Luann (comic strip)
Luann is a syndicated comic strip, distributed in newspapers by United Features Syndicate since March 15, 1987, featuring the ups and downs of life for a typical American teen-aged girl, Luann Degroot. Co-starring her friends Bernice James and Delta Halper, the comic occasionally covers topical issues, as well as conflicts with other characters, such as her family, including her mother Nancy DeGroot, her father Frank DeGroot, and her once-"hopeless" brother Brad DeGroot, for whom Luann is now showing occasional glimpses of respect as Brad has become a firefighter. Popular and beautiful cheerleader Tiffany Farrell is her main rival for popularity at Pitts High School. Luann and Tiffany formerly battled over the affections of Aaron Hill, but once Aaron moved to Hawaii, they found that their rivalry extended to other topics beyond competition for one guy. In fact Tiffany's constant consideration of Luann as a potent rival exposes to the reader how incorrect Luann's own low self-assessment of her beauty and popularity really is. Other characters include Puddles (Luann's dog), fellow students Knute (a class clown) and Gunther (an intellectual student who has on-again, off-again romantic interest in Luann and Bernice), insightful high school teachers and counselors, and Brad's semi-unrequited love interest Toni Daytona (who has had an abusive boyfriend, Dirk).
Luann is drawn by Greg Evans, who won the 2003 Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year. The strip has attained a degree of notoriety for its mixing of consideration of real-life topics with the lightness of being a teenager in high school. In Luann, Greg Evans has occasionally sprinkled in such topics as Luann's concerns about her first menstruation, Dirk's emotional abuse of Toni, Dirk's physical violence toward Brad, birth control, drunk driving, handicaps, and other social and policy issues that are of interest to young people. Evans drew praise in 1998 for a series of strips based around Delta contracting Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Some of Evans' topics show to teenaged readers an inspiring young citizen ideal for teenagers to live up to. Other topics show to adult readers the daily trials and tribulations faced in youth in case the reader forgot or in case things have changed since the reader was young many years ago.
History
From 1987 to 1999 Luann was vaguely in the 8th Grade at in the Pitts school system. This younger era of the Luann strip focused on topics among children in junior high school and within Luann's family at home. As might be expected, since eighth grade is not exactly the most substantial year in the typical person's life, after a certain number of years fresh topics for Evans were becoming exhausted or trite. Also, by 1999 Luann's popularity was widespread and broadbased, permitting both a volume of feedback from readers who wanted more of certain topics as well as a certain degree of comfort that the established popularity would bouy a small adjustment to the strip. Also by 1999, distribution of Luann had changed to the current United Features Syndicate, which also welcomed expanding readership of each of their strips.
From 1999 to the present Luann has been slowly aging from 15 to 16 years old at perhaps the rate of one Luann month per one reader year. Luann and her classmates have progressed from Pitts Junior High School to Pitts High School. Luann has learned to drive. Her approximately 19-year-old brother earned his firefighting certification after his graduation from high school. Bernice raised a seeing-eye dog for an organization that helps the blind. Luann and Aaron went out on a real date. None of these and many more storylines could have believably or appropriately been enacted by junior-high students, but do show an entertaining look at high school students as emerging young adults who are half filled with childhood and half filled with the real life of adulthood, just as the typical American was at that age.