An odd bit of bad luck, and a childhood memory regarding Mort Walker's passing.

Hi My Cagents. Ed Power here.

Last week Mel and I had to pull a strip that was supposed to run, and run the one that was supposed to run this week in it's place.

See, I'd written a strip for last week that I wanted to poke some fun at how behind the times on some issues, like the 'Me Too', movement newspaper comics can be, and to do so I picked the comic 'Beetle Bailey' as an example because of how well 2 of the characters fit the point, and how closely I thought one of those characters would fit into our own Max Terrier's world.

Sadly, "Beetle Bailey" creator Mort Walker passed away last weekend.

Growing up when I did, Mort Walker was a hero of mine. One of my favorite memories as a kid was when I was in the Cub Scouts (because I was cool) and one Sunday when we were out camping, it poured rain, and my friend/tent-mate Lou and I had each brought comic strip compilation books to read in case of such an occasion (because we were that cool).

My friend brought a ton of of compilation books of 'Beetle Bailey', which I read regularly each day in something know as a "newspaper", but only had one compilation book of (which didn't even have any Sunday strips in it). So, I spent that entire rain storm reading all my friend's 'Beetle Bailey' books, and it was really cool. :)

One of those strips was a Sunday comic, which oddly influenced the 'Beetle Bailey' 'My Cage' strip Mel and I did. In it a drawing makes it's way around Camp Swampy with all the cast of the strip drawn as animals, except for Chaplain Staneglass. The gang thinks it's because the artist  would've been afraid to mock a Chaplain, but then you find out the Chaplain was the one who drew the picture and left himself out because he "didn't know how to draw an angelfish".

It's a strip I've looked for the past week for on line, but can't find. But in it I remembered General Halftrack was a walrus, and that's why I wrote him as one in the strip we didn't run last week (If you can find the mentioned 'Beetle Bailey' strip, by all means, let me know where)

We are going to run our strip this week. I hope it doesn't come off as disrespectful.

I sadly never got to meet Mr. Walker, so I don't know if he'd like the strip, but from what I have read/seen about him, I think he'd think it was funny how badly the timing worked out for us. ;)

I'm sorry I never got to meet you Mr. Walker. I'm sorry you're gone. I'm glad I got to read your comic strip, and I thank you for it. You made me laugh, and I can't say anything better than that about a comic strip.

Thanks.

-Ed Power, Cage Writer.