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.