I was looking at this old cartoon from 1995, and I couldn’t help noticing the conversation is very animated, literally. I’m sure this was intentional, because, after all, I was drawing a newspaper comic strip featuring two people talking to one another. A little body English could only help. I employed this embellishment a lot, and it may have led readers to think of the couple as excitable and argumentative. A lot of readers back then simply thought Arlo and Janis didn’t get along. There is no doubt Janis harbored issues related to self-image and trust, but I think the hand-waving and vociferousness were defensible. As they’ve aged, such histrionics just don’t seem appropriate, and I think the strip suffers for it. For the challenge remains, how to make a conversation between two people interesting visually.
