This year marks 75 years since Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey debuted on the comic strip pages and there's a new book out celebrating its long, long run. You can order that book here and while you're Amazoning, you can also place an advance order for the book that's coming out next month celebrating 75 years of Charles Schulz's Peanuts. Seventy-five years ago was a good year for comic strips.
And here's a segment that ran on CBS the other day about the Beetle Bailey book. I knew Mort Walker a little and he really was a nice, funny man who only seemed to care about doing nice, funny comic strips. There was a period there when he seemed to be doing about thirty-seven of them and I know other cartoonists were rankled about him occupying so much real estate on the funny pages…but the ones I heard grousing all seemed to be unable to produce anything better. I think he'd be proud to see how his friends and family are carrying on the traditions he started…