Luann by Greg Evans and Karen Evans for January 15, 2015

Oh, Gunther, NOW you’ve done it!!! ;)

Not a drinker, not a hot pepper eater, and, without Luis’s help, not much of a walker! But he’s still wearing plaid, and has no beard, so this is probably not the end of the story….

Aha!!!! “Part two” of “Luis’evil plan”…After letting his pepper “slip it’s way” onto Gunther’s plate, Luis “allows Gunther to drink his beer”, and now we’ll get to the good part! ( (X^D)LOL!) – Seriously, though, how Ironic that as soon as Gunther leaves from Rosa to “head for stability”, that’s when Gunther runs into some "instability"…. – And no need for a tip… Gunther seems to have done plenty of that, already!

Evans must be a tea-totaler to think a single nasty Peruvian pilsner would make anyone bigger than a child drunk, as well as being unaware that beer is no good against a hot pepper.

“He’s no fun. He fell right over!”

Like I said yesterday, eating a chili pepper can take you to a mean trip to the toilet. (Los estómago e intestinos pores de Gunther.)

Well, can’t blame him for getting plastered after leaving Rosa. Most guys would do it on purpose though.

Noooooobody knows….how drrryyyyy he is….

Pink elephants…pink elephants on parade they’re here, and there everywhere pink elephants on parade…

Just wait till the beer and hot pepper come back up!

“Comfortably Dumb” (♫)“Lush Hour Traffic”“Cerveza In Your Cabeza”“Liquid Centrifuge”“Shaken And Stirred”“Paging Ralph”“Drunk Punch”“Hoppin’ On Hops”“Corona, Malt, Delete”“Cristal Unclear”or“This End Up”

Marilyn Manson is the “Lady Gaga” of… uh…

poor poor G, and him drunk? how was he able to save himself and Luis after the crash?

Yeah, true….

Ok, now that some of the suspense is over, I’m gonna crash. Later —

And a “hazmat suit”?

(Buick, Porcelain Cave:) Yup!- Ha ha, and there were a bunch of other names for it, too…

If this ends with nothing more than a hangover, after months of building a romance and adventure, I’m going to be very disappointed. Greg should show his creation some degree of dignity.

Well, I have to get up early tomorrow, so "Nite for now!-———————————————————-“Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.” (Groucho Marx, 1895-1977)

My God! Half of one beer???

Didn’t even need a few rounds with Jose Cuervo.

Aye, aye, aye!!! Come on ICE CREAM!!!

Evans could have gotten st least a whole other strip out of the “five minutes” between the second and third panel.I think we ought to have a competition to write our own scripts as to what happened in that “time”.

I like drunk Gunther. I think if he keeps this up, maybe he will finally be cool. also, i would like Luis to continue to be a recurring character

Gunther, first timer, plus drinking way too fast!!!!!!!! I can see how easily he got drunk

unless Luis messed up and put Gunther in wrong destination plane or he is actually a bad guy……… I can’t see how Gunther drunkenness has anything to do with how he grew a beard and he changed shirts…… but I can see how bad things would be for a drunk G handling himself and Luis after a car crash

Life is not like a box of chocolates, it’s like a jar of peppers. What you do today can burn your butt tomorrow.

It looks like Greg is channelling Bill Watterson in that first panel. ;) Anyhow, I’m glad Gunther is finally off on his own adventure, whatever that turns out to be. I just hope it involves a bit more than one hot pepper and a little beer!

The top of the 3rd panel says “5 minutes later”; meaning that Gunther spent 5 minutes guzzling down Peruvian Beer — sending him straight to the men’s room!

Where’s his mommy when he needs her at this juncture?

Now for the drunk Gunther to drink coffee for the very first time.

That’s why I’m against alcoholism entirely.

If you’re gonna suffer,do it right.

Okayyyyy – breakup with Rosa and his first (unrelated and unintentional) drunk; heckuva time in Peru…

Some times I need more than one cup of coffee in order to appreciate your contributions….this morning I am out of coffee.

Hope Luis didn’t take advantage of Gunther.

And the buildup of pressure from the carbon dioxide in the beer… got goggles?

Carbon Dioxide? I’d be more concerned with the “methane” from the “Southern Repository!!!” ;-PPP

I immediately thought of this commercial:Lite Beer commercial from 1982

I’ve sampled ahi before, tasty stuff!

Oh GREAT. “We Shall Continue Our Trip Gunther, But FIRST Let Me Down Several Adult Beverages While YOU Eat Food That I’ll FAIL to Warn You about. Then While The Peppers are Eating Your Stomach Lining Out and You’re Gasping for breath, I, Luis (Only Slightly Impaired), Will Continue Driving Pell Mell, Down the Steep Mountain Road in the Gathering Darkness at High Speed, To Get YOU to The Airport On Time!” - Luis

I LOVE the his face in the first panel!!!! LOL

For someone so smart, he’s really dumb. The structure and familiarity he needs is borderline autism. You take him out of his comfort zone and he’s likely to cause himself harm.

Reminds me of welcome week at college; got drunk, stoned and laid in the first week. This is gonna be great .

Synchronicity with Pearls Before Swine today…

RB2… I really am not seeing why you think this is so implausible. To me, the story arc seems reasonably realistic. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++1) Although it is not as common today to have a beer with a meal in the US as it used to be, it is still relatively common in many other nations. Luis having a beer with his meal is not anything abnormal.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++2) The hot pepper scenario is also relatively realistic… if you are inexperienced with hot peppers, and you are trying to prove your “bravery and risk-taking” abilities like Gunther, it would be quite possible you would chomp down on the whole pepper… then after a brief delay, get the undesirable consequences. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++3) Gunther drinking the beer to quell the hot pepper effect in his mouth also is realistic although not effective. Unless you KNEW about peppers, their heat, and their remedies, you could very easily assume ANY sort of beverage would be a help.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++4) Gunther becoming a bit “sloppy” from one beer… again, potentially realistic… Gunther is a young, very skinny, relatively short, non-drinking kid… the effects of the hot pepper roiling around in his stomach, plus the carbonation of the beer and the quickness of his consumption of that beer all could lead to him having noticeable effects. Now that said, 5 minutes to get those effects MAY be a bit overly rapid for realism, and perhaps 10-15 minutes might have been more realistic (maybe Greg simply forgot to put a “1” ahead of the 5?), but overall this is reasonably realistic…. and it is an interesting and pretty exciting story arc to boot!

Now, this still has potential. Gunther will discover he really does miss Rosa, word will come that the clinic in Peru has been taken over by the Shining Path, and Gunter will go back to rescue his beloved. Maybe? Come on Greg. DRAMA TIME. So much potential.

Actually, I don’t think Gunther has any real substantial future in the comic strip unless he becomes a dynamic character, faces a real challenge, and becomes something. If he just comes back to the old group, who cares? He will always be a loser. Come on Greg!

And Gunther’s real adventure looks like is it beginning.

I think in panel one that Gunther is more a dead ringer for Bill the Cat (right down to the AAAK! )

Adding any kind of a fizzy drink to a super hot pepper creates foam…lots of it…I may know first hand, shush

sooooo boring!!!

and once he emerges from the effects of that tiny bit of alcohol, he will be introduced to strong black coffee to clear his mind. I’m still hoping for something a bit more momentous than a hot pepper to transform him into the bearded seemingly more worldly easygoing person.

Super-hot chili; a chugged bottle of Christal; five lost minutes of shame; and we are left with a broken, drunken, former teetotaler. Gunther is indeed a new man, but not necessarily a better one. Thank goodness for Luis!

“My God! Half of one beer???”-Sure, let’s not stop there. Let’s have 50 beers and run 100 red lights! No, a 1000 red lights. And let’s not notice the flashing blue lights behind us! Meh.

From what I see, the aji limo rates about 30,000 to 50,000 on the Scoville scale. Compared to the jalapeño at 2500-8000, or the habanero at 150,000-450,000.

Gunther drank the wrong stuff – the antidote to capsacin (the fire) is calcium (the balm).Milk, cheese or sour cream does the trick every time. Ask any veteran spice eater…

Gunther’s telling his mother this story. That means he will be grounded and she’ll take away his allowance, because he drank a beer. :P

6’2" and 182lbs here. But, I would not get “drunk” from one bottle of beer. If I purposefully drank it fast, I would be able to feel a bit of a pleasant, relaxing effect, especially on an empty stomach, but would not be close to being drunk. But I am estimating skinny Gunther to be more akin to 5’5" and perhaps 140 lbs or so. He would be inching up the scale a bit in terms of effect.

Parent"S"?!?! Do you potentially have access to that arc so you can tell us the dates? I do not know if the gocomics archive goes back that far or not. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Are you saying that at that time, BOTH Mr. and Mrs. Berger were present? I always thought Mr. Berger was out (left or died) around when Gunther was born.

But really; half a Cristal, at a Budweiser equivalent of 5% ABV?And Gunther doesn’t seem the type to not Google an unfamiliar item in the lunch he’s just ordered.

I too have noticed how so many of the characters are no more street wise than when they were 10. These are supposed to be university age kids, but the pointedly stupid things they do and say are absurd. If the depictions are accurate then we have much to fear from the next generation.

Howie… I will take and rewrite your impressions to fit my perspective:

Howie says:a. Gunther has been led by nose by Rosa.

I agree with that…. but he DID learn to not be led by her. He DID make his own choice.

Howie says:b. Gunther is leaving not because he discovered himself, but because he is running home to protect his mother from dating.

I suggest he is going home because he realizes that Rosa’s vision will never be his vision. I still suspect that there is an important backstory that we do not yet know about why Gunther distrusts either Mr. Gray or distrusts his mother’s abilities to make relationship choices.

Howie says:c. Gunther doesn’t know not to eat hot peppers.

I would suggest he doesn’t know how to eat hot peppers for enjoyment yet. It is a learning process. And, he is learning valuable information.Howie says:d. Gunther is very easily intoxicated.

I say most young kids who never drank before will more profoundly notice effects and will express effects more easily. But, I doubt he is “drunk”… just feeling the effects for the first time.-Howie states:Gunther is no longer a zero, but somewhere in the negative numbers.

I never thought of Gunther as a zero. But, I do think his character “score” is actually improving and becoming much higher as this story arc unfolds.

http://www.chilipeppermadness.com/aji-limo-chili-pepper.html

“Let’s just call it like it is. This is awful writing. Evans clearly wanted Gunther drunk and so he went about it in this sloppy Rube Goldberg fashion that required complete incompetence from both Gunther and Luis. My story (which I wrote to be awful) was more believable. Brdshtt’s alien abduction story is more believable.”.Come on ! Be real ! .Water may not be safe to drink there. None on the table..Poor G. grabbed the first liquid and gulped it. Maybe more was supplied.. There were five minutes to be drinking.

But there is the beginning of the curl in the middle of Gunth’s forehead.

“drive in, grab her, then get away.”

-Thank goodness Brad finally got a case of Rogaine.

I believe we’re supposed to believe Gunther is now a MAN because of these experiences. And he has a beard, and isn’t wearing plaid, and he’s drinking black coffee! But that’s totally unremarkable behavior. If Gunther was a real high school graduate, he would do something interesting instead—but we can’t have that. It would be too shocking for the old fashioned among us. -And his anxiety about his mom and her boyfriend is so infantile, it cancels out whatever character growth there may be!

.I disagree..Liquids were safer to drink there it out of bottles. Gunthur may have gulped a couple — or more..But some while later the coffee remedy may have been needed. .Thus there is a role here.

back on my youth(around 20), one time i drank one beer and than drank REAL FAST 2 champagne glasses and actually got semi-drunk, and the next morning got my first and only hangover, and I already drunk before that a few beers, and drunk one shot of aguardiente so I did not have as big disadvantage as gunther…… eventually 2 or 3 years later, i made the decision not to drink at all by choice(I am not alcoholic so it was not a forced choice)….that is why I can see Gunther drinking beer than going to the rest room to gag because of the Aji and ending up either drunk or half-drunk ..by the way saw that Cristal beer is 5 ABV

Now that I think about it, Gunther’s utterances in panel three sound more like his nose is clogged than he is drunk. The pepper probs caused massive mucus showers in his sinuses.

Haha! Me too, Lonnie. But a bit longer ago.

So, is this where Rosa, Gunther’s mom, (and Mr. Gray, perhaps) appear to him in a fever dream as he and Luis continue the journey back to Lima, wherein (like the Three Ghosts of Xmas) they impart the answers to Life, The Universe, and Everything?

However, there has been some drama in this strip…but there could still be humor even if Gunth and Rose were kidnapped by the Shining Path. The Shining Path is no ISIS and there could really be an interesting twist to this whole thing. Then maybe we could get back to the real interest in this strip: Brad and Toni. :)

“AAAK! GAK!!”It’s a tribute to Bill the Cat from Bloom County.

Gunther looks like something out of Mad magazine in the 1st frame and even more infantile in the last two. He still has a ways to go before reaching his new bearded self. What is Greg going to give us now?

Luis is not gonna send this little kid home like that.

about the water

is more about “tolerance”, I drank water all the time at Colombia and when i came to the USA I simply drank water from the faucet as it was for me good, while almost everyone that saw me went EWWWWWWWW straight from the faucet? and I still do it…………. if USA people generally find faucet water yucky, how much more they feel about water from Latin American nations and we can easily see why they find it intolerable as they simply do not have the stomach for it

“For someone so smart, he’s really dumb”. It’s not unusual for the intellectually gifted to make dumb mistakes. After all, we’re only human."

So true. I have always been book smart; however, street smart unfortunately doesn’t go hand in hand with book smart. I still shake my head in wonder at the incredibly stupid decisions I have made, mostly when I was much younger.

Gunther made himself ill. It’s Luis who is saving Gunther from himself.

"It is not unbelievable that chugging even a half bottle of beer might have a bigger impact on some, according to their genetic disposition for processing alcohol. "^Very true!!! I believe Greg understood this, and saw this as only a “Wonder Years” kind of moment, where Gunther is only getting a “mild taste” of hijinks in his growing older…..

“Tabasco Road”? – Good one!! I have the Eric Burdon/War version, as well as the Lou Rawls version. Not sure if I have anyone else’s version. in my collection…..

In the category of “some people see the bottle as half empty, some as half full” …. some among us are alcohol sensitive. It is not unbelievable that chugging even a half bottle of beer might have a bigger impact on some, according to their genetic disposition for processing alcohol.

Yes, especially if one is not “properly seasoned.”

Anyone want to take bets on Evans dropping this story line on Monday like he did with the party for Gunther’s mom?

“Last Chance Bistro” (part 1) (see “Tom’s Diner, Suzanne Vega”)

(♫)Well, it all started from that last night,Awaken in the hotel morningThough we had both left our rooms,My ears still rang from the snoringAnd I thought to myself, A year, a month, a dayWho could blame me, for the difference?And how long could you last,With someone who sounds that way?

(bridge/hook [4x]:) Dooh-de doo-dooh, dooh-de doo-dooh…

So then Luis comes up the mountain:“Tio says your playtime is through…”She clenched that rake so tightly,Just then, my lightbulb knew what to do!So I gave her my goodbyes, She gave me the gift of a kissBut before I could be “Duck” and dodge her Her mark did not miss!

(bridge/hook)

So I rode down the mountain,Pondering Jane’s AddictionLuis gave me some counsel,To smooth out the frictionThe gas tank was on fullBut our stomachs disagreedSo we decided on the next fry trapTo fill our growing need

So, now we’re here at the greasy spoondiscussing forks in the roadLuis had Mr. Manley’s special,I went for the “mother” lode All kinds of people walked inOne stood out so clear,Her skirt was tighter than a cheap dateBut her shirt said: “Hey, eyes up here!”

A snap and crackle was brewingBut it didn’t come from my Rice Krispies™ A popping so horribleAnd faint and kinda wispyBut I soon discoveredThe source of my bilkIt was just Luis bending to sit back downWas gonna say it was funny, but instead I just poured the milk…

(bridge/hook)

In that first panel, Gunth looks like he’s channeling ‘Bill the Cat’ from ’Bloom County! G

After hot peppers, eat bread. Do NOT drink water or cervaza.

Dumb, dumb, dumb. However, typical male behavior.

The least Evans could have done when imagining a drive 6 hours out from Lima is some kind of travelogue.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huacachina

This is my fav storyline by far!

G U N T H E R

I don’t typically read the comments because everyone seems to be an armchair critic.

Some comments are spot-on while others are a complete miss (i.e. Gunther abducted by aliens).

I’d like to see some of the regulars draw their own comic strip and insert into the comments (this challenge should be fun)!!

Although it’s very difficult to predict what will happen in this fascinating storyline, some of us made some remarkable predictions!

My logic on Gunther’s unshaven face is due to the fact that he missed his flight, due to the torture in the men’s room (what goes in must come out).

Once this storyline comes to an end, I sincerely hope that Gunther realizes how much fun his adventure really was and (hopefully) considers joining the military for a much more interesting adventure!

TechTalk Guy-*Ok, game on. YOU write a comment as captivating as that of a space alien abduction. We’ll vote to see whose story is more fun to read.

BTW, I love the way G-man’s feet are drawn in the last frame.

I learned my lesson, when three of us had shared some cheeseburgers (carbs, sugars, etc.) and “Crown Royal” (you name it, it’s got it/doesn’t have it, as the case may be). The two together = "Short quick burst of energy, followed by bouts of ‘knockouts’ "…. – I do enjoy alcohol in moderation now, but boy did I learn the hard way, back then! – Some of the (mis)adventures I found during those days sure could also fill up some books. But I’m sure that many of us here could also say the same!!!!

I thought your alien abduction scenario was imaginative and very amusing. Keep up the good commentary.

Re “Last Chance Bistro”

Wow, I love it!

I must also point out that that’s one reason Evans came up with the name of his blog (with a comment section), since his readers are usually of the “analytical” sort.: “Luannalyzers”…..

I enjoyed yours, as well!!!!

“I do not think that there is anyone here who could honestly say that they have never made a stupid decision at one time or another.”.I can say it.Oh wait, you said “honestly”Never mind.

Where’s our Early Bird Special?

SPOILER ALERT-The adventure is only beginning…

it takes at least 15 minutes for alcohol to be processed, and only a portion of a bottle of beer wouldn’t get anyone drunk – and yet gunther is drunk for hours after this. absolutely ridiculous.

Spicy food and beer? Who are you and what happened to Gunther?

Spicy food and beer? Who are you and what happened to Gunther?

Spicy food and beer? Who are you and what happened to Gunther?