Al Scaduto is dead

I am just shocked by this. Al Scaduto, the longtime artist and writer for the one-panel comic They'll Do It Every Time, passed away on Saturday, December 8, 2007. He was seventy-nine.

Many people seem to think that The Comics Curmudgeon is a mean-spirited site where people get together to cast aspersions on comic strips they don't like all that much. In reality, it's a community of people who love comics, headed up by blogger Josh Fruhlinger. In the fourteen months that I've been going there I've become far more interested in the daily comics than I ever was before, and I find myself reading the funnies with a newfound intensity. (On several recent occasions I have raved to friends and family members about things like the meticulous linework in the current Blondie strips!)

They'll Do It Every Time is one comic that has gone from being a target of derision and ridicule to a target of submissions from the Curmudgeon community. Many Curmudgeon-submitted ideas have been turned into cartoons, and many more are in the pipeline - including mine, which is scheduled for publication on January 18 of next year. I had planned on celebrating the occasion by having a picture taken of myself wearing a black sweatervest (the standard apparel in the TDIET world) and holding the published cartoon - and then sending it to Mr. Scaduto. Too late, now.

I hope he knew. I hope he knew what we thought of him, and how much we loved him. I toyed once with a submission that would blow the whistle on our community's Al Scaduto fascination, but then I thought No, he might be offended - and then I thought Heck, he probably already knows about us. Now I guess we'll never know.

Goodbye, Mr. Scaduto, and thanks for everything. We all die too young.

The Comics Curmudgeon: Al Scaduto 1928-2007
Biography of Al Scaduto (with self-portrait!) from the National Cartoonists Society (Reuben.org)
Appreciation from friend and fellow cartoonist Mike Lynch
Wikipedia entry for Al Scaduto