I think what I failed to explain as well in my initial post was how I feel they interrupt the flow of the comic, in my eyes at least. I read the comic as they are typically meant to be read, following the text from character to character. When there is text with the arrow like that, I stop moving from character to character to read the arrow text, which makes me feel like I’m interrupting the flow of a conversation, the progression of the story (in that strip). Also, the art in this strip is good enough that a lot of the arrows are unnecessary. This is not xkcd, where the artist can’t draw for shit and could probably use these identifying marks, rather than crappy ambiguous stick figures. But here, we can tell the frames are the special artistic ones (especially since they have been mentioned so much recently, both in text and drawn). We can tell someone is reading a note, because the note is in their hand in near their face, and we can see their eyes looking at it. If the art wasn’t particularly good, sure these explanations might be helpful, but as of now I think they are just a little too repetitive (i.e. pointing out which bike Joe/Yehuda is riding).