Luann by Greg Evans and Karen Evans for May 03, 2018

She could revisit that look, especially with that star on her cheek, and hang out waiting for Piro. They could be star – embossed lovers.

Ziggy Stardust lives!!

Wow! Luann made over by Tiffany. Very 1980’s

So is she Jem, or one of the Holograms?

Switching around the time frame, would Axel have noticed Luann made up like that?

Oh, he’d take note all right.

So… the rest of the week in flashbacks…

waiting… waiting… waiting… …

When a boy is not interested, it doesn’t matter how she looks – better, fabulous, sexy, ugly, homely, frumpy – he is still not interested.

♪ Standing on the corner watching all the guys gag as they go by… ♫

.

Apologies to The Four Lads for modifying their song.

AWK ! gag me with a spoon

Very sweet, although at the end I wonder if Fay is doomed to have the same issue with Axel. Remember 13 year old boys don’t mature as quickly as 13 year old girls. My guess though is that he really likes Fay, and they both like theatre. After all he came to the original casting call by Pru (remember that way back there sometime last year) all by himself. Plus he was with his friend watching another play later in the Luanniverse year. So the theatre love is there, the only question (interlocked) is does he like Fay (I think he does but is too shy to show it) and how she can unlock that like.

(Searching. Searching….)

(As soon as I find a matching comment I made a few years ago, I’ll post it.)

Poor Luann a girl with a mad crush but Aaron didn’t even notice.

Luann going for ‘trailer chic’.

“So, in other words, you completely failed at ever becoming his girlfriend – so are you going to give me any helpful advice or can I go home now?”

Is this a “real” flashback? I’ve been reading this comic since the beginning (I think), and don’t remember that drawing of Luann all “hot”.

The things one does for love!

That look used to be “edgy”, I assume? Maybe only in the Luanniverse!

I would like to see Aaron ‘today’.

I get it now. The same thing happened with For Better or For Worse. The writer ages the characters and grows tired of constantly having to come up with new arcs for so many characters. Lynn Johnston just called it quits. The Evans have decided to go retro, a la Fay reliving Luann’s old scripts.

As long as she will listen to Luann, she can learn what behaviors do not work.

They might work for some people, but those are possibly people you don’t want to attract in the first place.

Anyhoo, learning from failures of the past gives you a chance to make new failures — or possibly try something which actually works. With that in mind, it is good to remember that humans do not always or long respond favorably to attempted manipulation. Do you?

Uh Lu? I think young Fay gets the “point” about Aaron Hill.

So how about telling her about Q-Ball, Miguel, Stuart, Ben York, (GAG) Elwood Druit, and Gunther?

THAT, should be sufficient to get Fay to NOT even consider dating a guy until she’s at LEAST 35.

I hope this week’s strips are to designed to motivate Fay and not a portend of Aaron Hill’s return.

2

More flashbacks. I guess they are “ok”, but in some ways this feels like a nudge to get folks to read “Luann Again” which I suspect many of us already do.

While this “works” as a way for Luann to explain her past to Fay, I am not really finding the information Luann is providing to be particularly helpful FOR Fay to hear. Luann’s “Aaron crush” was not a particularly successful time in Luann’s dating history. So, unless this information is designed to encourage Fay what to NOT do, it could end up being exactly some of the nonsense Mrs. Garcia did not want to become part of Fay’s impressions of how the dating scene is supposed to work. From what Luann has thus far described to Fay, if I were Mrs. Garcia, and I knew of this…. I would again be fairly disgruntled.

So, the questions I have are about where this is going? Here are some hypotheses:

1) This is being used as easy “filler” by Greg to give him a small break/vacation…. sort of like the flashback episodes on television (especially from the 50s, 60s, & 70s).

2) This could portend the return of Aaron (IMO this would be horrible if Luann becomes all “swoony” again about him, but could be ironically interesting if there is some sort of weird twist (like he is related to the Garcia family).

3) This is leading to a bigger blowup relative to Mrs. Garcia’s explicit instructions to not have Luann “mentor” Fay about dating (I still think that Luann and Fay needed to clear this matter up with Mrs. Garcia before proceeding like Luann has.)

4) This is leading to having Fay adopt some of the same “patterns” of behavior Luann had in the past…. this would disappoint me for I would like Fay to NOT become this sort of “swoony” character as her primary personality trait in the comic.

+ + +

The way this is currently proceeding, I am fearful we will have this focus continue into next week and perhaps beyond.

I don’t think this is about learning any girl-gets-boy strategy from Luann. But I do think Fay will benefit from getting a little perspective, and a good bit of acceptance of her natural feelings. Her mom seems unwilling and unable to provide that. Luann can see how far she has come.

Ah yes, the “Grease” solution…if a girl can’t get a boy’s attention, she should slut it up. You gotta look like a hooker to get a man, right? This is what gives girls body-image issues…negative gender-stereotypical BS like this. Yes…I know it’s “just” a comic strip, but it’s still perpetuating a misogynistic message that girls should dress/act like prostitutes to please the boys. Pathetic.

Back in the day when Luann was much younger and more crudely drawn.

The Hooker look. Bernice imagined it while dreaming about Piro, assuming a similar position that Luann demonstrates today. Bernice also tried it with makeup to attract Piro, but backed out of that idea. Even Tiffany opened a button or two to get Piro’s attention and the Mighty Tiff struck out. Therefore, the sexy look is good except when you’re dealing with zombies like Piro.

Don’t understand all the “hooker” comments. She’s done up in typical 80’s “glam”, with nary any skin exposed.

Luann sounds possessive.

@JOE PETITJEAN: I was a volunteer for a time on a crisis switchboard, and though most of our callers and walk-ins turned out to be Vietnam vets suffering from PTSD (which had not been correctly identified back then, and we weren’t at all trained to help them), I’ve never forgotten the foreign exchange student who called, and probably ended up killing herself. She was staying with a family who was supposed to be friends of her parents, but either the husband or the brother had become very possessive of her, to the point that he not only interrogated her about her every move, but he decided she was meant to be his ‘true wife’. So here she was, age 14, English only her second language and pregnant. I tried to help, but she was so afraid, she just hung up.

………………

Long story short, you have apparently no idea what ‘possessive’ means. Clue: it isn’t dressing sexy, okay?

Gotta wonder if Luann will finish her Aaron story noting he was living with his girlfriend in Hawaii last time she saw him.

The old paper uneven yellowing is especially well done today.

I came to Luann after that point in time, but in Luann Again she is currently getting braces and I find myself wondering if Aaron will also.

Luann would be boring if she always did the right thing, the smart thing and never made mistakes. I think that the current arc is great. Don’t we all think about our first crush even in our old age? I’m a sixty-year-old white guy and I still think about the girl I wanted but could never find the courage to ask her out. SIGH

Pretty woman, walking down the street, with Julia Roberts .

She was a great drummer in Kiss.

Aaron Hill has always struck me as vapid. Luann’s attraction is, then, to me, puzzling. And why she is imposing this sad history on young, impressionable Fay is even more a mystery….