A pithy comic strip about life, love, lust and puthy cats.

Est. 1985

Extra, Extra!

Scenes from the Morgue

By Jimmy Johnson


Buy the new book, "Beaucoup Arlo & Janis!"Today's "Arlo & Janis!"
Here’s something you’ve never seen before. Few have. I produced these vignettes in 1997, why I can no longer remember. I am pretty sure that whatever the reason, they were never used. One of my favorite files (using that word very loosely!) contains such art; there isn’t as much as you might imagine. I’ve never been the kind of compulsive sketcher that most cartoonists seem to be. I’ve always taken that as a sign I missed my calling, as a sign I am not a born cartoonist. Please! I’m not saying I’m not good at it. I think I’ve done rather well. However, it has never come easy, and it can seem suspiciously like work at times, albeit not very strenuous work. Now, where was I going with all this? Well, if I remember, I’ll get back to it tomorrow.

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105 responses to “Scenes from the Morgue”

  1. Lilyblack Avatar

    The “angry eyebrow” thing went right over my head. To me, angry people lower their eyebrows so that they are closer together and to the eyes: http://i1306.photobucket.com/albums/s565/Lilyblack1/Angry2_zps556926b0.jpg

    Janis’ eyebrow in the right picture is so configured, but then she is pretending to be mad in play.

  2. Ghost Rider 6 Avatar
    Ghost Rider 6

    I’m more of a waffle guy than a pancake person. I formally purchased a brand-name Belgium waffle mix, but it also had to be refrigerated after opening. So I just substituted regular SR flour, with some sugar and vanilla extract, and I like the resulting waffles even better.

  3. sandcastler™ Avatar
    sandcastler™

    Loon is a waffle girl, chocolate or red velvet please. Yours truly prefers corn beef hash and eggs. We had lunch today at a great fish house. Loon had the catfish, while I did an oyster poboy and gumbo.

  4. Jackie Monies Avatar
    Jackie Monies

    Sandcastler, are you breaking national security if you reveal the name of the fish house and location?

  5. Jackie Monies Avatar
    Jackie Monies

    Just printed out menu from restaurant in Port Aransas, TX where next boat festival is. Man oh man, what an awesome menu! And they have only nine tables for entire dining room! Our bunch would fill it for sure!

  6. Jackie Monies Avatar
    Jackie Monies

    Forgot to say, this might be the bistro that Mary Lou and Gene end up opening, because I read the history of this one and it sure sounds like the plot from A and J! Google “Shells” in Port Aransas, TX and read menu.

  7. Lilyblack Avatar

    My nomination for the snobbiest thing I have ever seen on Facebook: WWD: “By now guests know what to expect at the annual Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic – majestic thoroughbreds, top-notch party production, vintage-inspired glamour, and, given the sponsor, endless reserves of Champagne.” 😛

    Oh, an obligatory “Fish, ew!” I will eat shrimp, crayfish, lobster, crab, and even oysters, but anything from class Osteicthies is inedible to me 😛

  8. Lilyblack Avatar

    *Osteicthyes. Stupid spell check

  9. sandcastler™ Avatar
    sandcastler™

    ?????, Rockfish Seafood Grill, ???????.

  10. Jackie Monies Avatar
    Jackie Monies

    Rockfish is good.

  11. Ghost Rider 6 Avatar
    Ghost Rider 6

    Toro nigiri sushi…ummmm.

    Grilled fresh tuna steak…ummmm.

    Fried Whole Catfish…ummmm.

  12. Mark in TTown Avatar
    Mark in TTown

    food for thought: http://www.originalpancakehouse.com/phm_specialties2.html

    both the first two are delicious. the apple pancake is like a pineapple upside-down cake with the apple cooked in thee bottom of the pan and then flipped onto the plate. the dutch baby is great too. there is a recipe for the dutch baby in the new joy of cooking and they are easy to make.

  13. Trapper Jean Avatar
    Trapper Jean

    Ghost, add a generous helping of cheese grits to that fried whole catfish and you have a meal fit for a king, at least as I see it!

  14. Lilyblack Avatar

    Ghost, I can see that if I ever visited you – per impossible – I would never gain any weight. People are always trying to sneak fish in on me, Last time it was fried catfish and they told me it was chicken. I said, “Ew, where do you get your chicken, this tastes like spiderweb!” 😛 I did have grillades and grits one time in New Orleans. It was okay, but I thought that rice would have been better

  15. Granny Carol Avatar
    Granny Carol

    Food discussions make me hungry! I use Blue Ribbon corn meal or Abbitt’s corn meal, depending upon which grocery store I am near. Jackie, I am quite familiar with Hodgson’s Mill products as they offer quite a few gluten free products. How neat that you are related to them! We have celiac disease in our family and I cook everything gluten fee. It has been a challenge but I am pretty satisfied with the flour blend I use now. Unfortunately, biscuits are the one item that can not be replicated in a satisfactory manner. I do miss making homemade buttermilk biscuits.

  16. Granny Carol Avatar
    Granny Carol

    Gluten free, not fee! And I even proof read it! 🙂

  17. Ghost Rider 6 Avatar
    Ghost Rider 6

    I’ve been working lately on “consciously uncoupling” from beef, although I don’t actually consume a lot of it now. And when I do, it’s usually more of a side note, as in stir-fry dish (a little beef and a lot of veggies). Consequently, I’ve been looking for ways to increase my use of chicken as a protein source.

    One of the few good things about having to carry my Mom for so many treatments recently was that I got to look at a lot of waiting room Family Circle-type magazines, which were chock-full of recipes. Several recipes for chicken casseroles and chicken soups got photographed by my smart phone and were later transcribed at home for my personal use. (I hope that doesn’t violate some copyright thingy. Notice I said that the phone photographed them, not that I did.) I think that I’ll be preparing “Chicken and White Bean Soup” tomorrow.

  18. Jackie Monies Avatar
    Jackie Monies

    If you haven’t tried chicken and white bean chili, you should. It uses canned green chiles usually, not jalapenos, so it is fairly mild and high in fiber as well. Granny Carol, I often go gluten free, as I seem to have some sort of intermittent celiac problems too. Anyway, the gluten free products from Hodgson’s Mill are among the most reasonable and better ones I think.

    Isn’t it funny what you can learn from genealogy? I often wondered about the Hodgson Mill as I grew up and I knew no one else except the author with that name. I now know my ancestor who began most Hodgson’s in America came over long before the American Revolution as an orphan (orphaned on ship by parents dying) and was raised by a Quaker family in Philadelphia. His descendants populated America with thousands of Hodgsons but the Carolinas were chock full of them!

    Ghost, I find the women’s magazines to have remarkably healthier recipes now than they once did. No more,” melt two sticks of butter and sauté a half lb. of bacon before pouring in a cup of heavy cream.” I made that up, of course. They’d have whipped in a cup of flour and a pint of sour cream to make the bacon sauce!

    I still like boneless chicken breasts sliced into sort of giant butterfly shape and then pound the heck out of them to make them thin. They sauté up fast, stay tender and they can be the basis for almost anything you can think up to pour over them, wrap in them, pile onto them, glaze them. And fast!

    Good night, I am still so tired and have to pack in morning.

    Love, Jackie

  19. emeritus minnesota biologist Avatar
    emeritus minnesota biologist

    That seems to definitely be an ‘angry’ eyebrow in the Frisbee drawing, not a highlighted part of Janis’s hair. Compare the edge of her hair in the ‘lift’ drawing. A thin touch of whiteout at the eyebrow’s outer tip would help. It is often useful in pen and ink drawings to have the outline of a structure stop a touch short of something it’s behind, to emphasize that it is behind the other. Used that in some skull profiles I published, to emphasize that the mandible passed behind the zygomatic arch. I don’t have an example handy in online form to show you.

  20. Mark in TTown Avatar
    Mark in TTown

    i would like to think that eyebrow is intent, not angry. she is focused on that frisbee. wonder what expression arlo would have when he finishes falling backwards with janis landing on top of him. look at his feet and you can see it coming.

  21. Lilyblack Avatar

    We eat beef at least four times a week and care nothing for gluten, as both The Boss of My Life and The Man In My Life pooh-pooh the whole thing. Also we don’t worry about butter, cream, etc, since we are pretty low-carb and nobody but The Man In My Life is overweight, and he doesn’t give a darn. Which is fine with me, I don’t mind eating chicken but I hate to cook it. Or, more accurately, I hate to take it out of its more-or-less noisome containers and transfer it to cooking pans. I could happily eat beef five times a week with pork the rest of the time, which by a strange coincidence I am making tomorrow, Italian Pork Loin.

  22. TruckerRon Avatar

    Jackie, some medicines can cause gastric distress that mimics irritable bowel syndrome. One of my meds for type II diabetes did that to me… I had to turn to the FODMAP diet to find foods that were “safe” for me to eat; cutting out gluten helped with that.

    http://www.ibsdiets.org/fodmap-diet/fodmap-food-list/

  23. Ghost Rider 6 Avatar
    Ghost Rider 6

    The Chicken and White Bean Soup recipe has cumin, chopped onion, minced garlic and diced green chilies along with some other stuff, so I’m guessing it’s kind of a re-purposed “white chili” recipe. Calls for dice boneless, skinless chicken thighs, and the kicker is it also calls for light Alfredo sauce. Kinda curious as to how it will turn out.

  24. Ghost Rider 6 Avatar
    Ghost Rider 6

    All hail, Sir Paul.