He sold his first cartoon by age 12, as a Kansas City fifth-grader. He published more than 100 cartoons in magazines while still a teenager, and sold a comic strip to the Kansas City Journal. Soon, he was working for the company that would become Hallmark, and he told his bosses that they needed to provide humorous cards. They listened. "I helped change the industry," Walker told me of his gravitational pull toward writing funny.
He was drafted into the Army Air Corps during World War II, but within the world of Walker, even that sometimes turned comically absurd. He spent time at Camp Crowder, which he said inspired "Beetle Bailey's" Camp Swampy. "I signed up to go into psychiatry," he told me in 2013 of the Army's specialized training program, "and I ended up studying engineering. It was typical Army reasoning."
Walker created or co-created such globally popular strips as "Beetle Bailey" and "Hi and Lois," as well as "Boner's Ark" and "Sam's Strip." His work was visually clean and narratively quick, with deft setups and clear targets. He loved wordplay and pratfalls, but mostly, he knew his comic strips needed funny people you could relate to on some level.
And maybe that was the greatest comic gift of
Mort Walker, who
died Saturday morning at his Stamford, Conn., home after battling pneumonia, according to the National Cartoonists Society. He was 94, and still active in the comics industry.
