Post Content

Pluggers, 8/11/10

You have to give Pluggers a little bit of credit for coming up with a half-assed excuse to rerun panels (“Spotlight on readers who have nothing better to do than send in tons of Pluggers ideas!”); some cartoons just rerun strips in no-assed silence, which speaks to a certain lack of pride of craftsmanship. Anyway, as a professional comics-reader, it’s interesting to keep track of how my own immediate, visceral reaction to a panel can change from month to month. For instance, when this panel first ran back in May, I apparently was moved to write some weird diatribe about awkward sentence construction, Jewish stereotypes, and plugger sex. Whereas today, I just laughed a cynical laugh, because it’s obvious to me now that point is that pluggers are cheapskates who’ve never given anyone a tip in their lives, and plugger wife here dies a little inside every time they sneak out of the diner without leaving anything on the counter, and now Mr. Plugger is making a big joke about it. And certainly he’s not going to do anything nice for his wife, who just has to take care of him for free, without expecting any sort of reward, even emotional rewards, ha ha! You might want to keep an eye on those scissors, buddy.

Dick Tracy, 8/11/10

Considering the important social function served by the morgue in the corpse-lousy Dick Tracy universe, it’s no surprise that the building’s facade features enormous letters that presumably light up at night, so people know right away where they should be dumping the bodies.