Time & Perspective Quote by Mort Walker

There is something quietly brutal in the image: tables of original cartoons treated like mismatched office furniture, offered up in a lobby giveaway because storing them costs more than valuing them. Mort Walker tells it without outrage or nostalgia, and that restraint is the point. The anecdote lands like a shrug from the culture industry itself: even the artifacts that once powered mass attention can become literal clutter once their commercial cycle ends.

Walker is speaking as a working cartoonist who understood syndication as both miracle and machine. The Tribune Syndicate line is doing double duty. On paper, syndicates built American comics into a national habit, piping daily strips into thousands of newspapers. In practice, they were rights managers and distribution hubs, more invested in the next printable product than in the physical history of what had already sold. Calling the comics "a burden" isn’t an aesthetic judgment; it’s an accounting term wearing civilian clothes.

The subtext is a warning about how cultural memory gets outsourced. If preservation is left to corporations, it will be governed by rent, storage fees, and quarterly priorities, not legacy. Walker also slips in a democratic twist: "take one if you want one" turns forgotten originals into accidental folk art, rescued by whoever happened to walk through the lobby. It’s a tale about ephemera that refuses to stay ephemeral, and about artists learning that fame in print does not automatically translate to institutional respect.