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A side of Beetle Bailey you’ve never seen

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June 16, 2010

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.

Community Comments

#1 Dan Bielinski
June/16/2010
@ 2:49 pm

That’s awesome. Funny stuff.
#2 Tom Heintjes
June/17/2010
@ 6:55 am

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.
#3 Henry Clausner
June/17/2010
@ 9:32 am

::::::::I’M A BIG FAN of Mort Walker
#4 Philip Taterczynski
June/17/2010
@ 1:29 pm

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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