A side of Beetle Bailey you’ve never seen

Alan Gardner Published: June 16, 2010 Updated: June 16, 2010 1 minute 4 comments

Shaenon Garrity finds a Finnish collection of censored Mort Walker thumbnails, entitled, “Awesome Finnish Collection of Censored Mort Walker Thumbnails” containing material “rejected by the syndicate for lack of family-friendliness.”

A couple of weekends back, I attended the annual meeting of the National Cartoonists Society in Jersey City. Meanwhile, the Cartoon Art Museum here in San Francisco is showing a 60th anniversary retrospective of Beetle Bailey. Both these events reminded me of an oft-ignored truth: newspaper cartoonists tell the best and most dirty jokes. It all gets bottled up over the course of a year drawing squeaky-clean family humor and bursts like the Hoover Dam over drinks at the NCS cocktail reception. And of course everybody, at some point, draws R-rated sketches of their characters.

Quite honestly, I can’t even imagine the thumbnails even being submitted to the syndicate. Beware, content may not be appropriate for all ages or work place environments.

Via Tom Spurgeon.

Comments ⁴

Dan Bielinski

That’s awesome. Funny stuff.

Tom Heintjes

Mort’s studio has been producing this sort of adult material for years…nothing new here, except the Internet makes it easier to see it here than it used to be. I doubt King is thrilled about the simplified access.

Henry Clausner

::::::::I’M A BIG FAN of Mort Walker

Philip Taterczynski

I recently bought a copy of Craig Yoe’s “Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings”. Among many others, Mort Walker is represented on pages 54-57. His drawings include a two page gatefold of a giant nude Miss Buxley with the other BB characters sporting around and upon her.

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