Mort and Beetle

Mort Walker died yesterday.

He was 94 and so was allowed to, but he certainly made the best of the generous slice of time he was given.

While he created several strips, including "Hi and Lois," "Boner's Ark" and "Sam and Silo," he will be best remembered for "Beetle Bailey," which debuted the day after Mort's 27th birthday, on September 4, 1950.

I'm sure you can find lots of coverage, including this solid piece from the Washington Post, so I thought that, rather than try to outdo anyone, I'd simply run an interview I did with him for the Glens Falls Post-Star in 2003, and then a few Beetle strips from the (so far) 68 years of its run and a few odds and ends I came across in the course of digging those up.  

The interview was a lot of fun and I hope some of that comes through:

*******

Beetle Bailey has put in far more than his 20 years.

So has Mort Walker, but don't look for either of them to be retiring.

"Oh, they try to get me to, sometimes," shrugs Walker, whose "Beetle Bailey" is more than half a century old. "But I enjoy working too much, and I've still got the energy to keep doing it."

In fact, he's got a little more energy recently and feels the strip shows it. "I think it's improved since I gave up drinking two years ago. I think the line's steadier now than it was before."

He has made one recent change, adding his son Greg's name to the strip, but it's a courtesy rather than an announcement.

"I'm starting to sign his name along with mine," Walker says, "but it doesn't mean that there's anything different going on. He's been working with me for 2S years."

Walker laughs about his work schedule. "I hate to tell you how I work. I get up and have breakfast and then shuffle over to the Barcalounger and sit there until I have an idea."

Pressed for details, however; he admits that there's a little more to it than that. He pencils the strip, meaning that he roughs in the layout and characters, and then Greg inks it, adding detail. As for writing, he does most of it, but both his sons contribute to that, as does an assistant who has been with him for 45 years.

"We meet once a month to go over all the ideas and vote on them," Walker says. "Then the final decision is up to me."

He chuckles. "I use most of my own. I seem to like them better!"

Walker grew up in a creative family. His father was an architect, but also created impressionist paintings, wrote poetry and kept a farm. "He would get up every morning and write a poem," Walker says.

Walker's mother was a talented artist and would illustrate the poems, which ran in the Kansas City Star. Walker's father became poet laureate for the state of Kansas, and the Walker family was steeped in art.

"We didn't have a radio or telephone, and there was no television," he says. "We'd sit around in the evening and draw. I also kept a diary every day, starting when I was 5 years old."

"Beetle Bailey"· started out in 1950 as a strip about a college student, but the Korean War changed that. "A lot of editors said that they were drafting college students and Beetle was not so bright, so it didn't seem he'd have much chance of getting out of it."

Walker was reluctant to put his character in the Army, because he'd seen how many Army strips had faded since World War II. But he put Beetle in uniform, "and I kind of liked it," he admits.

When the war ended, he let Beetle go back to civilian life. He even gave him a sister, Lois Flagston, whose husband, Hi, was supposed to clash with Beetle. Oddly enough, that strip was a hit as "Hi and Lois," but readers didn't like the idea of Beetle out of uniform, and he went back in. (He still visits his sister occasionally.)

That would not be the last time Walker yielded to reader preferences. "One thing I pride myself on is that this is not some artistic thing I do to please myself," he says. "If readers don't like something, I'll change it."

Most famously, he raised the neckline of Miss Buxley, the general's secretary, lowered her hemlines and changed her from a vacuous sex kitten into a competent, thoughtful character. In the process, she went from being an irritant to female readers and became a favorite among them.

Meanwhile, General Halftrack himself has quit leering and even cut down on his drinking about the same time a certain cartoonist did.

Today, Mort Walker devotes a great deal of his energy and resources to founding a museum of cartoon art. There have been false starts and problems. The museum began in Greenwich, Conn., then moved to Rhinebeck (Dutchess County) and went from there to Palm Beach, a move Walker now says was a mistake. He now plans to move the museum back to New York and is working on a deal for a site.

Presumably, these efforts are squeezed into his schedule somewhere between the breakfast table and that Barcalounger.

***

Now for the comics and other stuff. Click to embiggen as necessary.

Here's Beetle as a student, Oct 6, 1950, but the paper that was running it apparently didn't take care of its archives very well, so I couldn't find a clean copy of the first enlistment strips in March of the following year.

However, he did pass his physical on March 19, 1951.

I've heard that the strip was struggling in its first year and that sending Beetle off to the Army boosted it significantly. I can't verify that, but I can tell you the strip became a whole lot easier to find.

My understanding is that the guys you meet in boot camp are only temporary friends and I don't recognize any of these people, but this  gag made me laff. Note, by the way, that he's wearing a different uniform than his buddies who are dressed to turn out for the exercise. Walker wasn't so persnickety later, but the gag wouldn't work if Beetle hadn't been trying to change clothes.

A year after the strip launched, Beetle is definitely in the army, and he's farming army humor in these early years, though it becomes more generic as time goes on.

A different anniversary was March 13, 1952, a year after he enlisted and apparently earned himself some leave and a chance to go home, grab some grub and get back into his civvies.

On Sept 4, 1952, the strip was two years old, and Beetle had not yet assembled the cast of characters we're familiar with beyond Killer, but they gradually appeared. Here's some evolution, as seen in Sept 4 strips -- or close, when Sundays or Labor Day intruded -- from that first decade:

(1953 - the Captain has a lot of refinement to go through, but that's him)

(1954)

(1955)

(1956 -- At this stage, Fuzz is more babylike, while Otto is more fierce and more doglike)

(1957)

(1958 - I'd forgotten that Rocky was originally a hood.) 

(1959 - still a doggy dog)

Let's ramp things up and start going by fives:

(1965 - The characters are assuming their familiar looks now, and Sarge has begun his campaign of purposely annoying Lt. Fuzz)

(1970 and Halftrak's henpecked misery is an established gag point.)

But other things were going on by now, and I kind of wish I'd been around Clearfield, Pennsylvania, for the fair, because this sounds like a really good exhibit.

And Mort had other things going on, including the introduction of this character:

(By Sept 4, 1975, the designated hitter rule was had been around for two years, but the mayhem had been around even longer)

In 1980, the Pantagraph of Bloomington, Illinois, used the day's strip as an illustration for a story about Beetle's 30th anniversary. (I'm guessing it came from King Features with the press release, shaded and sized for the use.)

There's a lot more to say about Mort Walker -- not just his other strips but his other major contributions to the industry, but that's a book. And I'm sure someone will write it and it will be worth having.

While we wait, I'll close out with a few divisible-by-five anniversary strips and thanks to a guy who did a lot for comics.

(1985)

(1990)

(1995)

(2000)

(2005)

(2010)

(2015 -- Hell, when your 65, anybody can write your diary a week in advance)

Thanks, Mort.

Comments

[Mary McNeil]

Mort brought a lot of fun to a lot of us !

[Kip W]

I scanned a bunch of panel cartoons from various TRUE cartoon collections, consisting of work by Walker, Hart, Cavalli, Marcus, Ketcham, Dedini, Wilson (Gahan), Berenstain, Key, Parch, O'Neal, Schaefer (Burr), Interlandi, Rodrigues, Hoest, Harris, Dumas, Porges, Anderson, Gross, and Booth, many of whom hadn't yet found the comic strips we remember them for now.

I thought it might be fun to hide the artists' names and try to guess, but I'm not at all sure if that wouldn't bring me to the attention of lawyers. Some of them might be hard to recognize, though. Walker's, for instance is sort of borderline.

[Mike Peterson]

If you chose, say, ten and set it up as a trivia piece, it might be fun, but I think you'd have to do it as multiple choice.

Specific to Mort Walker, Bado linked to a site that included a couple of his pre-Beetle magazine pieces, but it's a case where, if someone says, "Here's an old Mort Walker piece" you'd recognize it, but you wouldn't pick it out because you know his work from what he was doing 40 or 50 years later. (Here's that link: http://bado-badosblog.blogspot.com/2018/01/mort-walker-1923-2018.html#more)

[Bob]

I always had trouble getting over Beetle taking up with Miss Buxley (or vice versa, maybe). I always worried about Bunny back home.