All things must pass, as George Harrison tunefully observed. So fare thee well, Arlo and Janis. It was fun while it lasted.

Some Tennessean readers might know what I’m talking about. As of a few weeks ago, Arlo and Janis, along with a bunch of other comics, has been booted from the lineup.

In their stead now comes a lackluster crew, including some pretty tired retreads. Beetle Bailey. Family Circus. Marmaduke. Dennis the Menace, for heaven’s sake. What, nobody thought of Nancy and Sluggo?

“We asked readers for input on our offerings and the refresh stems from the feedback we received,” Benjamin Goad, the paper’s news director, said in an article announcing the changes.

I don’t remember being asked, and am suspicious about the whole process. I sense a cost-cutting move by Gannett, the paper’s skinflint corporate parent. But maybe that’s neither here nor there. They didn’t ask me about ending the Saturday print edition, but did so anyway, and tried to sell it as a good deal for readers. It wasn’t.

The “funny pages” and I go way back to when my biweekly hometown paper put out a color section of deftly drawn adventures on Thursdays. Prince Valiant. Dick Tracy. Pogo. Tarzan. They and others were my introduction to newspaper reading, which led eventually to newspaper writing.

And I feel a special kinship with The Tennessean’s comics. In 1992, as a feature writer for the paper, I was asked to coordinate a poll gauging the popularity of comics the paper was running, with an eye toward revamping the offerings. We got thousands of responses, some of them quite adamant in their likes and dislikes.

I remember doubting whether my own writing could inspire as much devotion as, say, Blondie seemed to excite.

The 1992 comics reboot wasn’t as extensive as the recent carnage. Only three bit the dust: Boner’s Ark, Tank McNamara and Miss Peach. Seven new ones debuted: B.C., Wizard of Id, Curtis, the Fusco Brothers, Garfield, Arlo and Janis and the brilliant Calvin and Hobbes.

Calvin and Hobbes was added only on Sundays because, as I recall, the Nashville Banner had the weekday rights. (Alas, the creator, Bill Watterson, memorably ended that strip in 1995, with our two heroes snow-sledding off to explore a magical world.) And I don’t know how we added seven while subtracting only three; like many other bits of information from 1992, that is not retrievable from my brain. Maybe we shrank the sizes.

Of the newcomers then, Arlo and Janis was a favorite of mine partly because the artist and creator, Jimmy Johnson, is an old friend and colleague from my Mississippi newspaper days. But I did not place my thumb on the scales; the strip did well in a trial run before the change.

It featured the aging hippie boomers Arlo Day and his wife, Janis (think Arlo Guthrie and Janis Joplin); their son, Gene (think Gene McCarthy, the LBJ-slaying senator from Minnesota); and their cat, Ludwig (full name Count Ludwig Von Steppenmaus). Unlike with most strips, the characters aged over time. The current cat, for instance, is apparently Ludwig III.

Like Dagwood and Blondie, Arlo and Janis present a take on contemporary married life. Unlike Dagwood and Blondie, they exhibit an appreciation of that life’s subtle wonders and quirks. Dagwood and Blondie are a clown and his straight (wo)man. Arlo and Janis are my wryly cerebral friends.

The Sunday comics real estate they once occupied now hosts a strip called Pickles. It features a married couple who, judging by appearances, are even older than A&J: Opal plump and dowdy; Earl bald on top and potbellied. They, too, have a cat, Muffin. And a dog, Roscoe. A recent Sunday strip sought to dredge humor from the pair’s disagreement over the proper orientation for toilet paper rolls: over or under.

The Tennessean’s final Arlo and Janis, in contrast, was a homage to the late English poet laureate John Masefield’s “Sea-Fever,” presented as “Cabin Fever.”

“I must go out in the yard again

To a shady seat and the sky

And all I ask is a tall sip

And ‘A1A’ to drink it by…”

I rest my case. But there’s no point in lamenting too much. As another rock sage of George Harrison’s vintage reminded us, you can’t always get what you want.

Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.