Come September 4, one of the oldest and most-loved comic strips will be celebrating its 60th birthday.
Beetle Bailey started out on September 4, 1950, the brainchild of cartoonist Mort Walker. It is set in a fictional United States Army military outpost called Camp Swampy. Bailey’s story begins at Rockview University, where he was a college student; after a year, however, he quit school and enlisted in the U.S. Army, on March 13, 1951 – a time when the United States was involved in the Korean War.
Up until now, the strip’s original creator, Mort Walker, is still part of the production team behind it. In a feature on the Navy Times, Walker, now 86, shares: “I don’t know how I’d be retired… I wake up every day with another idea.”
King Features, the syndicating service for Beetle Bailey, is celebrating 60 years of Beetle Bailey gags by running Sunday cartoons that feature Beetle in a re-enactment of various military events in history.
That places Beetle in such events as the end of World War II, and the crossing of the Delaware with George Washington.
Of Beetle, Walker says that he has not changed much over the years: “He’s still pretty much lazy… I haven’t changed him a tremendous amount because I think that’s his character that I want to keep. He represents the little man in all of us. Beetle is the embodiment of everybody’s resistance to authority, all the rules and regulations which you’ve got to follow. He deals with it in his own way. And in a way, it’s sort of what I did when I was in the Army. I just often times did what I wanted to do.”


Children of fallen heroes
Local politician Abdul Manan, a candidate for parliament during a nationwide election scheduled for September 18, was killed in an attack in the western province of Herat on Saturday. Afghan officials believe that the killing was the handiwork of the
The 88-year-old served as a mechanic in a Navy air transport squad, and also flew planes in the South Pacific. He knew about his decorations and accolades before he was discharged, but never got around to getting them as he was in a hurry to go home to Western Kansas.
The attack involved the firing of mortars, rockets, grenades and guns. NATO officials revealed that two insurgents cut a hole in the fence of FOB Salerno and gained entry into the base. While there were no casualties among Afghan and U.S. troops, an Afghan police man, as well as NATO troops, were wounded, while a 12-year-old Afghan boy was killed. This was revealed by Khost police chief Gen. Abdul Hakim Ishaqzai.



