BW : The Army used to send my father all this research material, like photographs of the latest tanks and Jeeps and things like that. MT: What has it been like taking over and continuing the cartoon? GW : You know, we always lived with it. We know the characters so well, having grown up with them, that he offered to let us write. I started writing way back in like when I was in college.
And then I just kept doing it and moved into comic books and did that for a while. And then an opportunity came up to do a Sgt. Snorkel spinoff. I did that Is this something Beetle would do? Is this believable for the characters? From left to right: Neal, Brian and Greg Walker. Photo courtesy of the Walker brothers. Talk about Lt. What was that process like, as well as the reaction? But it was tricky, because the syndicate kind of warned them that they might lose some papers in the South, or certain people might object.
And you sort of struggle with it. The story he told was that he woke up in the middle of the night once and just came up with this idea for this sort of cool Clyde character who was a little bit inspired by Walt Frazier, who played basketball for the New York Knicks. And so, rather than making him lazy like Beetle or fat and angry like Sarge, he made him an officer and And it went over really well. I mean, he had fans in the South, people that would send them gifts and cakes and bake things for him.
They loved that character. MT: Was there any pushback or objection by editors, or negative reaction by readers? BW: I was talking recently to a very good friend of ours, Ray Billingsley, one of the few African American cartoonists in the business. He was a brother. MT: There was also an entirely separate issue about belly buttons, right?
GW : Yeah. If she was in a bikini, my father would just put a belly button in there. And then finally he sent something to them where he had belly buttons all over the place. It looks bizarre. The creators of Beetle Bailey have generated a large cast of characters in the past seven decades. MT: You raised the issue of Miss Buxley. That brings me to the question of Gen. The ensuing attention led to even more success for the cartoon, adding newspapers to its roster.
For decades, comic strips were perceived as being an all-ages form of entertainment and were often subjected to extreme forms of censorship. I heard that the editor had started collecting my navels. The oranges each had a navel, as well. Overwhelmed, the editor left it alone. Even Dr. Seuss was known to dash off adult material. Walker was no exception, though he did take the additional step of seeing his more mature Beetle Bailey sketches published in Sweden.
Titled Knasen: Varning for Snusk Warning for Smut , the collection depicts Beetle and his cast in a series of ribald, leering panels featuring jokes about sex and engaged in salacious, very not-safe-for-work activity.
Well, an editor in Sweden once asked me about them, and I said, 'Oh, you can't run them in newspapers. Walker decided to have Halftrack undergo sensitivity training after a series of headlines about real Army commanders behaving inappropriately. In a rare detour into seriousness, Walker decided to explore the real-world issues of post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD and brain trauma suffered by soldiers in the panels of his strip. In one installment, Beetle is shown having nightmares and trouble sleeping.
Rocky , a rebel without a cause, who later became the muckraking editor of the camp newspaper. Pop , an older G.
Julius , Gen. These characters served their purpose for a short time and now only make rare appearances in the strip. He sold his first cartoon to Child Life magazine at the age of He submitted his first comic strip to a national syndicate at the age of 15 and sold magazine cartoons all over the country.
By the time Mort graduated from high school, his work was polished and professional. In , he was drafted into the Army and served in Italy during the war. He kept an illustrated diary and some of the G. The Army sent him to Washington University in St. Louis where he got an engineering degree. When he returned home, he attended journalism school at the University of Missouri and was editor of the campus humor magazine, the Showme.
Mort was working as a magazine cartoonist in New York when John Bailey, the cartoon editor of the Saturday Evening Post, encouraged Mort to do some cartoons based on his college experiences at the University of Missouri. After selling a few college cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post, Mort then decided to submit a comic strip to King Features Syndicate starring Spider and his fraternity brothers. In addition to Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois , Mort Walker has been involved in the creation of seven other comic strips.
The Evermores - portrayed a family in different historical settings and was done with Johnny Sajem. Mort and his staff have developed a patented method for delivering daily laughs.
In the endless search for fresh material, the writers occasionally come up with ideas that are unsuitable for American newspapers. Censorship and size reduction are just two of the creative challenges that cartoonists face on a daily basis. He has won numerous awards and citations from cartoonist groups and government organizations. Postal Service. Today, after more than six decades, Mort Walker is still producing Beetle Bailey , which is the longest tenure of any cartoonist on his original creation in the history of comics.
New Archive About Trending Shop. Beetle Bailey. Beetle is the smartest guy at Camp Swampy because he understands the absurdity of Army bureaucracy and defiantly resists authority. He often gets beaten to a pulp after disobeying Sarge, but he never gives up. Beetle is the little guy who wins in the end because he steadfastly refuses to be defeated.
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