The Checker Book Publishing Group has announced an agreement with King Features that will allow it to publish Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey 1950-1952, a 280-page hardcover containing all the daily and Sunday strips (the latter reprinted in full color) from the first two years of the beloved comic strip. Checker plans to release the oversize hardcover volume, which will cost $24.95, in June 2008.
Although the Beetle Bailey comic strip debuted on September 4th, 1950 (it was the last comic personally approved by William Randolph Hearst), it was not until several months later on March 13th, 1951 that Beetle Bailey left the friendly environs of his campus fraternity house and joined the Army where he took his "prematurely slacker" ways to his permanent posting at Camp Swampy. The lazy private, who always has his helmet (or hat) over his eyes, was joined by a host of delicious characters including the rotund Sgt. Orville P. Snorkel, his anthropomorphic dog Otto, the bumbling General Halftrack, buck-toothed Pvt. Zero, and the irrepressible Lt. Sonny Fuzz, who didn't make his first appearance until 1956.
Checker has published a number of classic comic strip collections (ranging from Winsor McCay Editorial Cartoons to Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon, and Milt Caniff's Steve Canyon), and the addition of the vintage Mort Walker Beetle Bailey strips to those collections and others published by Fantagraphics, IDW, and Drawn & Quarterly simply reinforces the idea that we are living in a new golden age of comic strip reprints (see "Strip Series Find Sales Success").
