MORT WALKER MILESTONE

Here’s a milestone we passed a while back and should have taken notice of. As of September 4, 2006, Mort Walker achieved a record: 56 years doing a syndicated daily comic strip, Beetle Bailey. I was jolted into this realization while proofing the last chapter of my biography on Milton Caniff, in which I asserted that he had been doing a syndicated daily comic strip for 55 years, a record that, at the time of his death, had not been surpassed by anyone. Well, now it has been exceeded. Congratulations, Mort—many happy returns.

By the way (although not at all incidentally), Beetle Bailey won a competition over Get Fuzzy at the Concord Monitor. The paper ran a readership poll earlier this month to see whether it should drop the perpetual yardbird in favor of an irritable cat that beats up on a friendly dog. Said the Monitor’s Felice Belman: “I liked the idea of opening up space on the comics page for some up-and-coming artists and retiring some old strips that had, I thought, run their course.” The paper received more than 800 e-mail messages and 200 “old-fashioned letters” from readers. It was a near thing, but Beetle won. Belman, chastised, continued: “Here’s what I didn’t realize when we started: 2007 marks the 25th anniversary of the last time the Monitor took on Beetle Bailey and lost. Back then, Mike Pride was the managing editor. He found Beetle to be grossly sexist several times a week and in the winter of 1982 decided he would not run the strips he found most offensive. He called it editing. Readers called it censorship. After weeks and weeks and weeks of protest, he said uncle. Some things don’t change. Beetle has survived Korea, Vietnam, two wars in Iraq—all the while safely ensconced at Camp Swampy!—and now two skirmishes at the Monitor. He wins.” Moral: don’t mess with us old guys.