Chron features Jeff Millar, Bill Hinds
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The Houston Chronicle has a nice write up about Tank McNamara co-creators Jeff Millar and Bill Hinds. Both cartoonists live in the Houston area, but as the article notes, they rarely see each other.
Millar e-mails the dialogue, with whatever description he thinks is needed. For the first panel he’ll write: “1.” For the second panel, “2.”
“I suppose I could describe what (everything) looks like,” he says, “but I don’t. This encourages Bill to fill in the details with his own imagination, and that has some very interesting effects.
“He will sometimes change the gender or ethnicity of a character for some reason I didn’t think of. Or he may come up with something so wonderful, like our mad-scientist character. I simply typed out `a mad scientist type.’ He drew this character that was so funny that I immediately started using him again.”
Because it’s essential that a satirical sports strip stays topical, the writing and drawing are often done at the last minute. When there were recent protests of the Olympic torch journey, Tank McNamara was parodying it while the torch was still hot in the headlines.
Millar doesn’t see the illustrations until it’s too late to change them.
Correction: The Chron story linked above is about Bill, not Jeff.
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