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Mort Walker passed away yesterday the age of 94, and the many, many, many people who emailed and tweeted me to let me know are a testament to the huge impact he had on cartooning as an art form and as a business. His Washington Post obituary is a great summary of his life and career, but to me, these are the high points to show how he and the team he built affected the medium:

• “Beetle Bailey was among the first cartoons to mark a shift in the funny pages from the serial strips of the previous decade to the graphically simpler gag-a-day model that predominates today.”
• “He delighted in the history and tricks of his trade and wrote a tongue-in-cheek textbook, The Lexicon of Comicana (1980), in which he described commonly used cartooning conventions. Grawlix were the symbols deployed to convey foul language; briffits were the clouds often found at the end of hites (horizontal lines indicating speed). To Mr. Walker’s amusement, his book sometimes appeared in the art instruction section of bookstores, and his neologisms would pop up in discussions about the art of cartooning.”
• “He eventually found himself in charge of 10,000 German prisoners in a POW camp in Italy. At the end of the war, he helped oversee the destruction of binoculars and watches from an ordnance depot in Naples. His job was to make sure nobody stole anything before it was destroyed. ‘I began to realize,’ he wrote in the memoir, ‘that army humor writes itself.’”

There are many anecdotes around of his good humor and kindness to younger comics artists, and his ambitions for cartooning. He also helped create the workshop model of cartooning, and like many legacy strips Beetle Bailey (which he created) and Hi and Lois (which he co-created with Dik Browne) have long been written and illustrated by the next generation over at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC, so I look forward to making fun of them for years to come. But think of Mort the next time you see a grawlix or a briffit.

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Crock, 1/28/18

This is another great example of how the top two “throwaway panels,” which don’t appear in all layouts and thus need to be somewhat disposable, can really add another dimension to a strip. Without them, today’s Crock is a goofy tale of how that diabolical Crock has decided to take care of the fort’s trash problem by airdropping the whole midden onto the hapless Lost Patrol in lieu of supplies. However, the vulture’s dialogue in the second panel of the top row reveals the awful truth about this so-called “trash and garbage”: it’s a mountain of corpses — French and insurgent, dead of combat or disease, all mingled together — and the Lost Patrol is about to an experience a nightmare beyond imagining.

Dennis the Menace, 1/28/18

The only person you’re menacing with that attitude is yourself, Dennis, since without a social medial presence you won’t be able to establish a personal brand! What are you thinking? (In other news, I’ve already risked my browser history to ascertain that PlayPal.com isn’t a fetish dating site, you’re welcome.)

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/28/18

“And it’ll be great to for Johnny to have grandparents, since we killed all of our parents for the insurance money years ago. Wait, did I say that part out loud?”

Six Chix, 1/28/18

Soooo, what you’re saying is that the cormorant is carrying a bag full of … flesh? Stretched out flesh already marked, ready to be grafted onto women as they sleep by the cormorant’s sharp, nimble beak

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Mary Worth, 1/27/18

Mary Worth has definitely been setting up the Great Muffin Caper for a while now, with Mary offering up her signature pastry to console the whole Weston clan, both father and daughter, in their times of trouble over the past year. The ones Dawn got last fall were ID’d as carrot muffins, but I’m not sure what the later ones we’ve been seeing are supposed to be, and there may not be a canonical in-universe answer, what with the writer, artist, and colorist all being different people, but they sure look like chocolate chip cookies, right? Which leads to the next obvious question: what if you made something that you called “muffins” but they were actually chocolate chip cookies shaped like muffins? That would be delicious and a differentiating piece of intellectual property that could definitely make you rich, once you’ve successfully farmed out production to a country with low labor costs and a relaxed attitude about what sort of preservatives you can legally put into baked goods.

Shoe, 1/27/18

A cool thing about writing a syndicated comic strip is that you can be momentarily stirred by a vaguely erotic premise that doesn’t really have a punchline to it, and then, bam! 15% of your job for the week is accounted for!