I've been asking here if anyone could come up with a newspaper strip that's been drawn by one person, unassisted, longer than Russell Myers has been drawing Broom-Hilda. Someone finally wrote in to suggest Tank McNamara as a likely runner-up. While it hasn't been around as long as Russell's witch, Tank McNamara has had a pretty impressive run and is still running.
The Tank McNamara newspaper strip debuted on August 5, 1974 and I think it was daily and Sunday from the start. It was then written by Jeff Millar while Bill Hinds did the drawing. Hinds took over writing it when Millar passed away in 2012.
Broom-Hilda started Monday, April 20, 1970 so Myers' strip is 1,568 days ahead of Tank McNamara and always will be as long as the two strips' makers are still making 'em. But as of today, Tank McNamara has appeared for 17,807 consecutive days and as far as I know, they've all been drawn by Mr. Hinds. I may be wrong but I don't think he's employed any assistants or reprints.
17,807 strips means he's 90 strips shy of Charles Schulz's run on Peanuts. If my numbers are correct, that means that in about three months, Tank McNamara will be in second place among newspaper strips drawn by their original artist. But it's also worth noting that for a time, Hinds also originated and drew a strip called Cleats that ran from 2001 to 2010…so maybe he's drawn more strips total than Myers.
I haven't gotten into figuring out who might be the leader if we add up multiple strips. (Myers had another newspaper strip for a time and both men did a lot of work not in daily comic strip format.) Mort Walker was probably involved in the production of more individual strips than anyone but after the first few years of Beetle Bailey, they were all team efforts.
A few folks who wrote in asked about artists like Milton Caniff, Al Capp, Mell Lazarus, Johnny Hart, Chester Gould, Walt Kelly and Chic Young. Yes, they all had long runs signing their names to newspaper strips but all of them used assistants — sometimes sparingly, sometimes a lot. Al Smith ghosted Mutt & Jeff for centuries (it seemed) but he didn't start it just as Bud Sagendorf didn't start Popeye or the guys who drew the bulk of Gasoline Alley or The Katzenjammer Kids didn't start them.
And a couple of readers — who could easily have looked up this information — seemed certain that Doonesbury has been around longer than Broom-Hilda. Nope. Broom-Hilda, as mentioned, started 4/20/1970 and Doonesbury started 10/26/1970. It's a great, ground-breaking strip but Garry Trudeau has taken many a hiatus and had a lot of help and the daily strip is now reprints. Broom-Hilda has been in papers for a longer time without its artist taking vacations or having someone else do much of the drawing.
You can catch up on Tank McNamara on this page. If, like me, you didn't follow it often when the place to do that was in something called a newspaper — which ran it in something called a "Sports Section" which you had no interest in opening — you might be delightfully surprised. And you can sample Cleats over on this page.