Jimmy Johnson, who writes and draws ‘Arlo N Janis’ was in town to sign his new book today. Some of the local cartoonists came to visit him at the bookshop, and here we are crowding around him trying to get some of the magic to rub off on us. No idea if it worked, as security ejected us moments later. We was holdin’ up the line, they say. Pah. Hundred and fifty people or so. They weren’t much of a line, so much as a MOB. Crabby… never mind. Jimmy sure is a nice guy.
P.S. As there are a fair few Arlo N Janis readers now wandering over here from Jimmy Johnson’s blog, I would like to point out that the comments about the ‘Mob’ above are utterly sarcastic. Most of Mr. J’s readers are intuitive and learned, and no doubt caught the sarcasm. I’m not fooling myself that the InterWebs are the best place for expressing sarcasm for those who aren’t lookin’ for it, though. For all of you guys, I’m pointing out that the comment about Mr. J was serious. He wrote me a intro to a comic strip collection I did in the 80’s. Don’t go puncturing my tires in the dark of night, ‘K? And, while I’m confessing, we didn’t really get thrown out. And we only held up the line a little bit. And folks were all very nice about it.
So anyhow, that’s Andrew Chandler, me, Jimmy Johnson in the front, then Kevin Williams and Jim Palmer in the back.
Sometimes I think Jimmy’s peaking in our windows. A&J comes very close to home except I’m the technogeek and my wife is the one who only used the cell phone to talk on.
Who are the others? I ONLY know you Greg … does that make me a bad man?
Bad Computer Man! Bad!
Let’s see… The main attraction here is Jimmy Johnson, who’s been doing Arlo N Janis for nearly twenty seven or so years now. That’s a great strip. Andrew Chandler does children’s books and some Christian comics, I believe. Even worked on some of the first David book, but I don’t know how wide a release that got. It may or may not be in Canadian stores. Kevin and Jim are more local heroes. Kevin does some wild puppeteering here and there with Muley the Mule. Jim draws a feature, off and on for years and years now, called “Li’l E”. Imagine Pogo done in the modern age with the world’s youngest Elvis impersonator as the central figure.
Now that you mention it, I should probably ask them if I can post some of their work here on a weekend and you can see what they do.
Yeah … I don’t know any of the strips you mentioned … never run up here in Canukistan … I have a list of 40+ comics I read on a daily basis (and I used to read others, like Cathy, Denis the Menace, etc that I removed as they got ‘boring’.) but for the most part the only ‘odd ball, one offs’ that I read are Jeph Jaques’ “Questionable Content”, “Hubris” and sometimes (rarely!) Cyanide and Happiness.