What began as an elaborate joke is now a classic
Mort Walker has not only been a print cartoonist for over half a century; his main strip, "Beetle Bailey," has been around for over half a century itself. This book started out as an extremely tongue-in-cheek presentation, and a parody of technical lectures and technical writing, but it quickly took on a life of its own, with the joking jargon Walker invented mostly out of thin air being quickly adopted as the accepted terms for things that never actually had names before.
This book is equal parts "how to," "how it works," and plain silliness. There is a whole section of step-by-step illustrations of how to draw various things, and while a very few of them would be at home in a typical art instruction book, most of them are patently (and very intentionally) absurd (e.g., "how to draw a beer" in 4 steps: 1. draw a beer mug; 2. add a hand holding it; 3. draw a keg with an open spigot over the mug; 4. a finished drawing of an overflowing mug of beer).
