Beetle Bailey MIA
Yes, you say, but 52 years later Beetle Bailey is old and lame, and those Miss Buxley gags stopped being funny three waves of feminism ago. Maybe, maybe not. In late 1998 the Tribune asked its readers to vote on which comics they liked, and males of all ages among the small, self-selected, arguably meaningless sample of readers who responded put Beetle Bailey first. Among men and women 18 to 34 years old it was down in 18th place, so it obviously was extraordinarily popular with older guys.
Beetle Bailey had been gone only a couple of days when T.R. “Rocky” Shepard III, president of King Features, came to the tower and met with Brown. Shepard brought along assistant sales manager John Killian, who would speak often with Brown over the following weeks. After the meeting was over, Shepard had lunch with James Warren, the Tribune’s deputy managing editor for features. They’ve known each other since Amherst.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Warren allows that the price of the strip has come up. King and the Tribune both regard that price as proprietary information, but Walker says it’s about $400 a week, or about $20,000 a year. It’s money, Warren observes, that in hard times a paper would want to think twice about spending. “What’s playing out with Beetle Bailey,” he says, “is sort of the early part of an attempt to be more rigorously assessing everything we’ve got in features.”
For the sake of argument, Haeberlein considers the hint on its merits. “They can say what they want about if it’s sexist or if it’s older. You know what? It’s established, it’s successful. Mort Walker is the best-known cartoonist working in the world today, and it’s the only comic strip that has a military setting”–a plus, in Haeberlein’s eyes, in times like these. “Yet they would cancel it, or drop it from their lineup.”
“If only you knew how nothing was there, you would be amused at how much noise and light is being generated over something that doesn’t exist. There’s no enemy.”
“I sent the general for sensitivity training a couple of years ago, and he hasn’t leered at her since,” Walker says. “He doesn’t drool over her anymore. I’ve even toned down on some of the other characters, like Killer. I don’t know what it is, but you’re not allowed to look at women anymore. So I’ve stopped that. In the beginning I didn’t have any girls in the strip, and my editor said, ‘This is an army strip. These are young men. You’ve got to get some pretty girls in there.’”
