Gaydar

One of my favorite jokes, and one I've reused every time I've resold and redrawn the strip - which appeared in about ten papers at one point or another. I took the joke and made it literal - that gaydar is a submarine crew under constant red alert. Now why this joke doesn't quite work: in later strips the gaydar crew appears as Tad's inner mind, and they are perpetually wrong. Here it just serves to point out that everyone but Tad knows he's gay but him.

The way I used to draw these - in mechanical pencil, then ink them in with an art pen. Later I would start to use photoshop to do the dialogue, and to cut and paste characters from one panel to the next. Now I don't even ink them anymore - after doing a pencil sketch photoshop can make it look like an ink drawing. I will say this: technology never made the jokes any better or worse. Think about that if you want to cartoon.