All last week in the Broom-Hilda comic strip, the witch and her vulture pal were discussing what to do with a dead cartoonist. A couple of folks wrote to me to ask if Russell Myers — who's been drawing that strip since Rembrandt worked in Crayola™ — was okay. Among his peers, Russell is famously far-ahead. Others spend their lives burning the Midnight Light Bulb to get this week's strips off to the engraver. Myers has around a year's worth of his fine feature Broom-Hilda, all drawn and ready-to-go.
So it's entirely possible that when he passes, which I hope won't be in the next few decades, his strip will continue to appear for some time. That's what happened when the late/great Virgil Partch was killed in a car accident in 1984. Ordinarily, when a cartoonist kicks the ink bottle, the syndicate has to decide A.S.A.P. whether or not the strip will continue and if so, who will do it. With Partch's strip, Big George, he was so far ahead that when people inquired about its fate, they were told, "We'll decide next year…or maybe the year after." The folks in charge finally chose to drop the feature when the Partch backlog was exhausted.
I decided to use the recent continuity in Broom-Hilda as an excuse to phone up Russell, who I've known for years, and make sure he was hale and healthy. He sure seems to be. Matter of fact, the joke here is that he's probably the syndicated cartoonist least likely to be found face-down-dead at his drawing board from "the ceaseless pressure of unrelenting deadlines." When he goes, it'll probably be from the strain of carrying around all those yet-to-be-published strips.
Here's a link to last week's Broom-Hilda storyline, which starts with the two panels above. Click the appropriate arrows to advance from day to day.