These characters aren’t real people, you don’t have to be nice to them
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Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/22/25
“Would it help to know that after your relationship ended in failure, she still thought about you all the time, obsessively, even though she never tried to communicate with you, or tell you about your son? Think carefully about the answer to that one, New Dad, it’ll probably tell me a lot about your whole deal!”
Crankshaft, 6/22/25
Ha ha, it’s funny because Crankshaft is in constant pain and has a hard time thinking about anything else! Now, usually when I do the “Ha ha, it’s funny because” bit, I’m doing it specifically about something that’s not funny, but this one is funny to me, actually. Crankshaft’s not a great guy! I wish him ill!
Pluggers, 6/22/25
Ideas? Thinking? Originality? Not on a plugger’s watch.
88 replies to “These characters aren’t real people, you don’t have to be nice to them”
Crankshift:
“This reminds me…the branches of a parabolic arc meet in infinity!”
Pluggers: Dog Plugger is rightfully concerned, because the presence of the axe means that Hen Plugger is not planning on building a garden because she’s taking up a sudden interest in horticulture, but because she needs a place to conceal a body, and he really doesn’t want to be the victim of, or an accessory to, murder.
RMMD:
“Not sure if I’m flattered or insulted.” Well, (a) she divorced you and (b) she didn’t even bother to tell you about a son whom you apparently had with her. So what does that tell you about which of those reactions is more appropriate, “Poindexter”?
CS: I expect Crankshaft’s neck hurts too, since he’s adopted the “face away from the monument and look over your shoulder at it” style of tourism.
CS – Perhaps Ed will experience a massive coronary when he sees a “I [Heart] NY” t-shirt.
Crankshaft: How is it that every single person in a popular area of New York City has suddenly decided to form a crowd behind Ed Crankshaft? It can’t be because of his good looks or pleasant personality — more likely there’s a runaway taxi barreling in their direction, and they’re hoping to use him as a human shield.
Rex Morgan: “She has a copy of every single one of your records… which she uses as coasters, because she’s a petty lady who still hates you. So I tried to teach her about this new thing called ‘streaming,’ but she said she’d be damned if she’d help Spotify pay you .0001 cent per playback.”
Pluggers: Another five words no plugger wants to hear: “Donut prices went up again.”
Crank: I wonder how long the author wrestled with: Do I go with the foot joke or fast food?
Pluggers: When you’re a dog who finds himself married to a chicken, I think you probably just accept the celibate life pretty quickly. It makes sense that the last thing a plugger wants is his beaked, feathered, cloaca-ed wife making bedroom eyes and saying she has “an idea”.
Crankshaft: I’m surprised they let Crankshaft into NYC. If he were to accidentally brush against a hip, sexy, young urbanite, the resulting matter-antimatter reaction would cause an explosion of pure energy that could level a city block.
RMMD:
“Son, how about you and I do a cover of ‘Winchester Cathedral’? — we’ve got the kind of sideburns that The New Vaudeville Band sported to be able to pull it off!”
RMMD: ‘Yup: medical, dental, even phone! It’s amazing how easy it is to impersonate an FBI agent…”
CSh: So wait, Ed needed a reminder of the intense pain he’s in? He must be drugged up 3 feet above the pavement.
Plugger: It’s murder, isn’t it? I mean, it looked like a gardening project right up until the axe…
Five words no cheap Plugger wants to hear: Honey, I have an idea. Let’s ditch the chores and take a cruise.
CS: Crankshaft says that literally every time he passes a McDonalds.
CS: Why is his daughter smiling? Your father in is pain… (Oh right, everyone in this comic is a sociopathic asshole)
Edit: Then I remembered that this is Crankshaft we’re talking about, so really any normal person would be happy about this.
RMMD – I’m betting this is all just the classic, let’s fuck with some old man’s head routine….
Crank – That reminds me – Americans of my generation have lots of arch enemies….
Pluggers – “If I had a chicken-woman for a wife, I’d spend the first hour sharpening my ax.”
Abraham Lincoln
Adios Amigos, DJ.
@Hibbleton: I was going to make a joke about entertainer Esme from Mary Worth showing up, but then I remembered that Pluggers is an animal world so she’d probably be a cat girl or something…
My thought is, if Varla enjoys Truck’ work to that completionist degree and she still cut off all contact with the man, it suggests he was a truly terrible husband. But whatever lets you keep your dignity, Truck.
Both Mary Worth and Ed Crankshaft are being pushed out of their own comic strips. But when Crankshaft does show up, he’s still Crankshaft. Mary’s entire personality is being sacrificed on Mount Wilbur. She should be so done with the Weston family’s bullshit by now. And telling them that is also exactly what they need to hear. But after a week of listening to Dawn’s sub-Luann relationship observations, today’s strip ends up with “I’d better clear my schedule to help him deal with the aftermath” of Wilbur’s own inaction and poor choices. And on what planet has Wilbur ever “come out okay” from even the tiniest problem? Good ol’ Meddlin’ Mary seems like a thing of the past.
Dustin : Why isn’t DustinDad the one on the receiving end of this? HE’s the one who golfs! And it’s not like the strip hasn’t done aDustinDad suffers horrific gonad pain bit before! (This was during that really weird “DustinDad has a Frazz-esque obsession with bicycling” phase).
************
Pluggers : Today, the role of Pamela Murdock (née Crankshaft) will be played by Henrietta Beaks, and the role of Ed Crankshaft will be played by Earl Houndstooth. The scene : Pam finally tells her dad she’s putting a stop to him spending tens of thousands of dollars on Bean’s End crap.
***********
Rex Morgan M. D. : My theory of where this storyline is going, is that it’s going to turn out that, regardless of whether Cody is sincere about believing that Truck is his father or not, this was just a scheme to try to get a guitar gig in-between two failed bands that go nowhere.
RMMD: So, Varla’s review would read: ” OK at music, B-A-A-A-D at everything else.”
MW: I cannot believe that Dawn isn’t telling Mary what really happened. I’d dine out on a story like that for years.
Just because it’s Sunday there’s JUNGLE JIM!
I guess Jim was asked to take a flying leap.
JP: ‘Hello? We’re the local Committee to End Over-tourism. This house that you’re about to plaster all over your ‘socials’ could be going to a local family that needs shelter and your job could have easily been done by a native who actually knows about our culture and customs. We don’t need any more empty-headed Americans gushing about how ‘quaint’ our homeland is while doing nothing to contribute to the betterment of our society. You will kindly get back into that rideshare, pay the driver a handsome tip, and let him take you back to the airport so you can go back where you came from.’
Mary Worth: No, Dawn. Humans are not weird. You are weird and your dad is weirder.
Five words no Plugger wants to hear: “You should eat more fiber.”
I’m assuming the discrepancy between long sleeve/long pants and short sleeves/short pants is because the Chicken Lady is undergoing Henopause.
RMMD-“Every night mom would burn one of your albums.”
MW-Let us work on the assumption that Wilbur didn’t know Belle is crazy when he met her.
FC-Where I work there is a pond and we have a family of ducks there.
Crankshaft-“This reminds me of the time in 1940 me and my army buddies marched through Paris.”
@Anonymous: Dammit! I was expecting to see Ed suffering horribly, and I got Ed enjoying playing with his genitals! That guy gets more undeserved nakhes than Wilbur Weston.
MW: Another couple of weeks of this with Wilbur. Ahhhhhh! Belle feed me now!
“Truck, the DNA test results are back… and they are not what I expected”
“You mean I am not your father?”
“No. But I am your father!”
Pluggers: Does the same apply when Dog man says this to Chicken lady or has it been determined that pluggers are male,
@MKay: MW: Dawn is too dim to realize what happened. Or she’s forgetting it already, she has been in Mary “the past is how you remember it” Worth’s orbit for years. She’s probably already re-thinking the whole Belle experience to ignore any details Mary wouldn’t approve of
Cranky — Despite the puzzling and completely unexplainable recent drop in foreign visitors, the Manhattan Committee to End Over-Tourism is still attempting to have Ed Crankshaft sent back across the Hudson. . .
RMMD — Just not sure what “good results” would be in this context. . .
Plugged — “Honey, I have an idea. Let’s stop trying to cut the grass with an axe, OK?”
MW – Dawn saw a hunk and got moist. The hunk was a jerk. Dawn is heartbroken. OK, I get it.
Pluggers: Chicken Lady leaning in, eyes narrowed, hand hidden behind her back, is downright ominous! The axe is visible in the background, but it’s cold comfort. She could be concealing any number of murder weapons. Any number, I say!
RMMD – Of course there’s not really a package delivery service called “Express.” That box is just a decoy! As soon as Maybe-Truck-Junior was gone, the guy inside the Express Box costume stood up and shuffled away, privately hoping he’d snagged some valuable items or documents. He’s in for a big disappointment.
Crankshaft – This is the only way a Batiuk cartoon will ever be called a triumph.
Don Abundio, translated:
“The boss believes he’s discovered a rare new tree species”
“Oh! That must be very exciting!”
“Yeah”
“I don’t have the heart to tell him it’s just a flag”
@nescio: That’s the stage that comes between “layer” and “Arroz con Pollo” right?
CS – “Next, let’s go to Tiffany’s so I can make a joke about being hungry for breakfast. Then we’ll go to Lincoln Center where I can make a Hannibal Hamlin joke. I haven’t worked that one out in my head yet, but I’m sure it will totally land. Damn, I never realized New York was a fountainhead of comedy material… Fountainhead! Let’s go to Ayn Rand’s house so I can make an Objectivism joke!”
FG: They do a nice job with the Sunday recaps by giving them a narrator. Unfortunately a bit boring this week what with Bok being the only character, guess I was wondering if they’d find some high-flying bird or whatnot.
DT: I’m sure this is already an incoherent mess, but the problem with technobabble time-travel accidents is that bits could come back and get explained, so we can’t be sure what to snark about until we find the un-tied-up story threads at the end
@Peanut Gallery: Wow. That’s just one hell of a Divot to make on a simple putt.
@Bob Tice: Actually, the branches of a parabolic arc diverge to infinity.
DT: okay something new
MW: really seems there was a missing set of images where the Westons find defaced photo snd somehow learn of the prior poisoning attempts. I guess they were lost in the mail.
RMMD: okay next week we’ll see the package get picked up by Planetary Express.
JP: These images help justify the pictures taken of the house the writer and artist rented insuring their recent Norwegian vacation. Their accountant asked them to itemize and document all the expenses. It also helps bolster their claim with to get monies from the Tourist board.
@CanuckDownSouth: I was hoping for the SnowBeast, frankly.
C’shaft: Crankshaft visits his daughter in NYC pretty regularly, right? And yes, everyone has their favorite haunts and the Met can’t be done in a single day even if you exclude the Cloisters, but surely by now Chris would be taking him to little local places she’s fond of, or at the very least something that isn’t a heavily trafficked tourist attraction? Then again, this is Crankshaft’s daughter we’re talking about, she’s been in New York twenty years and probably still behaves like she just got off the plane from Cleveland.
RMMD: So Varla both a) bitterly resented Truck Tyler to the point where she never told him she was pregnant and certainly didn’t tell her son anything about him until she was on her deathbed and b) pined obsessively over him to the point where she was never able to move on and collected his entire creative output. Good, glad that’s cleared up.
Crank: Wonder why the African-American couple is smirking at the Washington Arch.
“Washington! Sucker freed his slaves in his will. Not Jefferson! He left them in human bondage, even though most of them were his kids! Now, that’s a real businessman.”
DT: The nice thing about putting a Time Machine in your comic strip is you can make your characters do the same thing over and over until they get it right.
no one’s going to comment on what a plugger might do with an axe, a few sacks of quicklime, and some shovels to dig a shallow grave? dark. especially as the chicken lady seems really into it
@Lord Flatulence:
Well, you and I know that, but Ed doesn’t. :-)
Crankshaft: After all the other “Ed doing things nobody visiting NYC would” entries, I have to acknowledge today’s strip for verisimilitude: Only a tourist would go to Washington Square Park to buy pot.
BG&SS: Everything in Hootin’ Holler has a patch on it, including fire extinguishers, light bulbs, and propane tanks. “Broke my fav’rite flower vase an’ glued it back t’gether”? How could you tell?
Beetle Bailey: Wait, the steno pool has a new girl (sic) named Toots? Watch out, Miss Buxley. You’ve got competition.
Pluggers: Mr. Houndstooth is sizing up his chicken-bride, wondering if he emptied the wheelbarrow, could she fit into it for a nice fricassee? The axe is right there…
DT: I wasn’t sure where they were going with all this, and I certainly never would have guessed “a painting that opens a portal to Hell,” but I am 100% here for it.
Dustin: Personally I think this would have been a lot funnier if it depicted the aftermath, with Dustin glaring at his friend and his underwear hiked up way in the back. But that would have contradicted the central tenet of this strip, which is that Dustin is the scapegoat for the entire populace under 40 and as such must always suffer.
JP: Dear Mr. Manley: If the script you’ve been given says a scene is “beyond charming,” you may want to put a little more effort into depicting it beyond “vaguely European.”
MW: I prefer to read Mary’s last line with an air of tired resignation. “Well, Wilbur shat the bed again, I suppose that means I spend another afternoon listening to him whine about it. God, does he think I have nothing better to do than to babysit him? There are other people in Charterstone to meddle, you know! I haven’t looked in on Toby in ages; she’s probably a complete mess by now…”
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
T.S. Eliot, The Waist Land
Rex Morgan: This comic seems to pride in taking the famously melodramatic plots and tropes of soap operas and making them as bland and boring as possible. If this was a telenovela, there’d be a lot more screaming in spanish and it’d be much more fun.
Pluggers: Pluggers live in constant fear that their spouse is plotting their murder… and with good reason.
RMMD: “Truck, I’d like you to give a listen to this little song I wrote – “Mama Said Once Was Enough!” It’s a duet where you sing about what a jerk husband you were, then I do a counterpoint about how she was always listening to your records and could never forget you. See, it’s ambiguous what the hook – once was enough – means!”
“Say what now?”
@51 ectojazzmage: on Rex Morgan: If Rex Morgan was a telenovela, there’d be a lot more eyebrow arching and low cut dresses with much exposed cleavage too.
Don’t forget Stuyvsant Square so I can ridicule people with peg legs.
Shaft – “Hah! Your arches are killing you, but that arch killed thousands of people! Or, at least, it celebrates doing it! Such is life, no?”
9CL: Brooke could learn a thing or two from Greg Evans and step up his game from catty, passive-aggressive comments to actual humiliation of the avatar of the girl who turned him down in school, 60 years ago.
Dustin: “Fitch only pawn in game of golf.” I was going to rant about whether this strip was more or less relatable to young readers than Luann, but I realized young readers weren’t the target audience for either strip.
@taig:
You gotta understand Mary Rosenzweig ALSO represents “Amos and Edda having ALWAYS passionately loved each other since THE WOMB is, at best, a really obvious retcon (at worst, it’s an outright lie)”. So she’s also an avatar for the beefwits who dare criticise this comic strip.
I thought that was the Arc de Triomphe, but realized two things – it’s not big enough and the real thing is in the middle of a traffic circle, and there is no way Crankshaft would ever travel out of the States, especially to somewhere he’d consider an effete socialist hellscape like France.
***
That guitar suddenly appearing despite Truck not asking for it was puzzling until it occurred to me that this whole “you’re my dad” thing is a scam to wrangle a free private concert from our favourite* roots country star.
*It’s between Truck and Mud Mountain Murphy. I don’t know any others, do you?
Not going to talk about comics. Just wanted to say, I own a videogame, where the final boss threatens the heroes by saying that once he kills them, he’ll enter the real world and attack the person playing the very videogame that they’re in. *Shows the player’s profile picture to really hammer it in*
My profile picture is a Penguin driving a Go-Kart, so when I get to that scene it will seriously kill any mood that the game was going for.
@Anonymous: Brooke has changed Mary Rosenzweig into a hapless perennial punching bag, much like Lynn Johnston and Patterson Dentist Adultery Husband.
@Anonymous: Are you implying that they loved each-other since they were both fetus’s in the womb?? Not only that is really really creepy but wouldn’t that suggest them being twin siblings?
Chicken Plugger Breaks Bad: Episode 2.
With her Trader Joe Prune operation picking up steam, it’s time to chop up and bury some bodies.
@Anonymous: True. Brooke despises critics of his perfect, beautiful work.
@59 The Rambling Otter: Good one, Otter!
CS: We get it, Crank. You can’t stand it when anyone is enjoying themselves so you have to make them miserable.
MW: Dawn is acting like she knew Belle was crazy all along because of her “bad vibes.” No, Dawn, you were acting like a jealous six year old because Belle was taking your dad’s attention and you had no idea about the attempted poisonings. Even when you were talking to Cathy (Ack!), you spent a good amount of the conversation whining about you wanting to spend time with your daddy. And again with Dirk? Yes, he was a bullying asshole and emotionally abusive but you ended the relationship in the most cowardly way possible by assaulting him with a bowling ball before sneaking out with Jared and his blow up doll. Things just ended right there; he didn’t try to stalk you or even sue you for assault (which you did). There was no closure because being a Weston, you get to avoid any consequences.
@TheDiva: JP: Dear Mr. Manley: If the script you’ve been given says a scene is “beyond charming,” you may want to put a little more effort into depicting it beyond “vaguely European.”
Compare Manley’s work in Judge Parker to his art on the Phantom. It’s clear he’s as bored with Marciuliano’s writing as the rest of us and just wants to get it over with.
Heathcliff: Someone just straight-up snuck a reference to the original Final Fantasy into Kitty Korner. Maybe Gallagher and team are so far out of touch with the video game milieu that they can’t recognize the plot of a genre-defining game released in the US 35 years ago, but maybe they just published it to show their own commitment to Chaos.
Mary Worth – “Humans are weird.” How would she know. Oh, well, she probably figured that out when she was on the crew of the mother ship that beamed up a human being and probed him.
Mary is slipping. She forgot:
It’s always darkest before the dawn.
It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
It was meant to be.
Life is what you make it.
Time heals all wounds.
Maybe she was saving these for Wilbur.
Crankshaft – No. Not an indulgent smirk. She should be rolling her eyes like Madi or the Italian prime minister.
Rex Morgan – I have to take a break from this. I can’t take the action and suspense.
JP – My understanding is that long flights eastward are overnight flights. They arrive in the morning at the destination, so the passengers have a full day ahead of them. Why is it dark here? Did Sophie and Reena spend the day hanging out at the airport waiting for their ride?
@Tabby Lavalamp: I like to imagine Crankshaft is visiting the Arc of Triumph. The one in Pyongyang.
@Majicou:
Garland from Final Fantasy being “JACK Garland” is something that was established in the more recent reimagining “Stranger of Paradise : Final Fantasy”, a game that came out in 2022.
@69 I speak Jive: on Judge Parker: To add to your confusion, this time of year, that area of the world has about 18 hours of light between sunrise and sunset. It only gets almost dark for only a few hours of the remaining 6.
Pluggers. Why does the chicken have breasts? It’s a bird, not a mammal. Mammal: it’s right there in the name.
Sunday Mary Worth Quotevestigation: Ah ha! Ah ha! Ah ha ha ha! I get to bust one for the first time in a while. “If you want to see the sun shine [note the space], you have to weather the storm” is widely attributed to controversial baseball executive Frank Lane, but the first use I can find of it is by controversial baseball owner Charlie Finley, in 1977 on the occasion of his loss in a lawsuit against MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn over Kuhn voiding his sale of Rollie Fingers, Joe Rudi, and Vida Blue to the Yankees.
Finley describes it as an “old adage,” so perhaps he picked it up from Frank Lane in 1961 Lane worked for him as the general manager of the (then) Kansas City Athletics. But why should we think so? There’s a book of baseball quotations which attributes it to Lane in 1961, but three lines above it attributes a quote to Stengel that ends “You could look it up,” the title of James Thurber’s classic baseball story, so I have no reason to trust its attributions.
Busted, busted, busted! (Tentatively.)
There are people asking in CK what the Your Drawing is in Slylock. Its one of those South American gopher things. A Capybara. It’s a darn good rendition too. Don’t make fun of it.
Is Ed in Washington Square Park? I haven’t been there in a few decades but last time I was U bought some of the devil’s lettuce. It was the place to go.
@Be kind and rewind: I not U
@BigTed: Ed’s gotten a job as the NY Malaprop Tour Guide.
“Good news from your DNA test! You have DNA! This means you are either a human, an animal, a plant, a fungus or a bacterium and not a subspecies of virus!”
CS: real query: does NYC have a place like this or did they get magically whooshed to Paris?
PHANTOM: Time trippin’. So #21 saw the WW Ii c ash in the real time, found wreck and fold in present time? Ethically, after pilfering gold, shouldn’t he have reported bones so families can have closure?
CURTIS: a new religion is created
“The Romans built their arches to celebrate military triumphs over vanquished nations, but the only thing arches reminds me is the immediate pain that comes with old age.” Crankshaft goes full Ecclesiastes and I love it!
@John Plugger Mellencamp: I would guess that it’s more that he gets paid a living wage for the still internationally popular Phantom, and minimum wage for Judge Parker, which is pretty much unknown outside this blog.
Pluggers don’t want to hear the five words! Since their children cut all contacts with them and social media is their only means of communication with the outside world, they are only interested in fourteen words
“Hi, you psychologically scarred my mother for life. I hope this test proves I share DNA with you”
TG: an extra PLUGGER today. I can identify.
FBoFW: this pun to is actually chuckle worthy, rather than tired kid is actually grandkid mistake.
PV: any word on our friend Melody Thee Mare? The pirates of course are only non threatening actors, but the waves and collisions might be real. She and her understudies might be pretty sea sick in steerage.
PLUGGERS: Dog-man: “They’re having ideas now? I knew that ‘women’s lib’ stuff would go too far!”