Luann by Greg Evans and Karen Evans for January 08, 2016

Agreed. It’s probably time for her to go off to a college that would require her to move out of Casa DeGroot.

Huh. Weird time for a segue, unless Luann babysitting Shannon is somehow connected to all this processing.

I don’t see how that is, though.

By the way, am I the only one seeing the comments completely out of chronological order? And with the wrong time stamps?

In other words, Luann is totally free, Toni.

Luann and Quill could be out playing Laser Tag, or at the amusement park, going in circles, on the ferris wheel… – Instead, they’re battling….and also, going…er…in circles…. – At this point, Luann could be thinking: "Can’t Shannon be old enough to babysit her own self? – And though she’s a precoucious tyke of a kid, and she knows how to handle her five year old mind, I’m sure Luann will be thinking: "When did it get to be, that I’m having more fun babysitting, than talking to my boyfriend?

“A Break In The Broken Action”“Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” (♫)“Is You Is, Or Is You Ain’t…My Babysitter?” (♫)“You Got Me Sittin’ On Top Of The Girl, Sittin’ On Top Of The Girl…” (♪)“Sweet Child O’Not Mine” (♫)“Born To Be Child Watching” )(♪)“Watching Daytona, For the 500th Time” “If Youth Say So”“Don’t Kid Me!”or“Call Of Doody”

Luann probably made a deal with her, and convinced Bernice to put her two lips in the vase, downstairs…

After a 3 long years we finally getting closer an closer to Brad and Toni wedding I knew this was coming but never expected Greg/Karen to bring it up so quickly

The thrill is gone,The thrill is gone away…

(R.I.P. B.B. King)

Captain should help change their minds about when to have the wedding…but I rather doubt he will.

That’s quite an attitude, missy. Be careful which way you aim it.

Wonder if Quill is talking to Pru about Luann? Maybe if Pru is in the house she can babysit Shannon and then Pru will “Love the adorable child”. Shannon will respond to her and Luann will have yet another reason to hate Pru and be insecure. Oh wait, forgot, Luann said this wasn’t about Pru.

It is more about…. everything. That she and Quill are going in different directions… or maybe he is going somewhere and she doesn’t seem to be going anywhere at all. Except a few months back, they both seemed to think she was really good with kids and would make a great kindergarten teacher.

Now I am totally lost as to where this is going… but then I am directionally challenged. LOL

She COULD have been but she blew that.

Luann, you have made your situation. Now you have to live with it and correct it hopefully in the future.

Growing up is hard isn’t? You can do it.

Jonah meets Pru and they take off together, Brad and Toni adopt Shannon then Luann and Quill ride off in the sunset together happily ever after

A silver lining behind Luann’s problems

Jonah is her brother.

Jonah is Pru’s former lover and Shannon is theirs

Luann clearly needs someone to listen to her problems, someone with experience making mature, well-timed decisions about her relationships… Toni is just the woman… HAHAHA.

Setting up Luann and Jonah

Does Shannon even have a mother.

wreck it ralph said, Does Shannon even have a mother. ??-—————————————————-She abandoned her and has never surfaced in the strip.

Ah, relationships, aren’t they grand? (Yes, they are, despite these bumps in the road.) It’s times like this that I kind of envy pets like Puddles. No worries…no drama…no overanalysis…just pure unadulterated contentment.

“Her brother Jonah? Does she have more than one brother?”*Imp – good catch, but its hard to watch your punctuation when youre talking fast/

Quill really isn’t all that great.

No. That’s his name.

The “Wedding!” That’s Right! I almost forgot about the Wed-ding!

Say, here’s an Idea: When the two of you get done baby-sitting the little Storm Trooper, why don’t you guys can take your minds off “things” by picking out your brides maid dresses and drinking COFFEE!

Wouldn’t THAT be “Fun?”

And I’d get USED to picking out THOSE types of dresses if I were You, because at the rate YOU Guys are going, you’re Never, Ever, EVER, Gonna be picking out WEDDING Dresses!

And FURTHERMORE…, Oh HI, Argy!!!

No more than most people’s lives do when they’re in a relationship. In fact there are plenty of things she does where Quill is not a part: Her time in school, the time on her art projects, the time she spends with the little kids, the time spent with Bernice, the time spent with her family, etc. In fact compared to most couples I know who basically shut themselves apart from their past lives, Luann is remarkably healthy.

How would Lu be doing anything fun with Quill? She doesn’t ever spend any time with him. Except to argue.

Good point about it being unneeded information – I hadn’t caught that initially, and it does make the dialogue sound stilted (and Karen is usually pretty good at avoiding “stilted”). But – it also serves to bring anyone who’s new to the strip, or who doesn’t follow it all too closely, up to speed.

Yep, exactly. It’s called exposition, and is a common movie, book, comic strip device. It is used for new readers to be introduced to the character’s name (or for existing readers to be reminded of it). Using Pearls Before Swine as an example again, Pig frequently refers to “my girlfriend, Pigita.” Of course that obviously does not mean that he has more than one girlfriend, and to interpret it that way would be just plain stupid, a desperate attempt to try to pick something out of the comic that isn’t there in the first place.

Implausible…. while you are technically correct that “my brother Jonah” being said to Luann is redundant and unnecessary for the character of Luann…. the reality is that “my brother Jonah” IS valuable for many readers of the comic, especially….. a) those who read sporadically and may not know who all the various characters are by name, b) new readers, and c) avid readers who may be forgetful.

4IMO cynical sarcasm is not a particularly attractive behavior for Luann (“Wouldn’t that be nice”). For me, while (like argy suggested two days ago to me) Luann may be truly at an emotional crossroads and may even be borderline depressed… it is really not an excuse for bad or ornery, or rude behavior. For me, Luann has been acting far more like a baby child this past week since she blew up at Quill rather than a young adult that she is (or at least is working to become). As I have stated before, I hope she and Quill go their separate ways. I do not really like this current side of Luann, and I hope that if there is a breakup, she will be able to return to being a helluva lot more pleasant whether dating or not. I just realized… in many ways Luann’s new surly attitude is a reflected mirror of the same sort of surliness Gunther has adopted. I hope it is not a theme that all the college aged characters in this comic are going to go through. Not every young adult, college-aged student gets ornery and surly.

To those who are snarking on Jonah:We can assume that all the times we DON’T see Shannon being taken care of by Toni and Brad that she is with her father, which is most of the time. We’ve not seen that Jonah is an otherwise irresponsible parent; Shannon is always clean and fed when she is dropped off and doesn’t seem more ill-behaved than many children her age I’ve seen.Besides, even some “responsible” parents sometimes need help with making sure the child is safe and taken care of while the primary parent works to pay the bills or has those pesky “adult” errands that we all have to make, and sometimes a relative is best for that.BTW: It’s Toni who’s shoving the child off on her boyfriend’s sister, and only because she can’t do it to the boyfriend. (Who took care of Shannon while Toni was with Dirk ?)

“Shannon might have called him “Bwad” a few years ago but she should have grown up since.”====It’s the child’s pet name for Brad and differentiates him from all others with that name.I, myself, used a childhood deconstruction of “daddy” to refer to my father until I became a teenager.In a crowd of children he didn’t have to rely on voice recognition alone to know when I called him.

Well, he’s a {{{ grrrr! }}} ACTOR!They’re SO irresponsible!!!(Wait, isn’t that the profession of two of the other current characters?)

Jonah is a terrible actor wannabe … but maybe he will latch on to Pru thinking she is a free tic ket to NY theatre ( Broadway or of-off- off Broadway. Maybe she will give her " “raised in foster care speech” and he will see the error of his ways with dumping Shannon. Nah…. never happen.

I very much hope Brad and Toni never adopt Shannon. How many holes can you knock in the walls with a sledgehammer before you cause structural damage to the house?-However, maybe this situation will allow Jonah to drop off Shannon at Luann’s house and meet Pru, as others have suggested herein. If they become a couple, then Shannon gets a new Mom, Luann loses a romantic rival, and we have 9 months to brace ourselves for the travesty of a 9/11 wedding “celebration”.

Shouldn’t Principal Purgiss (or whatever his name was) be calling Luann soon to arrange for her next stint as an after-school or summer vacation “teacher”? That would take her mind of Quill for a little while every day, at least.

Shannon can have a play date with Chucky, the evil doll.

Toni called Shannon “Mini Eiffel”, because she acknowledged Shannon’s a smaller version of the former W.W. despot. Also, it has been alluded to, that her aggressive and mean tendencies were engendered by an irresponsible father (Jonah) and an aunt totally overwhelmed by having to fill in for Mr. Daytona’s repeated absences, and her own struggle to maintain “control” of her life, before recently (Toni)… – Brad and Toni’s going in a closet was so that they could get in a small, brief, temporary amount of privacy, during their watch over Shannon. There was a “comedic backfiring element”, when they were stuck in the closet accidentally , as they didn’t account for the locks being old in Mrs. Horner’s residence (now occupied by Brad). That moment was purposely portrayed as a comedic “Uh, Oh!!” moment (with resulting embarrassment and regret, especially after they underestimated Shannon’s ability to remedy the situation), whereas Jonah isn’t being depicted as “just a well meaning Dad, with lighthearted, comedic ’Uh, Oh! moments”.

what happened with Bern and Gunther? I thought they were going to link up?

- A new glitch in the comment system.

Not that new. I pointed it out some time ago. When I posted that comment, you said I was wasting time bringing it up to us, and should report it to GoComics. I did, but never got an answer.

Implausible…. Interesting (your statement about the Greg (and Karen) acknowledging the 9/11 wedding date angered some)…. where did you read that? If you have access to an electronic source, would you please put the link here? I would like to read about what was said.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Captain likes the 9/11 idea. It could be tone deaf enough to happen.

“Awfully big assumption to make there, that Toni just volunteered to babysitter-hunt…”=====Make up any reason you please, but there is no evidence that she DIDN’T tell Jonah “Sure.., I’ll take care of it." Thus taking on the responsibility without a fight.

Perhaps she didn’t mention her own plans (and why don’t they just take Shannon along?)It’s a big assumption of your part that Jonah was “just being irresponsible again”.

Jonah is still in her life?

The “true story” may well be that (as has often been suggested) Shannon is actually Dirk and Toni’s child. It would explain so much.

There are new people reading this comic all the time. If Toni just said Jonah called, the new readers wouldn’t know who Jonah is. There is nothing wrong with putting in some information for new readers. Jonah is not mentioned very often.

Man I stay away all day from this comment blog and the hate-watchers take over, not that there is anything wrong with that. -:) Toni and Brad have grown considerably during their relationship, and with respect to Shannon, who is simply her niece. When their relationship started she was this beauty introduced to the strip, and I remember saying to myself in some airport somewhere I happened to read the strip, that she was way way above Brad’s pay grade. Brad at the time was basically a lump, always with his butt out buried in his car, and the most interesting thing about him was his crazy, Eddie Haskell clone friend TJ. By the way for you youngie’s Eddie Haskell was the Beaver’s brother Tony’sbest friend and while he was always so nice and polite around Tony and Bev’s parents, he was a total scamp. Anyway, Toni turned out to be in an abusive relationship with the erstwhile Dirk, a total scary character/stalker. In order to eventually get Toni Brad had to grow up, confront Dirk, at considerable danger to himself, become a first responder, while Toni had to extricate herself from Dirk, begin to have a belief in herself (something Luann is struggling with in her own inimitable way) and also become a first responder. Now they are going to get married in the firehouse the conventional wisdom has as on 9/11/16. Shannon came along as part of this change. Her brother is ambitious, and as handsome as Toni is beautiful, and has shown that his responsibility to his daughter is something that is not a first priority in his life. He did lose his wife in a tragedy and perhaps this is a way to run away from it, so there is dramatic room here, but in any event Brad has turned out to have grown as a father figure too, and Shannon has clearly benefited from it. They did do some dumb things along the way, but the overall point of the Shannon arc is considerable growth into a sweet, if very strong-willed little girl, and is learning to be a better person potentially by being babysat by Brad and Toni, and Brad and Toni have grown a lot, as I keep saying. The overall arc of Luann is human foibles, and humor, dumbness and brilliance, inanity, and sometimes amazing things, life expressed in a comic strip world. The central characters are two dimensional figures who are changing, even TIffany!!

Anyway this is a love watchers response to hate watchers commentary. Sort of like our political split huh? We continue to debate freely.

“I’ll be sure to keep watch on this non-biased depiction of Jonah”-————————————————Opinion Piece, you mean.

“We need some arcs with Jonah…”====No time, we’re planning that wedding that’s nine months in the future.

And if the characterization of Luann were based on opinions expressed in the strip by Bernice, it would not be at all a flattering portrayal.

How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All? – Firesign Theater

You seriously rewrote his Wikipedia entry (multiple times, judging by the page history) just to defend him?