Mort Walker at 86 might be the oldest syndicated cartoonist still drawing his strip — I haven’t mustered the entire regiment to see for sure —but his comic strip, the immutable and irresistible Beetle Bailey, a satirical monument to all social hierarchy worthy of ridicule (and all of it is eminently deserving), celebrates its 60th anniverary today and is, without doubt or quibble, the longest-running comic strip still being drawn by its originator.
Beetle Bailey started in twelve papers on September 4, 1950. With about 1,800 subscribing newspapers today, it ranks as one of the world’s half-dozen most popular comic strips.
Beetle at first chronicled the lackadaisical underexertions of a lassitudinal college layabout, but even though it was the sole college-themed strip on the syndicated horizon, it gained only another dozen subscribers over the next six months. Then Beetle enlisted in the Army on March 13, 1951. The strip began picking up more papers, and when, in January 1954, the army’s newspaper, Stars and Stripes, kicked the strip out of the paper for making fun of officers, the circulation of Beetle soared. “Papers all over the world ran stories about how the army brass had no sense of humor,” Walker once remembered.
Although the strip is ostensibly about military life, Walker’s army is just another version of society at large, which sustains its essential order through a hierarchy of authority. From the point of view of most of us in a social order, the flaws in the system are due to the incompetence of those who have authority over us. Beetle Bailey encapsulates this aspect of the human condition and gives expression to our resentment by ridiculing traditional authority figures and by demonstrating, with Beetle, how to survive through the diligent application of sheer lethargy and studied indifference.
More than a satirical statement about the human condition, Beetle has also achieved a highwater mark in the art of cartooning. Over the years, Walker refined his style, streamlining simplicity into a unique comic abbreviation. By the late fifties and early sixties, Walker's patented stylized forms had emerged. Not since Cliff Sterrett surrealized human anatomy in the futuristic manner in Polly and Her Pals have we had such engaging comic abstractions of the human form. The flexibility of Walker's abstracted simplicity is capable of extreme exaggeration for comic effect. Indeed, much of the humor in many strips arises from the antic visuals as much as from the situation depicted. In short, Beetle Bailey is an artistic achievement of the first water.
In 1954 (on October 18), Walker introduced a second strip, Hi and Lois, about Beetle’s sister and her family. Drawn originally by Dik Browne, by the end of the 1980s, it stood eleventh on the Editor and Publisher list of comic strips and their circulation. It is still in the top twenty in numbers of subscribing newspapers.
Subsequently, Walker concocted another seven strips, not all of which have survived: Mrs. Fitz’s Flats, 1957-72; Sam’s Strip, 1961-1963 (a cult classic, reprinted a year or so ago by Fantagraphics Books); Boner’s Ark, March 11, 1968-2000; Sam and Silo, April 18, 1977 ; The Evermores, March 29, 1982-86; Betty Boop and Felix, November 19, 1984-88; and Gamin and Patches, April 27, 1987-July 1988.
As the number of strips increased, the number of Walker’s helpers did likewise. In addition to Walker’s sons Brian, Greg, Neal and Morgan and on-the-premises cartoonist Bill Janocha, at one time in the mid-1980s, the team included another half-dozen gag-writing and drawing cartooners: Bud Jones, Bob Gustafson, Jerry Dumas, Frank Johnson, and Johnny Sajem.
Walker sees both the social and the personal aspects of cartooning: “As society becomes more spread out, family members find themselves living further and further apart from each other, and with life becoming more impersonal, comic strips help fill the void in people’s lives by creating the illusion of friends and shared experiences.”
As a personal enterprise for a cartoonist, “the comic strip,” he continued, “is one of the few media that allows one person to express his philosophy, his anger, his joy, and his disappointment without outside restriction. It is one of the purest forms of art and expression that exists.”
In the same spirit of untrammeled purity, Happy Birthday, Beetle — many returns of the day for you and your tireless creator. 
