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.

In the '60s, an upstart from Australia named Pat Oliphant came to the Denver Post, bringing with him an irreverent British style of cartooning that stood apart from the vertical format and charcoal school that dominated America's editorial pages. In the inevitable pecking order of things, the Oliphant approach began to win out. Among the 150 or so full-time political cartoonists, a continuing debate over which young turk was at the top of the heap began to overshadow Herblock and Mauldin.

Even as I joined Tony Auth, Jeff MacNelly, Doug Marlette and others, dabbling in Oliphant's free-form approach to editorial cartooning, I never forgot the gift the old cartoonists gave me. As with other constants in life, I drew comfort from seeing their work regularly after all this time. Herblock never varied his style, and many began to say he was over the hill or stodgy. But take the time to scrutinize a Herblock cartoon, and you'd find he was almost always ahead of everyone else on getting to the heart of an issue. For my money, he was still nailing 'em right to the end.

Sadly, Mauldin had to give it up far too early. Arthritis in his hands took a toll on his drawing ability, and a serious injury to his drawing hand took him out for good in his 60s. When word got out among World War II vets last year that he was in terrible shape, they started writing him letters from all over the world. If I could write him now, I would thank him for helping open my eyes to social injustice. I'd also thank him for giving my dad a lift while he was hip-deep in snow during the Battle of the Bulge.

Through the decades of debate over cartooning, Hirschfeld seemed to remain untouchable in his unique niche. Still, even the great Line King (after the 1996 documentary about him) was starting to feel a changing world despite his still-great talents. Speaking more than a decade ago, he touched on an issue that rings true in today's political cartooning.

"The stars who created their own personalities stayed around longer in the star system, so they were easily identifiable," Hirschfeld said. "In today's theater and movies, actors don't stay around long enough to have an identity. People like ... Jimmy Stewart and Lillian Gish had such long careers that I drew them when they were young and over and over again through their lifetimes, so that they have begun to look like my drawings."

There also seem to be fewer colorful, larger-than-life political figures with staying power long enough to fully develop their character in the editorial cartoon world.

Hirschfeld also commented on the dwindling market for drawings, and he had taken to discouraging young people from going into the field. "One thing a young artist doesn't need is advice," he said. "He needs money. Don't judge by the big prices for art. Only a few artists get them."

Hirschfeld's discouraging comments, unfortunately, slop over to about every genre of cartooning. Newspapers have declined drastically since my childhood years, and there are fewer and fewer outlets for our work. Mass media and other venues compete with serious news outlets for the public's attention, and fewer people take the time to read up on the issues. No matter how good a drawing or cartoon is, it is still dependent on the reader having some knowledge of the subject. A wonderful Hirschfeld drawing of someone unfamiliar to the viewer joins the sound of the tree that falls in the forest when no one is around to hear it. The same principle applies a well thought-out editorial cartoon on a topic unknown to the reader.

So we continue to dip one nib at a time. The urge to draw doesn't recognize market woes, judging by the lines of wannabe artists and cartoonists who still darken my door and check my pulse. As one wag in our business told a young ambitious artist, "You've got about as much chance of making it in this business as you do of getting into the NBA."

To which I would reply, "Soldier on, kid. If you really have something to say, you'll make it. There's some mighty big nibs that came before you, but remember Bill Mauldin's credo: "If it's big, HIT IT!"

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