Today’s retro Arlo & Janis is a Sunday from March, 2002. I was attempting to stretch myself as a cartoonist that winter and spring, as I hope is evident above. There’s a lot of Cliff Sterrett influence here. The humor in Sterrett’s long-running comic strip Polly and Her Pals seems dated and forced today, but I don’t think the writing was ever Sterrett’s forte. He certainly is one of the best comic artists ever to ply the trade. Although ambitious interiors and innovative camera work never really made it into A&J, I think my base proficiency as a cartoonist was much improved during this period of experimentation and effort.
A Man’s Home Alone
By Jimmy Johnson
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34 responses to “A Man’s Home Alone”
This is one to clip out and put on the refrigerator until it turns yellow with age (except my wife ate sole meuniere at a wonderful little restaurant on the Oise River many years ago, got food poisoning, and spent three days in our Paris hotel ‘calling huey on the big white phone’). But the sentiment is perfect!
I still can’t leave a comment from my phone…. The “art” of A&J is in the language. Sometimes the “language” is in the art. Whatever it take to tell the story. Jimmy does a great job of combining both.
Love the hallway phone on a small table – brings back memories.
You have it all, Jimmy! You da man.
Loved the COVID shot dreams.
.
Mine is Mexican food in my little family owned restaurant and a roam through Goodwill on Senior Day. So, I love both and haven’t gone in a year.
We are near our two weeks immunity date. Plus mask and gloves.
Your art constantly improves. Who is panel one influenced by.? That stepping out looks familiar.
You are Symply being “zapped” by a Crumb….fargone right I had missed that.
Live music, food, travel, my 8 grandkids, a haircut……well no on the haircut thingy
I desperately need a hair style! Our stylist quit hair and entered health care with COVID-19.
The wheel chair is still limiting as is locale. I want to go eat oysters and. Seafood in Mississippi but their records aren’t good on infections nor is Louisiana.
However, everyone from Gourmet Magazine to the N.Y. Times loves White River in Tulsa. We will settle for that. At my next cancer visit. Oysters!!
There’s this place, too. https://www.hebertsmeats.com/menus/lunch.asp
What is “debris” as listed in a few sandwiches?
I haven’t eaten there, but my guess is the bits and pieces left in the pan after cooking. Probably Jackie or Ghost would know for sure.
When very tender roast beef is sliced thin, as for a roast beef po’ boy sandwich (which by my lights is the king of the po’ boy sandwich world), little bits and pieces fall off the slices and are incorporated into the “debris gravy” that goes on the sandwich. To me, the key ingredients of the roast beef po’ boy are the bread and the gravy, in that order. (It’s difficult, but not impossible, to get good po’ boy bread outside of Louisiana.) And the measure of how good your po’ boy was is how many napkins it took to wipe your mouth and face as you’re eating it.
(For the Cajun-impaired, Hebert = A-Bear, not HE-bert.)
I liked learning about an early artist who invented or established so much of what in my life has just always been there. From the Wikipedia article about Cliff Sterrett I’ve read attributed to him by no less than Al Capp, the exposure he brought to masses of then cutting edge modernism and cubism. Joe and Jane America Might not have leisure or money to attend a gallery to see new art, but they did read the funny pages. And there they could see Sterrett’s take on new ideas, even if they’d never viewed the works of artists we now take for granted.
A hundred years can make a big difference in the norms and customs of polite society. Language changes too. One of Sterrett’s early efforts was titled “Ventriloqual Vag”. After first being impressed by such a talent, I’ve decided that according to the norms of the time, it is much more likely the subject of the comic was a bum or hobo, a Vagrant as it were, who may have gained a reputation for distracting police with a voice that seemed to be behind them, allowing for yet another subtle escape from the bumbling long arm of the law. Wikipedia does not help, they only mention the title in listing early works.
If you haven’t seen this site, you might like it. http://strippersguide.blogspot.com/
The linguistic difference between a soft or hard ‘g’ is what stumbled my reading, I think. Whither a vaj rant or a vag-rant would somewhat change your results.
Some years ago, my brother-in-law owned a restaurant in Houma LA that did strictly po’ boy sandwiches, strictly as carryout. To say it was popular would be an understatement. The sandwich assembly area was a large island, staffed by eight sandwich makers supported by two people that did nothing but keep the sandwich makings replenished. The local bakery that furnished the po’ boy bread literally had to put on a second shift to meet the restaurant’s requirement for bread.
My mama and daddy learned about po’ boy sandwiches while they were in New Orleans for a couple of years while Daddy attended the Baptist seminary. They brought them back to rural north Arkansas and south Missouri where they were both teachers. I was allowed a modified version when I was little… my mama would pull out the center bread from a piece of French bread on one end, then stuff it with beef and sliced tomatoes, then pour in the gravy, and finally top it off with pieces of bread packed in on top of the filling to help soak up some gravy. I think I usually had to eat it outside at the picnic table– then they could spray me off with the hose. 🙂 I’ve never actually been in New Orleans and had a New Orleans po’ boy, though we still make them often. My kids love, them.
Tonight I fulfilled a bucket list item and played tympani on two of our 4 concert pieces. 50 years ago, back in high school, our band room was on the 3rd floor. I was often drafted to help the percussionists cart the big drums and chimes down to the auditorium or even football field. It was fun to finally play them.
Mark, it has been years since I ate at Heberts in Tulsa. I remember it was a franchise of Heberts in Lafayette, Louisiana.
I did know Mr. Hebert the original Cajun butcher but he must be cooking in Heaven for the angels.
In New Orleans it was possible to order a dry po boy. But typically the grsvy ran down your arms beyond your elbows.
Jimmy:
Have you ever examined Richard Outcault’s work?
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