It's our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! This year, the theme is A Comic Strip Christmas! Each day will spotlight a notable comic strip, and at least three Christmas-themed comics from that strip. Today's comic is Beetle Bailey.

Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day's Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened, and you can see what the "treat" for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries.

The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Santa Claus giving out presents to comic strip kids (although instead of a present for Charlie Brown, his dog, Snoopy, gets a present instead), is by Nick Perks.

Day 17 is now opened (once opened, the door will feature an image from the featured comic strip)...

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WHAT IS BEETLE BAILEY?

I'm going to repeat myself from my Hi and Lois write-up a while back, since their origins are the same. In the late 1940s, after returning from service in World War II, Mort Walker started submitting one-off gag panels to the Saturday Evening Post featuring a sort of slacker college student (or whatever people in 1948 called slackers back then). His editor, John Bailey, liked the pieces enough that he suggested that Walker try to do a multi-panel daily comic strip featuring the college character, now dubbed Spider. The "real" money back then was in multi-panel strips, but the Saturday Evening Post did not ultimately pick up the Spider comic strip. Walker then began to pitch it to other syndicates, and eventually, King Features Syndicate bought the strip (I don't actually know how many syndicates he pitched it to. For all I know, King was the first one he tried). However, the syndicate had another feature that had a recurring character called "Spider," so it asked Walker to come up with a new name.

Out went "Spider" and in came "Beetle," paired with the last name of his Saturday Evening Post editor, and so Beetle Bailey was born. Initially, Beetle Bailey was a college student when the strip debuted in 1950, but in 1951, Beetle dropped out of school and enlisted in the army, and he's been there ever since. As his son, Brian Walker, pointed out, Walker looked to his time in the service as the inspiration for the characters in the strip. For instance, Sarge in the strip, as Waker noted, "was inspired by Sergeant Octavian Savou, a tough-as-nails authoritarian Mort Walker encountered in basic training after he enlisted in the Army in 1942. Savou would yell and scream at his men without mercy. One night Mort and all his buddies had the night off and went into town. When they returned to the barracks, they found notes with poems written on them pinned to their pillows. They were all addressed to “my boys” from Sgt. Savou."

Over the years, the strip went from being fully Beetle-focused and expanding to cover the various members of enlisted men and officers (and civilian workers) at Camp Swampy. Mort Walker worked on the strip until he died in 2018. His sons, Neal, Brian & Greg Walker, had been working on the strip with him since 1982, and since their dad died, I BELIEVE Greg Walker is currently drawing the strip (he had been inking and lettering it before his dad died), but I honestly don't know who is drawing the strip now.

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HOW DID BEETLE BAILEY CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS?

Interestingly, in the early years, Walker really didn't do that many Christmas strips, if any. One of the first Christmas-themed Beetle Baileys came in 1961, with a fun one where Sarge is Santa Claus and, of course, being Sarge, he is a strict disciplinarian Santa Claus (I forgot how much the characters used to "curse" back in the day. They don't seem to do that as much nowadays)...

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Probably THE central relationship in Beetle Bailey is that of Sarge and Beetle. Sarge seems to hate Beetle, but at the same time, Beetle is such a sweet guy, it's hard to really HATE him. Instead, Sarge is more frustrated by him than anything else. However, the Sarge also doesn't exactly know how to express himself (much like Walker's real life "Sarge"), and so he resorts to violence a lot. Here, though, we see that the thoughts of Beetle's mother's Christmas cookies is enough to put some Christmas spirit into the ol' Sarge...

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In 2009, Walker did a two week riff comparing the actual Santa Claus to Sarge, and the whole thing ended up with Santa Claus, the following week, accidentally screwing up and giving the wrong presents to the Camp Swampy folks (like Beetle getting a shovel for Christmas, because he's always digging at the base as part of his duties).

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In this strip, we see how Sarge is just so caught up in his "Sarge-ness," as it were, that even when he tries to be Santa Claus for a bunch of little kids, he can't help but bark orders and freak them all out...

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In the early days of the strip, Beetle would visit home a lot, but over the years, it became much less of a thing. Towards the end of his time on the strip, Walker had Beetle visit home, with Sarge along for the ride, and there was a whole week's worth of daily strips of Sarge adjusting to life at the Bailey's (and the Bailey's adjusting to Sarge and his weird dog, Otto). On Christmas, we see a crossover, as Beetle's sister Lois, and her husband Hi, and their kids, all came over to celebrate Christmas with Sarge and Beetle and, of course, the readers, as well.

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