Today's Tank McNamara

[RealityChuck]

(might only display for a few days).

[MFS62]

I miss that strip in my local paper.
It was one of my favorites.

Later

[RealityChuck]

MFS62 wrote: I miss that strip in my local paper. It was one of my favorites. Later

It's online at http://www.gocomics.com/tankmcnamara

[G-Fafif]

Tank I kept taped to the wall next to my bed for several years of my adolescence:

One black ballplayer to another black ballplayer: "That's COLD, baby!"
Uptight white veteran ballplayer: "You think it's cold now, Willie, you should wait 'til we get to Montreal."
Tank to the two two horrified-looking black ballplayers: "You'll have to forgive Joe. He doesn't learn the new slang until May."

I think the strip peaked right around then.

[Guest Edgy DC]

It's no Scroogie.

[Frayed Knot]

Yeah, the only 'Scroogie' cartoon I remember was just like that one. In it a white ballplayer arrives at ST and sees (out of the box) two presumably black players saying hello amid sound effects of: SMACK, SLAP, BANG, BUMP, etc., before saying; 'Ten years in the big leagues and I still don't understand the handshakes'.

[Guest Edgy DC]

White people. Amiright, folks?

[RealityChuck]

It continues....

[Guest Edgy DC]

I can't get over the idea that that looks like a tumbleweed that might have appeared in Peanuts, perhaps in one of the Spike-in-Needles stips.

I guess there's no chance that Schulz used an inker that's now working on MacNamara, is there?

[RealityChuck]

Schulz always insisted on doing all the work himself.

[RealityChuck]

[Guest LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr]

"Get A Laugh" has never seemed more imperative.

[RealityChuck]

[Guest Edgy DC]

Getting wordy.

[Benjamin Grimm]

Like Cathy!

[Willets Point]

Ack!

[Guest Edgy DC]

Benjamin Grimm wrote: Like Cathy!

See, that's the deal with Cathy to me. I thought Cathy Guisewite more or less did a good job keeping the strip running on her small bag of recurring themes, and providing in the punchlines new angles on old themes. But the wordy build-ups to the punchlines, with no incidental humor along the way, made you do more work than the punchline was worth. It's not that I'm too lazy to read. It's just that humor needs rhythm.

At least Tank gets two gags in here along the way. I actually thought the first was funnier.

[Benjamin Grimm]

Edgy DC wrote: But the wordy build-ups to the punchlines, with no incidental humor along the way, made you do more work than the punchline was worth. It's not that I'm too lazy to read. It's just that humor needs rhythm.

Absolutely.

[G-Fafif]

Filling in for Chuck with the "laugh" of the day.



I figured Mr. Delta Club's financial savvy was implied by his going to Citi Field's multiple ticket windows, as gorgeously illustrated in Monday's strip, thus saving on extraneous fees. But the Mets, those bastards, they got him, too.

Or as Tank put it in 1978, "That's COLD, baby!"

[G-Fafif]

Finishing the arc, with quite possibly the first comic strip pages appearances of Fred Wilpon.

[Guest Edgy DC]

They do the word baloons by hand but computer font the sign.

[Benjamin Grimm]

The word balloons are a font, too. (I think most cartoonists these days use a handwritten font for their lettering.) Take a look at the E's... they're all identical.

[Guest Edgy DC]

You're right!

It loked hand lettered to me initially, but close inspection showed me the S's were all the same.

It's different from most standard word ballon fonts these days and a little scratchy for computer work. Maybe it's computer generated but inked over? Or maybe an inked-over alphabet got saved as a font by the strip's makers for their use alone?

[Benjamin Grimm]

I think the cartoonist creates a font (or, more likely, has one created for him) out of his own hand lettering.

[Guest Edgy DC]

I imagine many do that. Others, I know, just go with comic sans.