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Mort Walker: Conversations (Conversations With Comic Artists Series)

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A sweet note to me from Mort Walker: "Dear Jason, I got the book today and it's beautiful! I read some of it this morning and had a great time remembering a lot of stuff I'd forgotten. Thanks for all your hard work and devotion. Sincerely, Mort."

Mort Walker has said that a successful comic strip character should be instantly recognizable. We should immediately understand who he is and what he's about. Walker calls this "see-ability" and "readability." Publishing professionally as a child prodigy at the age of eleven, and going on to hold numerous positions as an editor, designer, and creator of nine syndicated strips, it is ironic that Walker's most recognized character is known as the laziest fellow in the funny pages.

This volume begins with a syndicated article from 1938, which ran with the photograph of Walker at his drawing table, a sailor's cap perched back on his head. Walker's young face beams with joy and ambition. He seems to embody the Joseph Campbell catch phrase, "Find your bliss." In 1989, Bill Watterson addressed a festival at Ohio State University, expressing that the comic pages were full of doddering, dinosaur strips. A similar plea by Berkley Breathed came in 2003, asking the old guard to step aside in order to make room for younger creators. In both cases, Walker responded in Cartoonist Profiles (#89, #139), re-stating his devotion to his work. To Breathed he wrote, "I love what I'm doing. It would kill me to be told to quit." Walker's continued enthusiasm reveals that the boy with the sailor cap continues to beam from the drawing board, and that to "follow one's bliss" remains as valid and vital at age fourteen as it does at age eighty. Indeed, as this collection illustrates, that is Mort Walker's "see-ability" and "readability" as a character.


Mort Walker Conversations collects interviews and articles that span from 1938 to 2004. His engagement with the Museum of Cartoon Art- which he founded- is discussed in these pieces, along with the politics involved in working with cartoonists' unions, artistic communities, and syndicates. In these conversations Walker shows how he has managed to keep his art and stories fresh for over seventy years of production.

I had a blast reviewing interviews and articles from Mort's long career, and an even bigger blast spending time with Mort and his assistant, Bill Janocha, while I prepared this book. So many great comic strips have sprung from this self-proclaimed "human inventing machine." And for a year before launching Beetle, he was even the top-selling magazine cartoonist in the country. Mort's done it all, and it's really interesting to read through his colorful history of conversations about writing, drawing, and about working with many of the greats on strips and in the NCS, like Dik Browne, Rube Goldberg, Charles Schulz, Al Capp, Milt Caniff, and Walt Kelly.

Most of the pieces in this volume are quite rare, including a number of interviews Mort gave on television with Mike Peters and Bruce Blitz, and special interviews with me, Lee Nordling, and Bill Janocha. Mort Walker Conversations is an excellent resource for those interested in Walker's career and about the world of comic strips. Fans should also seek out these books by Walker: Backstage at the Strips and Mort Walker's Private Scrapbook.