Cartoonist spoofed Army life with ‘Beetle Bailey’

Mort Walker, whose “Beetle Bailey” comic strip followed the exploits of a lazy G.I. and his inept cohorts at the dysfunctional Camp Swampy, died Saturday at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 94.

Bill Morrison, president of the National Cartoonists Society, confirmed the death. The cause was pneumonia.

In contrast with the workshirking soldier he immortalized, Walker was a man of considerable drive and ambition. He drew his daily comic strip for 68 years, longer than any other U.S. artist in the history of the medium.

Debuting in 1950, “Beetle Bailey” was distributed by King Features Syndicate. In 1953, the National Cartoonists Society named Walker cartoonist of the year. But it wasn’t until the next year, when the Pacific edition of the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes banned “Beetle Bailey” for mocking the authority of officers and encouraging laziness in the ranks, that Beetle’s success was assured. The ban lasted 10 years, and the strip eventually reached 200 million readers in 1,800 newspapers in more than 50 countries.

Beetle and company were also featured in a musical with the book by Walker, as well as on a U.S. Postal Service stamp in 2010.

The characters never saw battle, and weapons and uniforms were not updated. Walker said that the military setting was simply a convenient stand-in for the pecking order of which everyone is a part.

Starting in 1954, Walker wrote another hit cartoon, the widely syndicated family strip “Hi and Lois,” originally illustrated by Dik Browne (later the creator of “Hagar the Horrible”). Walker said he wanted to depict a loving family “together against the world ... instead of against each other.”

In 1974, Walker opened the Museum of Cartoon Art in a mansion in Greenwich, Conn. The collection grew with donations of art from newspaper syndicates and the estates of cartoonists and is today worth an estimated $20 million. In 2008, its more than 200,000 pieces became part of Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, where a gallery is named after Walker.

Addison Morton Walker was born Sept. 3, 1923, in El Dorado, Kan., the third of four siblings. His father, Robin Walker, was an architect who moved the family from oil boom to oil boom, building houses, churches and schools. The family settled in Kansas City, Mo. Robin Walker’s poetry appeared in The Kansas City Star with drawings by Walker’s mother, Carolyn, a staff illustrator for the newspaper.

Walker said he knew he wanted to be a cartoonist at the age of 3. By 12, he was regularly publishing his own cartoons in magazines such as Inside Detective and Flying Aces, and at 15, he had a comic strip in The Kansas City Star.

In 1942, Walker was drafted. “Little did I know,” he wrote decades later, “that I was going to get almost four years of free research.”

In 1949, Walker married Jean Suffill, with whom he had seven kids. The marriage ended in divorce. In 1985, he married Catherine Carty. Besides his wife, survivors include his kids and three stepchildren.

In 1990, the Pentagon recognized Walker with the Certificate of Appreciation for Patriotic Civilian Service.

“As hard as it is to find anything at the Pentagon,” Walker quipped, “they finally found a sense of humor.”