CSotD: Jeff Millar, RIP
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Jeff Millar, the writing half of the "Tank McNamara" team, died Friday of cancer. I never met Jeff, though his partner on the strip, Bill Hinds, has been an on-line friend for several years. More to the point, Tank McNamara has been on my comics radar since the strip debuted in the mid-Seventies.
Cartoons on the sports page were nothing new then, but, just as sportswriting turned from iconography to actual reporting about 40 years ago, Tank McNamara boosted sports cartooning from adulation to satire.
I suspect part of the commercial success of the strip was that it began with Tank as a broadcasting buffoon, a sort of Ted Baxter ex-jock with a penchant for spoonerisms and general incompetence:
While I don't think this was critical for the audience, it was very likely critical for earning Tank a place in the hearts of the sportswriters, who tend to take themselves very seriously but are happy to pile on when it comes to (A) ex-jocks as journalists and (B) the hair-spray contingent, and thus welcomed this strip to the pages of their newspapers.
Meanwhile, for readers, he was an adorable manchild. In this early story arc, he had been computer-matched with a sports fan, to the bemusement of his female buddy and confidant:
But as the strip found its feet, it moved away from the initial themes of Tank's speech issues and his instinctive diving on every errant object as if it were a fumble, and began to offer real — and real funny — sports commentary.
However, it still returns to him from time to time, not as the respected commentator on sports he has become, but as the loveable lunk. It's a touch that not only keeps the strip from falling into ruts, but maintains the personal element that is a strength.
Bill Hinds reportedly took over the writing duties as Jeff's health failed, and, though I don't know quite when that happened or how far ahead they were working, I suspect (based on Bill's solo work in "Cleats"), that this current arc is a portent of how the strip will go forward.
Which is likely a tribute to Jeff Millar's talent as a mentor as well as a partner:
Ouch.
And I can't think of this partnership without mentioning their other strip, which stands at the top of my most-missed strips, "Second Chances," a stylish piece about a couple in their second marriages that ran for four years starting in 1996.
Like the Thin Man movies, it was always witty, and often, but not always, sentimental:
There are more definitive articles about Millar on Mike Cavna's Washington Post blog and at the Houston Chronicle, and Alan Gardner also provided a link to the obituary, but, while I was digging through my much-loved copy of the 1978 collection, "The Tank McNamara Chronicles," I realized that Jeff had written an intro to the volume and decided to let him explain it all.
After all, he was a very talented writer:
The sweetest music to my ears is when somebody tells me that he knows for sure the real person upon whom Tank McNamara is based.
"It's [name deleted], right? He's the guy who does the sports in my hometown. He's the whole bit: Ex-jock, big and he screws everything up the same way Tank does. Gotta be that guy, right?"
Tank is all these guys. There's one – or more – in every major television market: The guy who got his job as a sportscaster not because he has any talent at reading scores but because he's got a semimarketable name which the station management thinks might have some novelty value. When I came up with the idea that became Tank McNamara, there was no one jockcaster who functioned as a role model. But I can tell you the specific incident which started me off. I was watching a Tank-type struggling through the sports on a local newscast (not necessarily in Houston, where I live). He fumblemouthed through the baseball scores with marginal intelligibility; but when the poor guy came to the results of an important European car race, you could tell he was about ready to buy the farm. "Jacky Ickx" nearly sent him into a labial arrhythmia; but the name of the race, which occurred last in the sentence, as the heart punch.
Guess how he pronounced "Grand Prix." Yep.
That was in 1973. I was working – still do – for the Houston Chronicle as the paper's film critic and twice-a-week humor columnist (well, at least I tell my editor the column is funny). In doing the humor column, I came to believe that I had acquired an unusual perspective on sports. For just about the same reasons that everyone else gives it a shot – ego and money – I thought about seeking a national audience for it. I briefly considered a wry sports column; but the market is overburdened with syndicated columns and my chances of persuading a syndicate to take me on seemed slim. And then I thought about a comic strip. I had long read comic strips – from habit and enjoyment as a child, with admiration and interest as an adult. Ah-ha, I thought. There's nothing quite like the strip which I propose on the market. A niche presents itself. Seize the time.
There was only one thing that kept me from becoming quickly rich and famous as a cartoonist: I cannot draw. Not even stick figures. Were I lost in the desert and dying of thirst, I could not draw a recognizable glass of water to communicate to a passing Arab that I thirst.
A couple of inquiries put me onto Bill Hinds. He was then 23 years old, freshly graduated from Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches, Texas, and was in the process of genteelly starving to death as a freelance cartoonist .
I called up Bill, went out to see him, gave him some strip ideas and asked him to pencil them. It was immediately clear that he was very, very good. We worked up six weeks of daily strips and three of the big Sunday drawings and showed them, on the advice of Jack Loftis, my editor at the Chronicle who buys the paper's strips, first to Universal Press Syndicate (yaaay!) because they would most likely be receptive to iconoclasm, satire and other impolite attitudes.
Bingo.
They liked it, basically. Oh, they didn't like the name we had for the strip, "Jocks" (there was some thought that, referring as it does to the item of lingerie, there would be some sales resistance in small newspapers). Or the principal character. Or the second name we came up with for the strip (Sweatsox). Or the new principal character. But other than that …
Tank was there all the time, as a supporting player. When we suggested that we make him the title character, bingo. Break out the contracts.
We started syndication August 5,1974, learning as we earned.
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