Arlo and Janis

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Arlo and Janis is a comic strip written by Jimmy Johnson. It was first published in newspapers on July 29, 1985.

The focus of the strip are its two title characters, a middle-aged, middle-class Baby Boomer couple with an easygoing approach to their lives. They are frequently joined by their son Gene and quirky cat Ludwig. Ludwig was introduced into the strip in the mid-1990s (casually, as if Arlo and Janis had always had a cat but he had never been mentioned before), and has only more recently become a regular character. Similarly, as Gene slowly matures into his mid-teens (having been approximately 8 when the strip was introduced, he's roughly 17 in 2006; in the June 16, 2006 strip, Janis mentions to Arlo that Gene will be going away to college in a year), his presence in the strip has shrunk dramatically; Johnson maintains that this is due to the way that adolescents detach themselves from their parents and begin to lead their own lives, a process he wanted to show realistically. The family surname is Day, although it's only rarely used in the strip.

It's also of note that it has been implied in the strip that despite having been a couple since meeting in college in 1973 (a backstory revealed in a series of strips that also functioned as a parody of the book and film Gone With The Wind), Arlo and Janis are still both sexually active and completely besotten with each other; the libidinous undertones of the strip, which can sometimes be surprisingly overt to readers used to the sanitized feel of other newspaper comics, are an ongoing feature of the strip. In a medium where long marriages are presented as either sexless or antagonistic (see The Lockhorns, Andy Capp, etc.), the strips that show the couple's ongoing physical attraction to each other are a refreshing and realistic alternative.

Other elements of note include the strip's subtle political viewpoint (in particular, Arlo regularly rants about the insidious influence of large corporations on American society), regular detours into surrealism (e.g., Arlo "calling in sick" and being replaced by a large, realistically drawn alligator for a week of strips) and meta-joke strips about the process of writing a daily comic strip, and Arlo's fondness for the Florida-based singer/songwriter Jimmy Buffett.

Given the strip's original Baby Boomer focus, which has been toned down as the strip has aged into a quirky domestic comedy, it can be assumed that the lead characters are named after 1960s music icons Arlo Guthrie and Janis Joplin. Some readers familiar with the work of Johnson's ex-wife, the newspaper columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson, have suggested that Janis and Rheta are lookalikes.

Jimmy Johnson lives in the coastal city of Pass Christian, Mississippi. Although his own house was largely undamaged by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, the devastation of his adopted hometown affected Johnson greatly; his blog at arloandjanis.com focused on little else for months afterward, and references to the hurricane appeared in the strip in the last third of 2005.

Though it's unclear exactly where Arlo and Janis live, Johnson's southern upbringing regularly influences the strip, and it can be assumed that they live in or near a southern city such as Jackson, Mississippi, Birmingham, Alabama or Atlanta, Georgia.