Another America Classic....Bettle Bailey

I remember while I was overseas in Korea (two decades ago....no...I can't be that old) and in Kuwait five years ago, one thing I always saw each morning was Beetle Bailey.  I don't read comics much while I'm in the US but I always read Beetle when I was overseas.  Mort, thank you for many good laughs over by years in and out of uniform

Beetle Bailey nears retirement age but stays put

STAMFORD, Conn. — Beetle Bailey is slouching toward retirement age, but the lazy Army private won't be getting rest anytime soon from his tour of duty on newspaper comics pages.


The indolent wise guy, whose popularity soared when he enlisted during the Korean War, turns 60 on Saturday.

Mort Walker, who conjured up Beetle and has been putting him on paper every day for all those decades, says he'll continue with his creation until he's no longer able.


"I don't know how I'd be retired," said Walker, 86. "I wake up every day with another idea."...

...Charles Schulz, who created and worked on the enormously popular Peanuts strip for nearly 50 years before his death in 2000, came close to Walker's longevity. But "no one has worked on the same strip for 60 years with that kind of consistency," Burford said.

King Features has been celebrating Beetle's anniversary by running Sunday cartoons by Walker of Beetle re-enacting military events in history, such as celebrating the end of World War II or crossing the Delaware with George Washington.


..."Beetle is the embodiment of everybody's resistance to authority, all the rules and regulations which you've got to follow," Walker said. "He deals with it in his own way. And in a way, it's sort of what I did when I was in the Army. I just often times did what I wanted to do."






Beetle Bailey, originally called Spider, made his comic-strip debut as a smart aleck college student on Sept. 4, 1950, in 12 newspapers, according to King Features. It considered dropping the strip at the end of Walker's one-year contract, but when Beetle stumbled into an Army recruiting post in 1951 during the Korean War, the number of newspapers that picked up Beetle climbed....

Some people have to get a life

,,,Not everyone. Some women have been angry about the caricature of a dumb blond secretary, the curvaceous Miss Buxley, Walker said.


"The women's right groups got so riled up against me they had a national agenda of attacking me," Walker said.

Next thing the SPCA and PETA will complain Garfield portrays felines as arrogant or lazy...

Again, thank you Mort and to many more years of service.