Mort Walker, whose ‘Beetle
Bailey’ was a comic-page staple for decades, dies at 94
Mort Walker, whose
"Beetle Bailey" comic strip followed the exploits of a lazy G.I. and
his inept cohorts at the dysfunctional Camp Swampy, and whose dedication to his
art form led him to found the first museum devoted to the history of cartooning,
died Jan. 27 at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 94.
Tom Richmond, a former president of the National Cartoonists
Society, confirmed the death. The cause was pneumonia.
In contrast with the work-shirking soldier he immortalized,
Mr. Walker was a man of considerable drive and ambition. He drew his daily
comic strip for TK years, longer than any other American artist in the history
of the medium.
Debuting in 1950, "Beetle Bailey" was
distributed by King Features Syndicate and eventually reached 200 million readers
in 1,800 newspapers in more than 50 countries. Beetle and company appeared in
comic books, television cartoons, games and toys and were also featured in a
musical with the book by Mr. Walker and, in 2010, on a U.S. Postal Service
postage stamp.
"Beetle
Bailey" was among the first cartoons to mark a shift in the funny pages
from the serial strips of the previous decade to the graphically simpler
gag-a-day model that predominates today.
Beetle's cast includes the title
character, a lanky goof-off whose eyes are always covered by the visor of his
hat or helmet; his rotund nemesis, Sgt. Snorkel, a violent but sentimental man
who frequently beat Beetle to a pulp of squiggly lines; the ineffectual Gen.
Halftrack, who ran Camp Swampy (a place the Pentagon had lost track of);
Halftrack's voluptuous secretary, Miss Buxley; Cookie, the hairy-shouldered
chef and purveyor of inedible meatballs; and the bumpkin Pvt. Zero.
The characters never saw battle,
and weapons and uniforms were not updated. Mr. Walker said that the military
setting was simply a convenient stand-in for the pecking order of which
everyone is a part.
Comics historian R.C. Harvey
wrote that the strip "gives expression to our resentment by ridiculing
traditional authority figures and by demonstrating, with Beetle, how to survive
through the diligent application of sheer lethargy and studied
indifference."
Starting in 1954, Mr. Walker
wrote another hit cartoon, the widely syndicated family strip "Hi and
Lois," originally illustrated by Dik Browne (later the creator of
"Hägar the Horrible"). Mr. Walker said he wanted to depict a loving
family "together against the world ... instead of against each
other."
He thrived on collaboration,
working with assistants (including Jerry Dumas and Bill Janocha, and his sons
Brian and Greg) to review jokes every week and to create at least eight other
strips, among them "Boner's Ark" and "Sam's Strip."
Brian and Greg, who have written
"Hi and Lois" since the 1980s and have assisted Mr. Walker with
Beetle gags and inking since the 1970s, will continue to produce "Beetle
Bailey."
Even as he was devising his gags
— he claimed to have 80,000 unused jokes in storage — Mr. Walker devoted
himself to establishing a museum that would treat the comic strip as a serious
art form.
In 1974, with a check from the
Hearst Foundation and refurbishing help from family and friends, he opened the
Museum of Cartoon Art in a mansion in Greenwich, Conn. The collection grew with
donations of art from newspaper syndicates and the estates of cartoonists, and is today worth an estimated $20 million.
The museum relocated several
times and closed in 2002 as the International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca
Raton, Fla., after corporate donors declared bankruptcy. In 2008, its more than
200,000 pieces became part of Ohio State University's Billy Ireland Cartoon
Library and Museum, where a gallery is named after Mr. Walker.
He delighted in the history and the tricks of his trade and
wrote a tongue-in-cheek textbook, "The Lexicon of Comicana" (1980),
in which he described commonly used cartooning conventions.
Grawlix were the symbols deployed to convey foul language;
briffits were the clouds often found at the end of hites (horizontal lines
indicating speed). To Mr. Walker's amusement, his book sometimes appeared in
the art instruction section of bookstores, and his neologisms would pop up in
discussions about the art of cartooning.
Addison Morton Walker was born Sept. 3, 1923, in El Dorado,
Kan., and was the third of four siblings. His father, Robin Walker, was an
architect who moved the family from oil boom to oil boom, building houses,
churches and schools.
But he never got rich, and after stints in Texas and
Oklahoma, the family settled in Kansas City, Mo. Robin Walker wrote poetry, and
his work appeared in the Kansas City Star with drawings by Mr. Walker's mother,
Carolyn, a staff illustrator for the newspaper.
Mr. Walker said he knew he wanted to be a cartoonist at the
age of 3. As a child, he accompanied his parents to the newspaper and became
friendly with the staff cartoonists. By 12, he was regularly publishing his own
cartoons in magazines such as Inside Detective and Flying Aces and, at 15, he
had a comic strip in the Kansas City Star.
At 18, Mr. Walker told an interviewer at Hall Brothers (later
Hallmark Cards) that he thought their cards were lousy. He was hired and became
chief editorial designer. He was instrumental in changing the company's cards
from cuddly bears to gag cartoons more suitable for soldiers serving overseas.
In 1942, Mr. Walker was drafted. "Little did I
know," he wrote decades later in the pictorial memoir "Mort Walker's
Private Scrapbook," "that I was going to get almost four years of
free research."
He eventually found himself in charge of 10,000 German
prisoners in a POW camp in Italy. At the end of the war, he helped oversee the
destruction of binoculars and watches from an ordnance depot in Naples, Italy.
His job was to make sure nobody stole anything before it was destroyed. "I
began to realize," he wrote in the memoir, "that army humor writes
itself."
After his discharge, Mr. Walker enrolled at the University of
Missouri, where today a bronze statue of Beetle Bailey lounges on a bench. He
received his degree in 1948 and moved to New York to become a cartoonist.
Undaunted by rejections, he pinned a note to his drawing board reading, "I
will not be denied."
Within two years, he was a top-selling gag cartoonist in
publications such as the Saturday Evening Post. Some of those panels featured a
college student with a hat over his eyes, named Spider after one of Mr.
Walker's fraternity buddies who had drunkenly crawled across the lawn to get to
the house one night.
The artist rechristened him Beetle and put him in a strip
about college life; he chose the surname Bailey after a supportive cartoon
editor at the Saturday Evening Post.
"Beetle Bailey" debuted in 12 papers and was almost
canceled by King Features. As the Korean War began and young Americans faced
the draft, Mr. Walker had Beetle enlist in the Army, and the strip gained
traction. In 1953, the National Cartoonists Society named Mr. Walker cartoonist
of the year.
But it wasn't until the next year, when the Pacific edition
of the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes banned "Beetle
Bailey" for mocking the authority of officers and encouraging laziness in
the ranks, that Beetle's success was assured. The ban lasted 10 years, but the
publicity dramatically boosted syndication.
Mr. Walker, who became president of the National Cartoonists
Society, won its Golden T-Square award for 50 years of service to the industry
in 1999.
In 1949, Mr. Walker married the former Jean Suffill, with
whom he had seven children. The marriage ended in divorce. In 1985, he married
Catherine Carty. Besides his wife, survivors include his children; and three
stepchildren. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
In the late 1960s, mainstream comic strips including
"Peanuts" began making efforts to include black characters. In 1970,
against the advice of his syndicate, Mr. Walker integrated his army, adding Lt.
Flap, an African American officer with an Afro and a goatee.
Flap's opening line: "How come there's no blacks in this
honkie outfit?!"
"Stars and Stripes" banned his strip again, for
fear that the character would stir up racial tensions. Again syndication soared.
In 1997, responding to criticism from feminists who objected
to Halftrack's longtime ogling of Miss Buxley, Mr. Walker had the elderly
general attend sensitivity training. Gone were gags such as the one in which
Halftrack approves of the three-martini lunch that enables him to see double
Miss Buxleys.
(Meanwhile in Sweden, where "Beetle Bailey" — known
as "Knasen" — enjoyed huge popularity, Mr. Walker was able to publish
"Censur!" a collection of risqué cartoons starring the Camp Swampy
characters.)
In 1990, the Pentagon recognized Mr. Walker (if not Camp
Swampy) with the Certificate of Appreciation for Patriotic Civilian Service.
"As hard as it is to find anything at the Pentagon," the veteran
gagman quipped, "they finally found a sense of humor."
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