Seven days without laughter makes one weak.
Laughter is the brush that sweeps away the cobwebs of your heart.
Belly buttons were a big battle of mine. Down at the syndicate, they would clip them out with a razor blade. I began putting so many of them in, in the margins and everywhere, that they had a little box down there called 'Beetle Bailey''s Belly-Button Box. The editors finally gave up after I did one strip showing a delivery of navel oranges.
Beetle Bailey is actually me, in uniform. I've got about 20 characters, and they're all after friends of mine.
I say, if you believe what you read in the comic strips, then you believe that mice run around with little gold buttons on their red pants and drive cars.
I like a happy ending. That's what I do all the time. I like to make people feel happy.
You can go through comic strips alone and study the common man. You can trace our history.
You learn just by trying and experimenting. By the time I was 14, I had my own comic strip in the Kansas City paper.
When I first started, you couldn't mention divorce or death. You couldn't show smelly socks. You couldn't show a snake. They took a skunk out of my strip one time.
Everything I know, I write about. My only research is what I did.
I go to the grocery store with my wife. She goes off to buy something. Where is she, anyways? So I ask the manager, 'What aisle do they keep the wives in?'
When I introduced a black soldier, Lt. Flap, in 1971, the Stars and Stripes banned the strip. They were having racial problems and thought it would increase the tensions.
I took Beetle home thinking that after the Korean War was over, I would have to take him out of the Army. I thought, well, what am I going to do with him?
I've always said that what cartoonists do is create friends for readers.
Most people are sort of against authority. Here's Beetle always challenging authority. I think people relate to it.
When I write 'Beetle Bailey,' I can always do jokes about him being lazy, and everyone gets it.
Humor strips dominated what were called the funny papers early in the century, but by the 1920s and '30s, adventure strips had taken over. With 'Beetle Bailey,' I revived the funny part of the funny papers, and I'd be proud to be remembered for that.
I was kicked out of The Stars And Stripes twice, and finally got back in.
I took my basic training on a golf course in Florida. Then I was on the boxing team. We did some demonstrations, and they put me in a theater one night and wanted me to box. So OK, I came out boxing with a friend - thinking we would just spar around - but the guy walked out, hit me, and knocked me out with one stroke.
Beetle is the embodiment of everybody's resistance to authority, all the rules and regulations which you've got to follow. He deals with it in his own way. And in a way, it's sort of what I did when I was in the Army. I just oftentimes did what I wanted to do.
