KEEP BEETLE BAILEY! LOSE "THE BOONDOCKS"!
Posted on 07/26/2002 7:52:49 AM PDT by NativeNewYorker
“Beginning Sunday," the Tribune told readers on Friday, June 14, "we are dropping 'Beetle Bailey' from our comics lineup as part of an ongoing effort to test the popularity of selected strips or to introduce new ones. We will make a decision on whether to resume running the strip at a later date." Beetle Bailey hasn't been seen since. Six weeks later, the Tribune is still making up its mind.
Cartoonist Mort Walker doesn't get it. King Features, which syndicates Beetle Bailey, doesn't get it. Don't count on me to make everything clear; I don't get it either. "Times change, and so does the Tribune," says the paper's delphic comics czar, Geoff Brown, who knows he's being exasperating.
Beetle Bailey is one of the most successful strips in the history of American cartooning. Walker launched it in 1950; three years later he was named the National Cartoonists Society's cartoonist of the year, the first award of many -- in 1999 he was given France's Order of Chevalier and a year later the U.S. Army's Decoration for Distinguished Civilian Service. The strip, which runs in 1,800 newspapers, has spun off more than 90 paperbacks and a second hit strip, Hi and Lois.
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.
"I want to get Tribune comics-page readers accustomed to change," says Brown, an associate managing editor. "Instead of 'I' make it 'we' -- I don't want to sound like some rogue editor. It's not a Beetle Bailey thing. Beetle Bailey just happens to have been tested during this time when our philosophy has changed."
Comics have been tested before. They've been pulled for a week, and after outraged fans shook their fists, either dropped or restored. The world still waits for a decision on Beetle Bailey.
When will we know?
"Later in the summer," says Brown. "There's not much of it left, is there?"
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.
"He was not a happy camper," says Warren. Shepard wanted answers, and Warren insisted he had none to offer, because he's not in the comics loop. "Ignorance was sort of bliss," says Warren. They've continued to talk, and Warren says the only thing he actually knows that he hasn't told his friend (and won't tell me) is the amount of reader response when Beetle Bailey disappeared.
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."
I called Shepard, but it was George Haeberlein, King's vice president for syndication sales, who got back to me. He says King is willing to deal; it's dropped the prices of some other King features the Tribune runs, and it's offered to drop the price of Beetle Bailey too, putting the ball in the Tribune's court. "We have settled on the others with the Tribune, but we haven't been able to settle with Beetle Bailey."
Why not? Haeberlein's been "racking my brain" over that one. "It's been hinted," he says, "that there was sexism. It came from within the Chicago Tribune, I don't know what level. We think it came from a pretty high level. It was hinted at at one of the meetings that John Killian attended."
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."
Brown responds to most questions with "No comment," including questions about whether the strip is being done in by a woman, such as an editor in chief, or women within the paper. But this is not about money, he insists.
"If only you knew . . . "
If only I knew what?
Brown considers his words.
"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."
Just before the Tribune stopped running Beetle Bailey Mort Walker announced a contest to name a new character, Camp Swampy's IT whiz. "We were astounded -- we got 84,000 entries," he says. Including more than a thousand from Chicago, adds Haeberlein; the contestants still don't know the new guy's now Spec. Chip Gizmo. The winning entry was sent in by four guys from the State Department, and Walker showed up there to make a presentation. "Colin Powell heard about it. My wife and I went into his office, and the first thing I know he's quoting my gags to me. 'I remember when Lieutenant [Jack] Flap got there and he says, "How come there's no blacks in this honkie outfit."'"
That was in 1970. Some southern papers dropped the strip.
Walker, who's 78 and a World War II vet, tells me that when he ran his contest he asked the readers submitting names to contribute to the Fisher House Foundation, which offers lodging to families visiting patients in army hospitals. He raised $105,000. "There's a lot of good feeling for Beetle out there," he says.
But what about Miss Buxley and General Halftrack?
"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.'"
Walker says Shepard and Killian have sent him the discouraging news that "'they don't care how popular it is. You're fighting an iron curtain.' What gets me is I don't understand how an editor can run a paper for himself and not for his readers."
KEEP BEETLE BAILEY! LOSE "THE BOONDOCKS"!
Ah, welcome to reality. Journalism is entertainment, but Hollywood is notorious for making R- movies when they know they can make more money on a G-rated flick. Why would the paper expose the sensitive eyes of its readers to humor which would point out the facts of military life?Everyone they know knows that soldiers (American soldiers, that is) aren't people.
Besides, older readers aren't the problem--newspapers want to attract younger readers so they'll have a business in the future.
Right.
All the data shows that young people, when they can be bothered with "news" at all, go to the web.
So, the press is flailing around, trying to figure out a content mix that'll work in this environment. Their solution seems to include pissing off older habitual readers with archly socialist news and editorial bias, while getting rid of non-news features they're loyal to.
At the same time, kindergarten level news "analysis" and "we think you're THIS stupid" lifestyle junk isn't snaring new, younger readers.
Add in hard to navigate web sites that increasingly require intrusive registration, and you have an industry slowly melting into history.
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