Sad Sack, The

The Sad Sack was an enormously popular, humorous comic strip that appeared in the Army's Yank magazine between 1942 and 1945. The Sad Sack captured the plight of the American citizen–soldier, drafted into an armed forces with a culture he could not master or even understand. Millions of GIs identified with the main character, even while they looked down on him as a misfit and a loser.

The Sad Sack was the brainchild of George Baker, who graduated from high school during the Depression. Baker worked at odd jobs while studying art in night school for a month and a half. In 1937, he moved to California, hoping to play for a minor league baseball team. Baker ended up taking a job at Walt Disney Studios as an animator. After being trained in the Disney style of animation, Baker was assigned to do background effects. His credits include work on Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi.

While on strike against the Disney studio in June 1941, Baker was drafted under the new Selective Service System Act. Like thousands of other men going through basic training, Baker found the Army's way of doing things nearly incomprehensible; its methods of operation and indoctrination were rigid and regimented in ways that most servicemen had never encountered. He was stationed at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and did animation work on films for the Signal Corps, which prepared training films for recruits. In his spare time, Baker developed the idea of a comic strip centering on the experiences of an average soldier. He hoped to sell the strip after leaving the service, but publishers showed no interest. Baker's creation received new life when the Defense Recreation Committee sponsored a contest for cartoons by servicemen. His entry won and was reprinted by newspapers and magazines across the country.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Army established a weekly magazine for enlisted men, produced by enlisted men. The publication was named Yank, and first appeared in April 1942. When the editors saw Baker's winning entry for the Defense Recreation Committee, they asked him to submit a weekly strip for Yank. The Sad Sack became the magazine's first regular feature. Baker himself was transferred to the staff of Yank and spent the war producing weekly strips. He traveled extensively throughout the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Pacific theaters, keeping in touch with enlisted men, and gathering ideas for the cartoon. Yank was eventually published in eleven different editions meant to serve the various theaters of operation, and The Sad Sack appeared in all of them, garnering a readership of millions of servicemen. Baker made a conscious effort to keep the strip generic enough so that soldiers in all theaters could identify with it. The Sad Sack became the leading feature in Yank and overshadowed the other regular comic feature, GI Joe, drawn by Dave Breger, a well-known artist.

Baker wanted Sad Sack, an average soldier, to be more like the draftees he encountered than the cheery, ideological soldiers portrayed in popular movies and propaganda images. Sad Sack was small, homely, and maybe a little stupid. He was resigned to his fate and saw his Army service as a job to endure so that he could return to civilian life. No matter how hard he tried to be a good soldier, Sad Sack was always the victim of circumstances or of the Army's bureaucracy. His name was a sanitized version of the old Army slang for a loser: “a sad sack of shit.” Even so, Sad Sack never gave up trying.

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