Cartoonist Al Scaduto has died at the age of 79.
For the last 18 years, Scaduto toiled away on the syndicated comic strip They'll Do It Every Time, a strip that had been around long before Scaduto's involvement, one usually overlooked by most readers. TDIET is a "Didja ever notice" observational strip, pointing out various foibles of everyday life.
Unexceptional in concept, but Scaduto brought an old school hipster's sensibility to it, all jazzy lingo and characters with names like Barfo and Wombo and Gaspayne. The strip seemed like something from another era, when teenagers wore dungarees and listened to bebop, but that was part of its charm.
Scaduto wasn't a great cartoonist, but he was a solid craftsman working in a medium in which his humble virtues sadly no longer seem to be required. With his passing, the funny pages become decidedly less funny.
