The Grandstander, a faithful reader of the daily comic strips, or "the funnies", today notes the passing of Mort Walker at the age of 94.
Mort Walker with his famous creation
1923-2018
Walker, as the photo above indicates, is the creator of the coming strip "Beetle Bailey", a daily strip that has been running in newspapers around the world continuously since 1950. According to his obituary, the strip's gag-a-day format was a marked departure from the serial-style strips that dominated the comics pages at the time. Amazingly, Walker continued, with some assistance, to pen the artwork and write the gags for all 68 years of its run. The strip, along with another of his creations "Hi and Lois", will continue to run and be authored by two of Walker's sons.
In 1942, Walker, who always aspired to be a cartoonist, was drafted into the US Army and served in Italy during World War II. "Little did I realize," Walker later said, "that I was about to get almost four years of free research." This paragraph from his obituary in the Washington Post goes on to tell this story:
He eventually found himself in charge of 10,000 German prisoners in a POW camp in Italy. At the end of the war, he helped oversee the destruction of binoculars and watches from an ordnance depot in Naples. His job was to make sure nobody stole anything before it was destroyed. “I began to realize,” he wrote in the memoir, “that army humor writes itself.”
RIP Mort Walker.
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