Have you ever noticed that the scenery in “Hi and Lois,” the popular comic strip, looks familiar? That could be because Brian Walker lives and works in Silvermine. Click on the cartoon for an example!

Brian works full-time contributing gags to “Beetle Bailey” and, with his brother Greg Walker, writes “Hi and Lois.” Both strips were originally created by their father, Mort Walker, now a Stamford resident.

With his office above the Silvermine Market, Brian Walker is a fixture of Silvermine. In fact, Brian is even more connected with Silvermine and its illustrious connection with cartoonists and illustrators—he lives in a house formerly owned by the Gruelle family. (Johnny Gruelle was the creator of Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy.)

So, a full-time cartoonist, the son of a cartoonist, you would think that Brian would have had his fill of cartoonists. But no, that’s only the tip of the iceberg! Brian was the curator of the Museum of Cartoon Art for eighteen years. The Museum, which had been established by Mort Walker, moved to Florida in 1992 and Brian had to come up with something else to occupy his time. The answer: comics, of course! He began teaching a course on comics at Fairfield University and later taught a course in cartoon history at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. In the mid-1990s Brian helped curate an art exhibition at the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport. That led to curating comics exhibitions worldwide and that led to books about—you guessed it—comics. Harry N. Abrams Inc. published Brian’s book The Comics Since 1945 in 2002 and they just published his companion volume, The Comics Before 1945. Both are beautiful, large-scale, comprehensive, full-color, coffee-table books. ECW Press will soon be publishing Hi and Lois: Sunday Best, a fiftieth anniversary retrospective of the everyday life that Hi, Lois, Chip, Dot, Trixie, and Dawg are living in a cartoon world that looks strangely like Silvermine.