Pacific Sketchbook

John Cullen Murphy has spent a long and popular career drawing the “Prince Valiant” comic strip. But in World War II he, like so many million Americans, had to take a different job, and he documented in hundreds of sketches the five-year odyssey that took him from South Carolina to the room in which Hirohito surrendered to MacArthur. A portfolio of the liveliest of his drawings and watercolors recalls moments fifty years past with an intimacy and immediacy that even the camera cannot surpass.