Mort Walker

"One of the most prolific cartoonists working today, and one of the most widely read, Mort Walker is the creator of the perennially popular Beetle Bailey. Over the years he's also managed to contribute to and sometimes draw over a half-dozen other strips, including Hi and Lois and Boner's Ark.

"Born in El Dorado Kansas, and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Addison Morton Walker was dedicated to cartooning from his early childhood. At 15 he was already doing a strip for a Kansas City paper and working as a staff cartoonist for an industrial publication. At 17 he went to work for Hallmark Cards, and at the University of Missouri, where he studied humanities, Walker edited the campus humor magazine.

"The sale of a cartoon to the Saturday Evening Post emboldened him to try his luck in New York after graduation, and from 1948 to 1950 he worked as an editor for Dell on the magazine 1000 Jokes. Seeing the business from the editor's position provided an education, which he quickly put to use. While at Dell he produced such a stream of cartoons for other magazines that in 1949 he was named the topselling gag cartoonist in the country.

"Walker wanted something more secure than the life of a free lance, however, so in 1950 he developed a character he'd frequently used in gag cartoons--a feckless college student named Spider--into a comic strip and offered it to King Features. The syndicate took it at once, altering the hero's name to Beetle, and Beetle Bailey was born. It was the first of many strips Walker was to create and, after a change of setting from campus to army camp, the most successful.

"Since then Walker has generated a wide assortment of comic creations, all but one for King Features. In 1954 he joined with artist Dik Browne to write the family strip Hi and Lois. From 1957 to 1972 he authored the saga of a testy landlady, Mrs. Fitz's Flats, drawn by Frank Roberge, and from 1961 to 1963 he collaborated with Jerry Dumas, who did the drawing on the ingenious Sam's Strip. In 1968 came Boner's Ark, which he signed with his little-known first name, and which Frank Johnson took over several years ago. He and Dumas revived Sam's Strip in a less esoteric form as Sam and Silo in 1977, and in 1982 Walker created The Evermores, a historical strip drawn by Johnny Sajem that ran until 1986. In 1987, again signing himself Addison, he came up with a kid strip about a lovable city urchin and his bedraggled dog. Titled Gamin and Patches and distributed by United Features, it proved to be his least successful venture and lasted little more than a year.

"Stil working in the timeless minimal cartoon style of his early magazine days, Walker maintains an open, uncluttered look that perfectly matches the unchallenging, middle brow humor of his gags. Never an innovative artist, he remains a fellow of infinite jest.