Frank M. Young never thought much of the Beetle Bailey comic strip, but that's mainly because he read it in the 1990s and after, by which time it had morphed into "predictable" and uninspired humor. A new book—Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey: 75 Years of Smiles—has changed his thinking about the Mort Walker strip because it shows how vibrant and even edgy the strip was when it began in the 1950s, Young writes in the Comics Journal. So what happened? Young's piece isn't just about the decline of Beetle Bailey, it's about the decline of newspaper comic strips—and newspapers themselves.
Young contrasts a 1954 Sunday strip of Beetle Bailey, crammed with detail and 199 words of setup, with a 2000 installment that uses fewer than half as many words, minimal backgrounds, and a lame payoff. It's not surprising: Once a main draw that justified full pages of color and elaborate storytelling, comic strips were progressively squeezed into smaller spaces, stripped of detail, and treated as filler. Walker, like other comics creators, had no choice but to adapt to those conditions. And comics lost the lushness that once made them an important part of the culture and the national language.
Beetle became yet another legacy franchise running on habit. Young's conclusion is bleak: Newspaper comics, once a reason to buy the Sunday paper, are now "gutted, empty things," with long-running features like Beetle denied a graceful end and serving instead as symbols of print media's own loss of influence. Read the full piece.
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