I know when I draw them that certain comic strips will not hold up with time. I don’t worry about this especially, because I produce a product for the moment, a four-panel joke to be read and tossed away. My emphasis is on now. This is true today, but it was especially true in 1994, when the above A&J was produced and before the Internet was relevant to you or me. There was a television advertising campaign for a brand of instant coffee airing at that time. It was clever enough. Each ad was a little episode in a to-be-continued storyline, like a little soap opera. In this story, a man and a woman verbally parried over cups of instant coffee as they inevitably fell in love. Like in real soap operas, they were beautiful and obviously well-heeled. This was, after all, the mid-90s, the heyday of the yuppie. Well, there you have it. That’s it, all you need to understand the above cartoon. I hope.
