Mort Walker, "Beetle Bailey," "Hi & Lois" cartoonist: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2

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Mr. MEDIA/BOB ANDELMAN: Did you have formal art training?

MORT WALKER: I used to take art courses until I suddenly got the idea when I was in high school that if I was gonna do a comic strip, which was my lifelong ambition to do, that was what I was preparing for, and I thought, If I just am an artist, I’m gonna have to pay somebody to write my ideas for me. And that means I’ll only make half as much money. I started taking writing courses instead of art courses. I took a couple because they were usually snap courses. I’d always get an ‘A,’ and I didn’t have to do any homework or anything like that. But after I came to New York and started doing cartoons, I was a top-selling magazine cartoonist in the country in 1948, a year after I got out of college. My art teacher in Missouri University used to hang up my drawings and say, “An example of fine art in cartooning.” They were trying to get some credit for me.

ANDELMAN: Oh, I see. They want the credit.

WALKER: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: Yeah, I see.

WALKER: “We trained that guy.”

ANDELMAN: I wonder how many people that they churned through there as a result of that.

WALKER: As opposed to that, my journalism school claimed me as a star student in journalism.

ANDELMAN: People living off of you all over the place.

WALKER: I remember I was taking this writing course, and I was getting straight A’s. I was the top student in the writing course. The teacher asked me one day, “I’d like for you to come home and have dinner with me and my wife,” and I said okay. So I go to dinner, and we talked about writing all through dinner, the great writers that we were. After dinner, he shoved his chair back, and he says, “I guess you’d like to write the great American novel.” I said, “No, sir.” He said, “No?” I said, “No. I want to write the great American comic strip.” And you never saw such a look on a guy’s face. He was like I’d hit him with a brick.

ANDELMAN: Do you feel like guys that do what you do are held in more esteem today than they were 50 years ago?

WALKER: No. It’s just the opposite.

ANDELMAN: Really?

WALKER: When I grew up, cartoonists were national heroes. Boy, they were famous. I remember going into a restaurant with Al Capp and Milton Caniff, and everybody turned around, and they said, “There’s Milton Caniff! And he’s with Al Capp!” They were on the cover of Time magazine and written about all the time. And they were revered, and they were rich and famous. They used to drive around in Mercedes and expensive cars and everything. They were well respected. But you’ve got so many other things going on for people today -- a lot of television, movies, and things that we didn’t have in those days.


ANDELMAN: We’ve talked about Will Eisner before. I remember Will Eisner had said that he wanted to rise to the level of the comic strip artist from the comic book artist because there were comic strip artists, then there were pornographers, and then there were comic book artists. That was about the way he thought that the pecking order worked.

WALKER: There was a time there when comic books were just about out of business.

ANDELMAN: Yep.

WALKER: And then suddenly, I guess it was the movies that came out with Spiderman and Superman and everything like that that revitalized the comic book business. But they were almost dead at one time.

ANDELMAN: Well, speaking of almost dead, let’s talk about the newspaper business and the effect of the Internet and other things. Where do you see it going? Do you think there will be a newspaper business for cartoonists to sell their wares in five, ten years?

WALKER: Boy, you just don’t know. I’ve seen so many businesses and things go out of business because of changes. Everything’s changing so rapidly these days. I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t know how you can get along without newspapers. Maybe people aren’t reading them as much as they used to, but I find I can’t move along without them. I’ve got all my computers all around here and television sets and DVDs and all that kind of stuff, but I depend on the paper to find out what’s going on.

ANDELMAN: I know there were circulation numbers just this past week for the major newspapers around the country. I think only three of them were up in circulation, and even that, none of them were up more than two percent, and the rest were all down. That’s gotta be a little frightening.

WALKER: It is, and I know that the papers are cutting back on their comics. They go from two pages to one page. They’re trying to cut the costs because the owners of the papers always want to make more money. And while they’re still making as much money as they did 10 years ago, just about, the owners want to make more. They think by cutting back on their expenses… Our local paper here just fired 15 of its top editors and combined its operations with another paper in the town next to us, cutting back on their comics and everything like that. And I’m thinking if they want to appeal to people, they ought to keep their most popular features. Comics are the best-read part of the newspaper and usually right after the headlines, the favorite part of the paper. A lot of editors don’t see it. They think their editorials are the big stars.




ANDELMAN: Little do they know. You know when they find out, of course…My wife’s an editor at a newspaper. They find out when they drop a strip, and the phone starts ringing off the hook. Then they realize, “Oh, people do care about that stuff.”

WALKER: I know, but it takes something like that to tell them. I don’t know why they don’t realize it before. While I don’t think comic strips run the newspaper or anything like that, they’re very popular with people so don’t cut them out. They’re the things that people look for.

ANDELMAN: I should give credit where credit is due, by the way. This is the line of questioning that Mark Tatulli, creator of “LIO,” had in mind, which I actually found interesting that he was concerned, as a guy who’s sold his strip into more than 300 papers in about a year and a half, but he, nonetheless, is concerned. I guess he’s wondering…He’s been on a fast rise, but I guess even he is concerned about how much further it can go if they’re all cutting back.

WALKER: I think that somebody starting out is probably going to be having a more difficult time because the editors are not adding the strips as fast as they used to. And they’re just trying to hold onto the ones that they’ve got and hold onto the price of the thing. I’m not making any more money now than I made 30 years ago. They’re just not raising their prices anymore. But still, “Beetle” is in 52 different countries and 1,800 newspapers, and it has a readership of 200 million everyday. That’s the kind of readership that I think any writer would love to have.

ANDELMAN: Sure. One of the other things that Mark was wondering is if, along that same line, is if you see a future for new comic artists being able to make a living as comic strippers?
WALKER: It’s going to be more and more difficult. Yeah.

ANDELMAN: Do they need to look for other media like the Internet, for example? Do you think that publishing your strips directly to the web is going to be a way of the future?

WALKER: I haven’t found anybody that’s been able yet to figure out how to make money at it. You can put yourself on the Internet and hope people are going to see it, but how are you going to get them to pay for it? That’s the big problem.

ANDELMAN: Speaking of strips that kind of mix the old and the new, I wondered what you made of the hybridization of Lynn Johnston’s “For Better or For Worse.”

WALKER: You mean that she’s going back to re-doing her old strips?

ANDELMAN: Yeah, but you can’t tell from day to day if it’s a new strip or a reprint. You can, but you don’t know from day to day what you’re getting. I don’t even think some of the newspapers have caught on to that yet.

WALKER: I don’t know how that’s gonna work out. I was reading it this morning, and I was trying to figure out when that strip first appeared, probably, what, 30 years ago or something like that?

ANDELMAN: Yes.

WALKER: She’s always been an experimenter. I read an editorial yesterday from, I think, the Cleveland Plain Dealer where the author said what’s going on with comic strips. You’ve got “Doonesbury” writing stories about a guy who lost his leg in battle, and Tom Batiuk (“Funky Winkerbean”) has a main character die of cancer. Lynn Johnston, she’s got dogs dying, and she’s got the old man with Alzheimer’s…Where’s the funny stuff? So many strips now are dealing with emotional problems and things like that rather than making you laugh everyday.




ANDELMAN: It’s probably not unusual to find that in “Doonesbury” over the years, but “Funky Winkerbean,” which I hadn’t seen in years. It’s not carried near us. I read about the character dying of cancer, and I thought that must be kind of shocking in that strip. I’ve always equated that strip more along the lines of a “Hi & Lois” or a “Blondie” in that it’s about people, and it’s a gag-a-day kind of a thing. And then what? A comic strip character is dying of cancer? Wow. That’s a wake-up call for people reading that strip.

WALKER: It’s not the traditional thing that you see in comic strips. I like to make everybody laugh and maybe enjoy the day a little bit better or something like that. Laughter is a great healing conduit for enjoying life more.

ANDELMAN: You’ve gradually brought family, as did Dik Browne, into your strips and kind of pass it along, although obviously you’re still involved. In the case of Lynn Johnston, though -- and I know she has staff -- but if she’s tired of doing the strip, shouldn’t she just stop doing it? Or financially, is it just too hard to walk away from that kind of thing?

WALKER: I’ve heard some rumors about her getting a divorce, and her husband leaving her penniless. I don’t know. I guess he took the money or something. I don’t know. So maybe she still needs the money.

ANDELMAN: Oh, so the motivation might be a little different. Yeah. It’s sad. It’s such a great strip for so long, but it just seems kind of lackluster now. There are times when Garry Trudeau has taken a couple weeks or a few months off, and you’ll see older strips run. You can just see the difference in the quality of the art and the gags. And you know what’s happening, I think, with “For Better or For Worse.” I think it’s unfortunate because it doesn’t add to the legacy of the strip.

WALKER: I don’t know. Sometimes it’s interesting. They’ve been re-running the “Peanuts” strips for a long time, and it’s like I’m reading them for the first time. He and I started at the same time in 1950.

ANDELMAN: Right.

WALKER: I started one month before he did, and we became friends and had a lot of experiences together over the years. It was interesting to me to go back and see his early work. And while I think he learned how to draw a little bit better than the early years, it’s still interesting.



ANDELMAN: It’s funny. You’ve done a wonderful thing here. You’ve set me up for the last couple questions I wanted to ask you, which actually were about Charles Schulz, cause I know that you’ve been friends, and of course, he’s the subject of this new book, Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis. You go back, obviously, a long time. You nominated Schulz to be a member of the National Cartoonists Society. He was rejected at first because nobody knew him. I remember that it’s a great story that you told me, and I know you told Michaelis. What do you think of Michaelis’ belief that Schulz was largely an unhappy, perhaps clinically depressed, man?

WALKER: I don’t think it showed up that much as far as I’m concerned. He was always a little shy, and that’s how I got to know him. Somebody said, “There’s a cartoonist that just started a strip out in Minneapolis, but he doesn’t know any other cartoonists. Could you write him?” So I said sure. So I started writing him, and we began to correspond. Then I invited him to come up to New York and meet some of the cartoonists. He came up, and I put him up and gave him a place to stay. I threw some parties for him, and he met everybody. He wandered around New York looking at the big buildings. I called him a “Hayseed,” which he didn’t like.

ANDELMAN: I think you called him “A hayseed’s hayseed.”

WALKER: I didn’t think it was derogatory, but he took a little offense at it. But anyway, we still remained friends. And then we began to sit together at the National Cartoonists meetings. He’d come up here, and we’d sit at the same table. And I got him into the Cartoonists Society. They said, “You don’t know him. He doesn’t have any other friends so you can’t really nominate him.” That’s one of the reasons I invited him to come up here. I said, “You can’t keep him out. He’s got a comic strip that’s in the paper. He’s a cartoonist!” And so they finally let him in. And we used to sit together at all the cartoonists meetings, and then later on, he and I were invited to hand out the yearly Reuben Awards, Cartoonist of the Year. He and I were on the stage together for many years. He gave us a million dollars to help start the museum. And anyway, he was just a good friend, and we were always related along the way.


ANDELMAN: Have you read the book?

WALKER: I started it, but I haven’t had the time really to get really engrossed in it. It’s right in front of me.

ANDELMAN: It’s funny, same here. It really is a fascinating book, but I also wonder if it gives you pause as someone who’s had a very long, very successful career to think about what might be written when your time comes if there’s someone out there thinking I’m going to write a posthumous biography of Mort. Are there things that you worry about being written or said about you at that time?

WALKER: You reminded me of a biographer, and somebody was asking him one day, all these books he’s written about people, and he said, “Why don’t you write a book about this guy?” And he named somebody, and the writer said, “I can’t write a book about him. I don’t know anything against him.” I would think that I’ve always been such a happy-go-lucky type of cheerful person and everything like that. It isn’t interesting.

ANDELMAN: Is there anything that you hope will be written about you when that time comes? Playboy liked to end its interviews over the years with what would you like to see on a tombstone, final words kind of thing. Do you have any thoughts about that?

WALKER: Only that I probably enjoyed life more than anybody I know, and I always like to leave them laughing, even on the street. I’m always saying funny things to people as they walk down the street. I like little kids. In the grocery store, I’m always talking to little kids: “Are you really a New York Yankee? You’ve got their T-shirt on there. Do you play baseball for them?” I’m always having fun.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.