From reporternews.com:
Mort Walker has drawn “Beetle Bailey,” a comic strip chronicling the lighter side of Army life, for 58 years.
During most of that time, the artist has been waging a war of his own — to preserve cartoons.
Over the years, comics have become hot. They’re the subject of movies, TV shows and Pulitzer Prize-winning literature such as “Maus” by Art Spiegelman. But when nobody took comic books seriously, Walker saw them as art.
In his quest, Walker, 84 years old, has amassed more than 200,000 pieces — including comic books, news clippings, drawings, film footage and posters.
Walker, who published his first cartoon at age 11, contributed thousands of pieces from his own collection. He got contributions from comic-book heavyweights such as “Spider-Man” creator Stan Lee and the late cartoonist Rube Goldberg. The trove contains Mickey and Minnie Mouse drawings by Walt Disney and hand-drawn panels of “Peanuts” by Charles Schulz. It is one of the largest collections of original cartoon art in the world.
It also has been searching for a home. Worth an estimated $20 million, the collection was moved to a storage facility in Stamford, Conn., in 2002. Walker and his family have looked at dozens of homes for the collection ever since.
In 1974, Walker opened the National Cartoon Museum in Greenwich, Conn., to house his collection. He moved the museum a couple of times, plagued by everything from money problems to collapsing roofs. He eventually closed it in 2002.
Walker’s quest to preserve comics began in the 1940s when he was a young artist. He would regularly walk into the New York offices of King Features Syndicate — which in 1950 became the distributor for “Beetle Bailey” — and see crumpled up “Krazy Kat” cartoons on the ground. They were used to absorb water from ceiling leaks, he says.
“It just wasn’t right,” Walker says. He began taking the drawings home.
For two decades he looked for a home for a national museum. He says he talked to Yale University, the Museum of the City of New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., among others. Nobody was interested, he says.
Then, in 1973, Walker talked up his idea to the Hearst Foundation. The foundation wrote him a check for $50,000, and the National Cartoon Museum opened in a mansion in Greenwich, Conn.
After a couple of years, the landlord decided he could rent out the space for more, and the museum was back out on the street, Walker says. In 1976, he moved the collection to Rye Brook, N.Y., where he bought a ramshackle 17-room home for $60,000.
Pigeons had taken residence in the house. Plastic ceiling moldings littered the floor, and windows were shattered. Walker hired his son Brian and friends to repair the place. Later that year, the museum was up and running. It attracted as many as 75,000 visitors a year in its heyday.
Keeping the museum running became a Walker family affair. Mort Walker’s wife, Cathy, managed the museum for free for decades. Brian Walker curated exhibits and organized events. Another son, Greg, would stay up till 2 a.m. typesetting captions for exhibits on the walls.
One afternoon in 1992, Cathy Walker heard a strange noise. Decorative ridges atop the buildings tower had fallen off. It was time to look for another home.
In 1996, Walker moved the collection to Boca Raton, Fla. He drew up plans for a majestic new space. Giant cartoon characters were painted on the walls of a temporary trailer placed on the land where the museum would eventually stand. When construction wrapped up, Cathy Walker was first to set foot in the new museum. When she walked in, she cried.
But two corporate sponsors filed for bankruptcy. The museum lost $5 million in expected donations and was unable to afford basic maintenance costs, Mort Walker says. The bank foreclosed, he says, and the museum closed in 2002.
The collection was packed up and moved to the Stamford storage facility.
Walker says he has lent out cartoons for specific exhibitions, but no museums would take on exhibiting the whole collection.
Donations paid for storage and preservation of the cartoon art, which is kept in a dark, humidity-controlled space. Certain pieces are handled with white gloves. Comics are rotated for exhibition to prevent from too much light exposure.
To pay off some museum debt, Walker auctioned off some cartoons: Most notably, a Mickey Mouse drawing fetched $700,000 at a New York auction in 2001. He has avoided selling any other major pieces of the museum collection, but does auction some of his “Beetle Bailey” strips for charities.
In 2006, the museum nearly had a deal to relocate in the Empire State Building in New York City. Press releases were issued and stationery was printed. But the plan fell apart.
In 2007, Ohio State University Prof. Lucy Caswell, a former member of the cartoon museums board of directors, began to talk with the Walkers about merging their collection with the universitys own cartoon collection. The university promised the art would be available for all to see, and the Walkers finally decided that was the way to go. The art arrived in Ohio last month.
Ohio State will revamp a space thats currently being used as a library and will catalog all of the cartoons. It is accepting the collection as a donation, and Walker reserves the right to borrow pieces back for special exhibitions.
