Does anyone read this comic? I only ever see it on the website Comics I Don’t Understand. I hit my breaking point today. How on EARTH can one comic strip be so consistently fricking incomprehensible? I know I’m not stupid, though I’m no Norman Einstein, but damn, man, does ANYONE like this strip, or does anyone “get” it one one read-through, without thinking too hard? I mean, I don’t read the comics to think, ferchrissakes, that’s for the crosswords and Sudoku…
Too young. If you go back to the beginning of the strip, Arlo and Janis are two Flower Children who are facing adulthood and all it entails. Boomers. They speak to those of us who are dealing with the same things they are, including cats.
Just roll with it. You won’t get them all. The strip in question deals with differing opinions as to the purpose of trees.
Except most flower children are in their sixties now. So any jokes that revolve around the collision of the hippie mindset with the realities of adulthood are likely to fall flat.
Now a comic strip about gen-x slackers and their teenaged kids … THAT would be funny.
If you say so. But on the second link in my OP, most of those strips don’t reference this in any way. The one with the frogs? If someone who’s not a fan sees that, they’ll never read the strip again. Same with the tree one, and the Thai food one. They don’t make sense as 3-panel stories.
My interpretation of Arlo saying, “Don’t force me to go nuclear” is that he means, “let’s not let our mutually using the tree for scratching escalate into peeing on it”.
Ask anyone who just once has put some kind of animal totem on their desk or mantel. Suddenly, every holiday or occasion, they get gifted with 3 or 4 new ceramic versions of that creature. “I don’t know what to get Arlo and Janis for the holidays, but, hey, they apparently like frogs. This banjo-playing ceramic frog should amuse them.”
Arlo & Janice runs in what used to be my local paper. (I since moved to California, and I don’t get the local paper here, so I don’t know if they carry it.) It rarely makes me laugh, but I usually get it.
Ok, I thought I usually got it, but I spent about an hour typing up my explanations of the strips in the archive you linked to, but then I started to check the comments in the archive and realized how many I was wrong about! Oh, well!
I’ve been reading Arlo and Janis for about 10 years now. For a comic strip, I think it provides lovely, germane observations about marriage. Heck, over the years, I’ve often felt the author, Jimmy Johnson, is peeping into the windows of Casa Aankh!
I don’t treat it as a bag-of-laughs comic, but as a humorous commentary on love and relationships. As Claire says, it’s very understated. Works for me because I usually end up cracking a smile.
For the fans, by the way, Jimmy Johnson will be putting out an anthology of selected strips sometime this year. I think, although I’m not sure, it will be available at his blog.
Speaking of his blog, he often analyses old strips there. An example.
That’s… that’s not funny at all. I guess I just don’t get it. I mean, I understand the “joke,” but it’s not “funny.” Oh, well. Too fucking young, I guess…
You’re not too young – I really don’t think it’s an age thing. Great comics like Calvin & Hobbes or Peanuts or even Pearls Before Swine can be understood by any age.
I’m a boomer, and I usually shake my head at A&J. The strips are either obscure, needing an author’s footnote (A long one, like: “What you can’t see is that between those two panels, he must have sat down on her knitting needles, so when she says…”)
Or they’re understandable, but not funny.
I actually agree with you about this. A lot of the strips would be Greek to a new reader and *would *drive them away. In my opinion, that’s because people who’ve been reading Arlo and Janis for a while have fallen into the habit of filling in the unmentioned background information themselves.
Take this strip, for instance. Fairly unfunny on the face of it. Trite, juvenile knock-knock joke, yeah?
Except to me, there’s a LOT of unsaid stuff there that makes it hilarious. Janis ‘falls for’ that one every time? Riiight. The expression on her face in panel 2 says it all. She knows exactly what’s coming and she’s going to play along. Why? Because her husband wants to take a peek at her while she’s dressing and that’s a good feeling! Between panel 3 and 4, in the “hidden” panel, she probably swats him playfully with that brush and they smooch. Well, they would, because Mr and Mrs Aankh do. Arlo walking away pleased as punch at how Janis fell for it again? Mr Aankh, meet Arlo - your partner in obliviousness.
And adding in all that missing information for a comic strip? Yeah, I’m not surprised most people can’t be arsed.
I’ve only seen the strips you linked to, and some are weak, but it strikes me that the problem is not the strips, but that the person writing the blog is pretty damn clueless. Some of the strips he listed had me laughing out loud (Captain Hook at a second hand store, for instance, or the extremely unreliable narrator).
