CSotD: Saturday profile: Mort Walker of “Beetle Bailey”
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(This is one of a series of cartoonist profiles I did in 2003 for the Post-Star of Glens Falls, NY)
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.
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