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Pluggers
Mark Trail, 7/15/10
Not since Rusty claimed that he “just put a new memory card” into his 1953 Leica camera has there been a Mark Trail that more hilariously mashes together decades-old repurposed art and writing with the vague sense that the existence of so-called “modern technology” should probably acknowledged. For the love of God, Mark, why are you paying $2.99 a minute or whatever madness the local Motel 6 is going to charge for use of their in-room telephone when you’re talking on a cell phone right now — a cell phone that, if it’s like every other cell phone sold in the last eight years, has a built-in caller ID feature? Is he one of those paranoids who doesn’t give out his cell number to strangers, because that would allow them to steal his precious bodily fluids? Does Mark’s Junior Illegal Wiretapping And Phone-Call Tracing Kit only work with landlines?
Gil Thorp, 7/15/10
Well, I guess we all owe Coach Thorp an apology, because it turns out his “Let’s run six miles around the golf course!” idea from yesterday was a joke, just a joke, heh heh heh, no, obviously I know how to coach golf, OK? Why else would they be paying me? They are paying me, right? Anyway, it appears that this summer’s dramatic conflict will come from the thought-ballooned antics of this surly teen golf prodigy, and honestly I can’t even imagine four more boring words in the English language than “surly teen golf prodigy,” I almost fell asleep just typing them.
Pluggers, 7/15/10
Most of the people I know are not pluggers, and none of them enjoy actually being tickled. Thus, I’m going to assume that “front tickle” is a plugger euphemism for sex, putting this one firmly in the Pluggers “there are a whole lot of things pluggers would rather do than be sexually intimate with their spouses” file, which is depressingly large.
Apartment 3-G, 6/12/10
OMG GASP WHO’S THAT AT THE DOOR! IT’S … IT’S … damn it, I’m not actually sure who that it is. This is a major problem in a strip where everyone but the three main characters looks more or less alike! I suppose it’s supposed to be late 2006-early 2007 beloved ancillary character Gina, who had similar short hair flips; Gina left to find fame and fortune in Hollywood, which may explain why she’s looking somewhat older and wiser, as presumably that terrible town chewed her up and spat her back to New York in short order (“short order” in soap opera strips being three years or so). Anyway, most of her time in the strip was spent in two main pursuits: insulting Tommie, which means that Tommie’s pleased-to-see-you smile is just another sign of her deeply ingrained self-loathing, and bedding the Professor. This explains why Ari was so excited by the new arrival on Monday, I guess. Ha ha, isn’t it convenient when, right after one of your lovers has been bundled off to a crooked mental hospital, another one shows up, her dreams broken and her heart vulnerable? Yup, being the Professor is pretty sweet.
Wizard of Id, 6/12/10
Wow, the Wiz is a kind of funny-looking bearded old man, so I guess Id’s aesthetic standards for rentboys are quite different from those that hold in early 21st century America. Of course, you know, magic powers and all that; he could be supernaturally sexy.
Pluggers, 6/12/10
You’re a plugger if you once, entirely by accident, got a gift to which your wife reacted positively, and you just keep buying the same thing for her, over and over again, because that’s so much easier than trying to figure what sort of things she likes and dislikes, or even just asking her what she wants, and anyway you can get birdhouses for cheap, sure enough.
You’re married to a plugger if your fantasies veer wildly between divorce and murder.
Crock, 6/2/10
So I’m in the midst of a minor fixation on the geography of the Crock universe, which I dearly hope passes soon. But, while I’m being tortured with it, I may as well share it with you! Today’s baffling segment of physical space is what I assume to be the command center of Crock’s Legionnaire post. This appears to be a vast, unadorned concrete chamber; its only contents are work areas for Crock and his adjutant, which are separated by a good twenty feet of emptiness. The exterior of the fort appears primitive, so I’m assuming this windowless chamber isn’t air conditioned; therefore, we must assume that Crock and Poulet spend their days shouting at each other through the thick, unspeakably hot air, their words echoing off the bare walls. Thus, the fort’s architecture duplicates — and perhaps exacerbates — the brutality of the colonial regime that it houses and represents.
Family Circus, 6/2/10
Uh oh, it looks like Billy’s managed to somehow get a hold of some off-Kompound knowledge, possibly from one of the devil’s own “books”! It’s totally in character for the Keane eldest to use some hard-won nugget of information to prove his superiority over his little brother, but his use of it here is weirdly contextless. Wouldn’t it be easier to make Jeffy feel stupid by pointing out that his attempts to color on a piece of paper that isn’t laid on a surface are doomed to failure? As it is, Jeffy is given an opportunity to offer up one of his trademarked defiantly ignorant comebacks.
Mary Worth, 6/2/10
Her work with Bonnie and Ernie complete, Mary has decided to jump right into another meddle without even the rest-period denoted by a pool party. This is a physically demanding choice — you can see that she’s checking her pulse to make sure that her body can handle it — but she’s highly motivated to reach a new pinnacle of her craft.
Pluggers, 6/2/10
Pluggers have no friends. The people pluggers think are their friends are just those acquaintances too polite to abruptly break off conversations and walk away, no matter how much they want to. Once these people have managed to extract themselves from a plugger’s awkward grip, any promises of future social interaction that were offered up in order to smooth their exit are immediately forgotten.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/27/10
Oh my gosh, have I really not commented on Rex Morgan for more than a month? Well, a lot happened in that time! Toots told June that all of Brook’s crazy stories about her drunken abusive mother were true, and then the nail salon lady gave Brook the day’s receipts to take to the bank, and Brook said she got robbed, and the cop didn’t seem to believe her but June showed up and did her Icy Death Glare thing at him and he scurried off. This really is a lot, for a soap opera comic strip!
Anyway, I will say this for Rex Morgan, M.D., and the other Woody Wilson-penned strip, Judge Parker: Generally speaking their plot outcomes are not painfully obvious a week into the storyline, the way they are in, say, Mary Worth or Mark Trail. We were discussing the current RMMD plot at this past weekend’s get-together, and I tentatively guessed that Brook was running some scam; I now tentatively believe she’s telling the truth, and am overjoyed to find that she will be vindicated by one of RMMD’s trademarked wacky walk-on characters: J. Elhew Bisbee, Hobo Detective! I’m only seeing about sixty percent of this dude’s face and I’m already in love with him. See those glasses? He won them from some irritating hipster, in a knife fight.
Pluggers, 5/27/10
Here are my three interpretations of this dynamic, in order of decreasing charity:
- Pluggers have crippling social anxiety and don’t want to interact with strangers unless they absolutely have to.
- Pluggers’ bodies are so bloated and creaky that getting out of a car seat is a painful exercise, so why bother doing it if there isn’t cheap food as a reward for the effort?
- Pluggers like making their wives do irritating little errands for them, as it is the only moment of power they feel over the course of their sad, pathetic day.
Mary Worth, 5/27/10
Say what you will about Mary, but she’s willing to see her meddle-missions through to the end, even at great personal cost to herself. Here, for instance, she pauses to do important meddling follow-up with Bonnie, despite the fact that she’s just been stabbed in the neck.
Mary Worth and Gil Thorp, 5/20/10
A pair of truly nightmare-fueling visages in today’s comics! Dr. Jeff has chosen exactly the wrong evening to come out of his hidey-hole and once again eat thawed-out halibut with his paramour, as Mary is clearly in the throes of a meddling binge. Eyes the size of dinner plates, she rapturously details her intention to not only “help” poor Bonnie with her problems, but to change the woman’s very essence so that it’s more in line with what Mary expects and demands from a human who’s fallen haplessly into her orbit. Jeff almost looks taken aback in the first panel as he takes in Mary’s meddle-glow. I thought that my sacrifice was enough, he thinks. I thought that by submitting to her requirements, I would keep the rest of humanity safe. But now I see that she’ll never be satisfied.
Meanwhile, in Gil Thorp, country star/weirdo Slim Chance is giving Cassie advice on undoing the pariah status she earned by scheduling an abortive elopement the day her basketball team was playing its Big Game. Said advice seems to have mostly consisted of “Be nice to the girls who hate you with good reason,” and today we see it’s finally worked — with Ashley Aiello, last seen as a wrongly accused suspect in the great Nutboy caper. Ashley went through her own social trials in the wake of that incident, if I’m remembering correctly, and the way her head swivels raptor-like towards the sound of her name in the final panel is frankly creeping me out. “POSSIBLE FRIEND?” she thinks, her eyes lighting up like high-powered laser beams.
Pluggers, 5/20/10
It’s sad when Pluggers can’t even master something simple, like the rhythms of how ordinary down-home Americans (or freakish man-animals, in this case) actually talk. It’s the lack of a contraction, “you will” instead of “you’ll”, that’s really setting me off; it sounds to me like nothing so much as a line that would be delivered by some stereotypical Jewish pawn broker in a movie made in the ’30s. This may be a defense mechanism, though: perhaps my inability to hear “will” as anything other than “vill” is preventing me from seeing the stilted sentence construction as an exaggerated faux-courtly pass, which will in short order lead to plugger-on-plugger coupling, right there on the hair-strewn linoleum.
Blondie and Crock, 5/10/10
One of the defining features of legacy comic strips is of course their trapped-in-amber quality, which goes beyond just the characters’ archaic motivations and gender roles and goes right down to their homes’ decor. In fact, incidental details are even less likely to change than major points; Blondie might have started a business with much fanfare sometime in the ’90s, but the Bumsteads will apparently only have a single corded phone, sitting atop an early 20th century credenza in some out of-the-way location in the house, forever. (At least it’s a modern push-button model!) It’s such an ingrained part of the Blondie universe that I can’t decide if today’s strip is some kind of knowing wink to it, or just the logical extension of having the layout of chez Bumstead so burned into your brain that its anachronisms seems totally natural to you.
Crock, meanwhile, shockingly manages to be more in touch with modern reality today, in the sense that it acknowledges that phones untethered by wires do, in fact, exist. Of course, the strip artists seem to believe that you can create one merely by detaching the handset of a classic bakelite phone from its base, but hey, baby steps.
Apartment 3-G, 5/10/10
At long last, all distractions will be put aside and we’ll now enjoy unfettered A3G-girl-on-A3G-girl-on-A3G-girl action! Three will enter — how many will leave? I suppose this is supposed to be the first time Tommie has seen Margo since the latter’s spa vacation, but I prefer to believe that our redhead has taken to just groveling before Margo every time they encounter each other, to reduce the frequencies the beatings. “O Margo, our days were like nights without the warm glow of your sun! Please, do not remove your divine presence from us again, for we cannot stand the thought!” Meanwhile, Lu Ann has finally decided to face Margo’s tyranny head-on, the prospect of which fills Tommie with obvious terror. Lu Ann knows there’ll be bloodshed, which is why she’s prepared herself by putting on a butcher’s apron.
Mark Trail, 5/10/10
Sassy’s wide, haunted eyes in panel three don’t say “excited” to me so much as “my God, I’ve seen things no living thing should have to bear, and which you can’t even begin to imagine.” Oh, but we can imagine them, Sassy! We’ve seen panel two!
Pluggers, 5/10/10
Longtime Pluggers readers know that Reed Hoover is a relentless, unstoppable Pluggers-idea-submitting machine, whose name pops up in this feature with unsettling regularity. Thus, it comes as no real surprise that the Chief Plugger has just given up and gone on vacation for a week and handed the strip over to some classic Hooverisms. Reed is no doubt celebrating pretty mightily down there in Dallas, presumably by hiking his pants all the way up to his nipples.