Arlo and Janis: I'll do all I can to positively influence events.

While the poor artwork in Marmaduke and The Family Circus provides ample ammunition for mockery, it doesn't really prevent their authors from telling the kind of stories they want to tell, mostly because the stories they want to tell are so simple. The less than laudable artwork in Pearls Before Swine and xkcd, meanwhile, is actually something of a feature; it's interesting, and often humorous, to see what Pastis and Munroe can do within their artistic limitations. The drawing in Arlo and Janis, though, is a real hindrance.

Jimmy Johnson's strip is mostly daily gag stuff, but it occasionally involves a reasonably complex continuing storyline, along the lines of a less involved For Better or For Worse or 9 Chickweed Lane. It's not a particularly great comic, but the serialized storytelling is pretty decent. The drawing really drags it down, though. As the above installment indicates, the style of the strip is pretty simple and minimalistic. Beyond that, the characters just aren't very expressive, and that's the real problem.

The conversation taking place between Janis and Gus is pretty serious, and the writing does a decent job of conveying the gravity of the situation. But Johnson isn't able to convey that same seriousness in his artwork. On the contrary, Janis and Gus are so stiff and expressionless that they may as well be in a Pearls Before Swine. And in a story like this, in which the characters should be wearing their emotions on their sleeves, that just doesn't work.

A big part of readers' connection to the characters in For Better or For Worse was image-based. Even without words, the characters' emotions were clear. The drawing in 9 Chickweed Lane is quite a bit more inventive than Lynn Johnston's ever was, but, still, what really gives readers a connection to it is that expressiveness in characters' faces. Johnson's characters don't have that, and it's the biggest reason why Arlo and Janis isn't a very good comic strip.