Jeff MacNelly died on June 8th. And he’s **still ** the cartoonist on Dave Barry’s columns, at least through this weeks Mr. Language Person. And it’s not like he’s reusing old cartoons, the “he bleeps with the fishes” joke is new to Barry and to ingrained into the comic.
My question is, does Dave Barry do his columns 10+ weeks in advance or had death not hurt Jeff MacNelly’s output?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ around in this thread here.
I don’t have a copy handy, but if you look closely at the signature on both the Dave Berry cartoons and SHOE, they now say something like “Jeff MacNelly Syndicate” or “Incorporated” or some such phrase, indicating that the cartoons are drawn by a staff, not by the late great MacNelly hisself.
Anyone else notice that many of the early “MacNelly Productions” Shoe strips looked like they were drawn by a demented yak with vision problems?
The ghost has settled down a bit since (or the syndicate gave it to someone else), but Lord! that was a weird transition: from pure MacNelly to “Drawn by Billy, Age 6.”
A big batch of recent strips are online at http://macnelly.com/shoefolder/shoe_archive.asp; check out 8/11 for a particularly odd-looking one. The last daily signed “MacNelly” (without the “Productions” was 7/15, so I think that was his last finished strip. (Some of the dailies as late as 8/5 look like MacNelly, so maybe he also had a bunch pencilled but not inked.) On the other hand, he clearly worked farther ahead on Sundays, since the first “Productions” strip is not yet posted. (8/20 is clearly real MacNelly, and 8/27 isn’t there yet).
A fine cartoonist; he’s already missed. (I’d rather that Shoe was put out to pasture than milked like this, but aparrently no once-good strip can ever be allowed to die.)