Willard H. Mullin was born on September 14, 1902, in Warren County, Ohio, just north of Cincinnati, the second son of Milo Mullin, a dairy farmer, and Marie Ballard. He was named for his mother's sister, Willa Ballard.
In 1906 the family moved to Los Angeles, where Milo Mullin became appraiser of the port of Los Angeles.
Mullin graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1920.
After the graduarion, he went to work lettering signs for Bullock's, a local department store. In 1923 he joined the staff of the Los Angeles Herald, first as a spot illustrator and retoucher and later as an assistant sports cartoonist.
Dissatisfied with his subordinate position on the Herald staff (his sports cartoons were usually drawn at night, after a full day of retouching), in 1934 Mullin moved to New York to work for the World-Telegram; the next year he took over as regular sports cartoonist.
From 1935 until the World-Telegram ceased publication in 1966, six days a week the first page of the paper's sports section featured a four- or five-column cartoon Mullin. He also worked extensively as a freelance illustrator; his work was published in national magazines, including Life, Look, Newsweek, and the Saturday Evening Post, and in books, most notably a number of editions of Henke's Encyclopedia of Sports. A Mullin cartoon graced the front cover of Time when the New York Mets won the National League pennant in 1969.
For most of his career, Mullin lived in Plandome, New York, where he often worked, delivering his daily drawings to the newspaper office by a series of relay messengers. He traveled extensively as well, covering sporting events all over the United States; he watched Joe Louis fight twenty-five times.
After the demise of the World-Telegram, Mullin continued his work as freelance illustrator; his lifework amounted to some 10, 000 cartoons. Mullin greatly defined the modern sports cartoon, now a dying art form, by combining representative portraiture, cartoonish doodlery, and editorial commentary - part news account, part personal observation, Willard Mullin's cartoons celebrated sport for its entertainment, cultural and artistic values.
Willard Harlan Mullin died on December 21, 1978, in Corpus Christi, Texas.
Willard H. Mullin was a sports cartoonist and illustrator, who was most famous for his creation of the "Brooklyn Bum", the personification of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team. Willard Mullin received the National Cartoonist Society's prestigious Reuben Award in 1954 and the NCS award for Sports Cartoons eight times (1957-1962, 1964, 1965). On his retirement in 1971, Mullin was honored by the National Cartoonists Society as "Sports Cartoonist of the Century, " a tribute both to the achievements of his long career and to the influence of his approach on American sports cartooning. In 1971 a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Artium Gallery in Port Washington, New York.
Quotations: "I'm not an artist, I'm a cartoonist. I got the notion from my mother's first cousin, Claire Victor Dwiggins, who did one of the first Sunday cartoons in New York in 1906 and who had the rights to draw Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. When I was 10 years old, I knew it would be my career forever. "
Willard H. Mullin was a founding member of the Village Green Reading Society, a social club whose members included the sportswriters Stanley Woodward, Frank Graham, Red Smith, and Grantland Rice, and football coach Herman Hickman.
On July 20, 1929, Willard H. Mullin married Helen Tousley; they had two children.
