was the second loss of the week in the world of editorial art. On Monday, Al Hirschfeld, theater and celebrity cartoonist -- or "characterist," to use his preferred term -- put down his pen, ate dinner, went to bed and died peacefully in his sleep at age 99.

Both deaths followed, by little more than a year, the passing of a third great artist, Herbert Block (Herblock) of The Washington Post at age 91. Images like his 1950s McCarthy-era cartoon depicting an unshaven Richard Nixon climbing out of a sewer would dominate his work for the next 50 years.

Unlike the Jack Nicholson tragi-comic character in "About Schmidt," Mauldin, Hirschfeld and Herblock left behind a forest's worth of paper onto which powerful insight and thought had blossomed in bold brush and pen strokes. Their graphic commentary documents huge chunks of the last century and chink into this one. They also made lasting impressions on an itchy-fingered young farm kid from South Arkansas.

It was Hirschfeld who captured my artistic imagination. New York sophististication was a long way from McGehee, Ark., but it made its way there through Hirschfeld's bold, fluid, uncluttered lines and instantly recognizable subjects. His work literally dominated a page, even if it was displayed just a column or two wide. In a few swoopy lines, he captured the total essence of the comedians and movie stars we regularly worshiped at the Malco theater -- and through a burgeoning new medium called television.

Hirschfeld was undoubtedly the catalyst for my early attacks on school authority figures. But Herblock and Mauldin opened my mind and encouraged me to question the authority figures who led the nation.

Through national syndication, both appeared regularly in the Arkansas Gazette. Their social consciences, channeled through acerbic, unflinching cartoons, helped me grasp the witch-hunt mentality of the McCarthy era. By exposing the dark side of segregation, they made me question the accepted way of life that I'd grown up under. An out-of-control arms race was brought into frightening perspective, and wholesale rape of our environmental treasures and rampant pollution were graphically laid squarely at the feet of the interests that propagated such excess. Theirs was the minority thinking at the time on all of these issues.

I never attempted to copy Mauldin, Hirschfeld or Herblock in my early doodling efforts. Thinking back, I suspect that it was akin to my approach to guitar-playing idols. I marveled at Jimi Hendrix's chops, but didn't dare attempt an imitation. But as I eventually found myself and entered the world of editorial cartooning, these artists were always there, constants in an ever-changing field.

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