Luann by Greg Evans and Karen Evans for January 31, 2016

Luann meets Dinosaur Comics..Take a set of artwork and swap in some different random text. Better yet, use text that makes no sense. The results look edgy and avant-garde..

Normally “going on a trip together” isn’t all that different from what Nancy was envisioning. In this strip, of course, the world works differently. In the Luannverse, uou can in fact “go on a trip” to Peru for 6 months and never even hug your travelling partner until you say good-bye to her when you leave for home.

um… nice mother/daughter moment

Nancy needn’t worry – if she’s reading the weekday strips, she knows that Luann and Quill aren’t going anywhere (at least not together).

Nancy: So where is this trip?

Luann: Orgas…Uh, Orlando.

Based on the recent developments in the strip, it would have made more sense for Luann to say that Quill and she were thinking of breaking up, not of going on a trip together.

heh … abstain … ri-i-i-i-ight

Whoa – are we just randomly picking out art and conversations from an unmarked file folder, Team Evans? Given the current story arc, this Sunday offering makes absolutely no sense at all. I know you don’t throw this stuff together at the last moment – so if you really loved this art work, why not combine it a heartfelt conversation about (possibly) losing a “boyfriend” and whether she can ever find love again

You chose to abstain? Does that ever work? Let’s ask Brad. Wasn’t he an ‘accident’?

Going back to your comment about the notorious “melons smell” strip –.“I think Greg is making a swipe at our resident complainers here. … the dialogue makes no sense. Perhaps he is testing them by putting something here that makes no sense and to those who say that things in his strip make no sense, now things will be in perfect alignment. Makes sense.”.None of the text makes any sense. The Evanses must just be messing with the readers again.

“Stop right there, Greg. I know you don’t care about the readers. And I know that you think that you know everything. But don’t let getting the strip done as cheaply as possible rule your brain.”

Hmmm….The text balloons that mention the trip are colored, while the rest are white. Maybe some funny business with swapping out original text?Who would do a naughty thing like that? The colorist, maybe? (Just kidding.)

“Good memory!”.it’s a strange thing about these story lines. As lame as the weekday story lines and many of the Sunday strips have been in the past couple of years, they seem to stick better in the memory than other strips. Maybe it’s because they have so much unfilled potential.

“I’ll Take Manhattan”“A Drop In Pressure”“How Do You Spell Relieved?”“The Biggest Hug, The Deepest Embrace”“A Lot To Learn, In A New York Minute”“42nd Thought Street”“We’ll Cross That Bridge To Brooklyn Later”“Fathom Of The Operative Word”“Easier…Like A Sunday Morning” (♫)“Kings And Queens…And Glee O’ Teens…” (♪)“I’m In A New York State Of Mind” (♪)or“Islands In The Stream Of Consciousness” (♫)

Remember the Sunday strips have to be in the syndicates hands about 6 weeks prior to print and I think daily is closer to 4… could be wrong. But I know Sundays are done farther ahead than daily. But I agree the daily story line isn’t going that way (yet…)

LOL!!!!

So, is this one of the rare times that the Sunday strip fits in with the weekday strips? I was expecting to read that Quill and Luann were thinking about breaking up (and thinking No! No!) but instead read that they are thinking of going on the trip together that they had planned during Christmas. Does this mean that, in an effort to restore their relationship or discover the merit of the relationship, Quill has suggested that he and Luann go ahead and take the trip together? I hope so, but if this is a misplaced Sunday comic, it will be heart wrenching to discover that poor Lu got her hopes up only to have them dashed against the Pru-rocks.

Nice mother/daughter interaction, Nancy is clearly on edge regarding Luann, as shown by her hasty erroneous conclusions. But it’s all worth it, anyway, because Luann needs all the advice and guidance her confused little brain can get.At this point, Quill is just a prop.

“If the worst happened”. So yup, Luann, if you “happened” to your parents before they decided to stop using “protection”, you would be the worst that happened to them. Good to know.

Good gods, is this the 1950s or something? These characters are in college. I mean, some people wait, but it’s pretttty rare these days, heh.

Rather poor continuity in this story.

Luann already did tell Nancy that she was thinking about a trip to New York with Quill — eight months ago:

Granted that Nancy was less than enthusiastic about the idea when Luann first brought it up, I would think that Luann shouldn’t be as nervous to discuss the subject as she appears to be in the first panel of today’s strip.

And given that Nancy seemed to be thinking of the sexual implications of a Luann-Quill trip in the sequence from May 2015 (see the last panel above), she shouldn’t be so relieved at the thought of Luann wanting to take a trip with Quill as she seems in the third panel. (“Phew! I thought my daughter was going to have sex with her boyfriend here in town. Now I found out she’s just going to travel across the country with him, so presumably they’re going to do so celibately! What a relief!”)

And the Sunday strips ought to at least be consistent with the daily strips, even if they don’t take place at exactly the same time. After all, when the deadline to turn in this Sunday strip occurred, Greg and Karen probably knew that they would soon be heading into a daily strip storyline in which Luann questions her relationship with Quill.

And Nancy is just now giving her this talk, more than a year into college? About 5 years behind the power curve there, lady. But then again, if you go by the popular theory of Luann having the emotional maturity of a 14-year-old, this conversation is right on schedule. Hell, has Luann even gotten the actual “sex talk” yet? Probably not, as Evans couldn’t even discuss menstruation without being forced to resort to euphemisms.

Do college kids still go to Cancun or Daytona Beach for spring break.

I think the current weekday strips are ambiguous. I took away the idea that Quill realized he was taking Luann for granted and that was the problem he had to fix.

Suggesting abstinence to a college student is a bad idea. Unless you also give them all the info about various birth control methods and lots of condoms. My daughter’s collegeprovides free condoms everywhere. You don’t need to ask for them. They hand them out like beads at the Gasparilla parade.

“Your father and I struggled with this same thing while we were dating. We chose to abstain. Of course, by then it was too late, since Brad was already 2 months on the way.”

This could be the Evanses’ way of dumping the whole Luann/Quill conflict and resetting their relationship back to the smoldering not-spending-enough-time condition.Bizarre, you say? Gunthie spent months obsessing about Ma Berger’s dating Mr. Gray. The Evanses set up the situation for a big confrontation, then … nothing. All forgotten.

So I know that the Sunday strips fall ‘outside’ the continuity of the daily strips, but what’s the case for this one? Did Luann and Quill talk already and patch things up? It sure seems like it. If not than Greg should have held this one back for another weekend. Or if future events won’t allow it – I personally don’t think they breaking up – then scrap it altogether. The heavy handed message wasn’t really worth the confusion it caused.

Luann is not sexy. She looks like a tall 10 year old, and behaves the same way. Trade her and Dez to Peru, and bring back Rosa.

I now dread my daughter becoming a teenager in few years! Funny strip

So disappointed with this particular mother daughter conversation. Abstinence, really?

“What she said was hardly “random””.“Random”, as in: drawn from some random sources or topic that have little or nothing to do with the characters or their situation..Other commenters have deconstructed the text in detail. I’ll just point out that Nancy gives a big pitch for abstinence, then is relieved when Luann says she’s going to something that will put her abstinence in serious jeopardy.

Just a show of hands here. How many ladies told their mom they were thinking about having sex with a guy before they actually did? “Hey mom, I’m thinking about having sex with Bob (or Betty), what do you think?”

Interesting how a couple of posters here are using Sunday as their day to test the moderating system’s threshold and awareness of content.

EW.

She didn’t get sex education. And it’s a little late, Mom. You should have had this talk in sections before now.

I was happy to see that this Sunday was not the typical “messy room story” or a oft-used Dagwood Bumstead routine, .BUT. . . . . It still makes no sense... . . . unless maybe Luann is planning to suggest a trip to Quill as a way of making up..But the line about learning a lot is still senseless, unless it is nasty Bernice-like sarcasm.

T.M.I., Mom!

Nancy has talked to Luann before:

“Going on a trip together” or “having sects” (sp). Doesn’t the first usually include the second?

“LOL, better watch those comments like that. T”*BS’s comment to Namrepus – The Namrepus comment did NOT appear, so I clicked on Namrepus’s name and read it. Yeah, the comment’s borderline “blue”.

Normally the Sunday strip has nothing at all to do with the weekday story arc, since it’s usually “Luann’s room is messy,” “Brad and Toni are not interesting people,” or “Frank and Nancy remember when the world was different.” Today’s strip, however, does make reference to the Quill / Luann relationship, and it does so in a way that is direct conflict with the weekday story arc. Has Team Evans explained how they allowed this to happen? When they were creating the Sunday strips, didn’t they know the general timeline for the weekday stories? Or did they just not realize that this reference to Lu / Q and a trip actually establishes some connection between the Sunday strip and the weekday story arc? Will the Evanses offer any comment about it?

Great mom….I had one like that and didn’t make those mistakes like so many of my girlfriends did. However, I had an advantage, a mom who grew up in Europe.

When the Sunday strip jives with the daily, it means two more weeks before Mr. Gray proposes to Gunther’s Mom. Which should set everyone back to zero.

“And it was hard to abstain back then because Frank was so sexy, he looked much like Quill does now.”.“Does that mean Quill is likely to come to look like Dad?”.“Oh, yes, very likely.”.“Never mind, I’ve decided against the trip.”

“No wonder Nancy had 14 boyfriends, she wasn’t sleeping with any of them.”.Actually, FRANK was the only one she said she never….

.Oops, never mind.Just consider those previous boyfriends’ responses to dating her:Two left town to get away from her.Eight married someone else because they decided anything else was better.One swore off women altogether, surrounding himself with other men.two volunteered for Vietnam, figuring it was a better fate..Frank was the bravest of them all.

@Phatts California“Abstain works for a very few the rest should be using protection.”.Actually it works for everybody, it just isn’t as much fun (in the short run, of course), so many choose not to work it..Separation is the only sure protection.Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I thought Luann was going to say… “thinking of breaking up”. This is different. They will go away somewhere to sort things out…. or is this just a Sunday episode that has nothing to do with regular plot.

Very funny. Puddles woke up. The floor is a little cleaner. You can’t see all of Bernice’s legs. The soda cans are different colors. It looks like there’s a cross on the book bag Finally, in picture two, everything is bigger. I’ll let other people have fun.

> Reminds me of the line from the song “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”>I have trouble imagining Frank as either John Wayne or Jimmy Stuart, honestly. However, I’ll grant you that Nancy may have a streak of Lee Marvin in her. Do not get her angry, if you know what’s good for you.

Nancy: “By the time I was 20, I had had 14 boyfriends.”Luann: “You had 14 boyfriends??? I couldn’t possibly ever have that many. There aren’t even 14 boys in Mr. Fogarty’s class at Pitt High School!”Nancy: “You aren’t in high school any more, Luann. You could meet and go out with some boys who weren’t in Mr. Fogarty’s class.”Luann: “That’s just crazy talk, Mom.”

It’s one thing for a Sunday strip to be stand-alone. I can understand if the Evanses need for the daily strips to be understandable without reading the Sundays, and the Sundays to be understandable without reading the dailies, for the benefit of readers whose newspapers only carry the daily strip or the Sunday strip.-So, for example, the recent Sunday strips have featured Luann complaining about her history textbook being boring, Frank complaining about wasted electricity, Nancy forgetting to bring her reusable grocery bags into the supermarket, and Shannon misunderstanding the concept of New Year’s resolutions. Nothing there affected the daily strips or was affected by the daily strips. But nothing there contradicted the daily strips, either.-But in this case, we have at least two notable discrepancies with the dailies: (1) Luann acting like she has never told Nancy that she might go on a trip with Quill, when they discussed that last May in the dailies; and (2) Luann planning a trip with Quill, even though just this past week in the dailies it was ascertained that she and Quill weren’t talking and it looked like their relationship was in trouble.-Stand-alone Sundays are OK; contradicting the dailies confuses those readers who actually read all the strips.

A few years back in Luann time:

every once in a while the sunday strip meshes with the weekday plot. But today it could be both stand- alone and continuous; for those not following the Luann-Quill melodrama it would be just a mother-daughter exchange regarding boyfriends. But for us, it is much more informative. The Evans’ kill two birds w/ one stone today.

why not tell dave to buzz(not the real word) off

@DavidHuieGreen“Sure if everyone would do it. They don’t.”.Obviously.But the statement was that it didn’t work, not that it wasn’t used by everyone.Obviously it DOES work when it is used.Obviously it often FAILS when not used.

@DavidHuieGreen“Frank was the bravest of them all.”.All that and a secret agent to boot.

This strips artwork is an obvious homage to Garry Trudeau whooften changes contents from one panel to the next in Doonesbury

Thank you! – But, it’s like that old saying, as was mentioned before – ’Imitation is the sincerest form of….imitation…"

Maybe everybody got a case of the Schultz Flu…

-SPOILER ALERT

Someone will be very disappointed. (Besides me, I mean…)

Seriously. This is a comic strip about teenagers written as if it were only intended to be read by people in their 70s who need to be reminded that sex exists.

LOL… Trip?!?! Girl, you are paying attention to what is going on IN your own strip … Hmmmmmmm???