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

Est. 1985

Extra, Extra!

Repeating Myself

By Jimmy Johnson

Buy the new book, "Beaucoup Arlo & Janis!"Today's "Arlo & Janis!"
I’ve always thought it was interesting that the dictates of good composition favor the short man/tall man dynamic in comic strips. The idiom “Mutt and Jeff” to describe a duo where one member towers over another comes directly from the comics, of course, from the comic strip of the same name by Bud Fisher.

I took this business to the extreme in the early days of A&J, often depicting Gene as above. Of course, if I’d been a better artist (or had the newspaper space afforded Fisher and his peers) I somehow could have avoided drawing Gene cut off about chin high. This worked, though. It seemed subliminally to reinforce the half-membership children have in the adult world around them.

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