Even passive enjoyment leaves pluggers exhausted
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Dick Tracy, 10/5/25
Longtime readers of this blog know that I have a lot of favorite etymological facts. One of those favorites is that the word “electrocute” was coined in 1889 by combining “electricity” and “execute,” and was originally meant to market the then-new electric chair; its use for being killed by electricity in non-judicial contexts only came later. That’s why I’m excited to see that Diet Smith Enterprises has an “Electrothanasia Room,” which I assume involves painless, voluntary death via electricity. Over the past few years in this strip, there have been hints that Diet Smith has shifted from playing the role for Dick Tracy that Q plays for James Bond to something darker, where he has his own shadowy agenda not always aligned with the MCU. Anyway, that seems to be confirmed today, when Dick is about to get electrothanized, or maybe electrocuted, or I guess just zapped, by a lady Diet Smith Enterprises was trying to sign on to its Superweapon Incubator program.
Pluggers, 10/5/25
Pluggers’ own failing bodies deny them even their most keenly anticipated pleasures! The thing about this strip is that in general it makes being a plugger sound frankly awful.
59 replies to “Even passive enjoyment leaves pluggers exhausted”
FC-But Billy will end up doing this comic.
MW-“And you, sir.” “I have a name!”
RMMD-Somebody stayed up late listening to Bill Cosby’s “Chocolate Cake” routine.
Pluggers:
What happened to your lingua in this panel, anyway, Jellicle? — let me guess: cat got your tongue!
Phantom:
“Hey! What did you do with Baron von Richthofen, you anthropomorphized eggplant?”
Family Circlejerk – Billy will never get to first base.
Pluggers The lucky ones wake up!
Dick Tracy:
“Don’t make a move, Detective! — I’m the genuine stigma, style and ovary of a flower!”
“No. Don’t say it, sir.”
“Yep. I’m a real pistil!”
DT: Blondie tells Tess to stop before revealing the grift that the combination German Luger / SuperSoaker doesn’t actually do anything.
Dick Tracy: Have you people looked at your chairs, your outfits, and especially that gun? Sheesh, just call it “the green room.”
Pluggers: You’re a plugger if you actually do know how to work your DVR, but somehow you’ve set it to record every episode of “My Three Sons” on Cozi TV (fun fact: they made 380 half-hour shows over 12 years!), so there’s no space left for sports.
Mary Worth: “The dogs will keep you company!” says Saul. “Yes, and provide us with a nice, soft landing,” thinks Olive. “Well, two of us, anyway. That balloon operator knew what he was getting into when he took this job!”
Blondie: So Dagwood doesn’t work in a huge, cavernous office building after all. It’s not even a giant, empty void. Nope, turns out it’s an ice rink! No wonder Mr. Dithers has such a weird leadership style — he’s breathing Zamboni fumes all day.
Hi and Lois: So in today’s Sunday funnies we have… Lois developing a lingering depression following a near-death experience. (Pause for laughter, I guess?) At least Chip has a better perspective on things — the punchline is that he’s a callous teenage jerk! (More laughter, the end.)
MW: There’s a connection, aka bridge, aka sax solo, between everything. —Max Shorter
MW: Olive: “That was fun! What adventure should we have NEXT?”
Mary: Drives Olive to the airport, duct tapes her to a chair and goes home.
DT: I think Josh has been led astray by Diet Smith’s eccentricities. The “Electrothanasia Room,” to all appearances, is what a more normal corporation would call “Meeting Room C.”
Phantom:
This guy’s causing mischief? — oh, yes; you’re darn Teuton
But Phantom’s the guy for whom we all are rootin’
His inflight ripostes are laconic and droll —
He’s guiding the aircraft to Jungle Patrol
There’s some kind of time warp that’s here on display
My liberal arts background says, “Huh? — what the hey!?!”
While our sentient chutist displays vitriol
It’s somehow connected to Jungle Patrol
I wonder just what will become of this flight
But plot resolution will take place tonight
This primitive aircraft will lack cruise control
Yet, Phantom will guide it to Jungle Patrol
LUANN: Red Letter Day. A key arc pivots 180°
CURTIS: Curtis reveals how “discussions” revert to “cussin’s” at home.
Pluggers: Pluggers have so little inner life that even their dreams are about snoring. Well, that, or Zorro, or the Russian army.
DT: If I hear “Electrothanasia room”, I’m imagining a mad science dungeon full of crackling spark generators and beds covered in chains and straps. Discovering it’s just an IKEA-furnished conference room with a complimentary buffet of coffee and cookies… well, it makes me regret modernity a little bit.
MW: Eve adds with disgust in her voice; “And Mary, fix your hair. You’re a mess.”
DT: “Guest writer- Elvis Costello”? This whole meeting should have taken place in the Imperial Bedroom!
In a just universe, the purple chair cover with pink polka dots and the pink ottoman cover with purple polka dots would annihilate each other like matter and antimatter.
FBoFW: everything Ellie and Connie are saying is true and noteworthy. But on the advice from other Mudges, I for one have learned to keep my mouth shut. Come to find out, there’s no benefit from groaning when we get up from chair or floor. We’ve always lost our keys or wondered what we went to a room.
RwO: a true Halloween horror story. It’s good to use a flashlight while reading, then suddenly flash to a listener at a startling point (they may wet their pants)
.
@MKay:#10. MW: MK– good one!
It’s time for Sunday’s JUNGLE JIM!
“We be dropin’ like flies, Massah.”
DT: Shouldn’t Dick at least have a gun drawn when he bursts through the door, rather than starting off in the “I surrender” pose?
@MKay: Dream on. In strip time, we’re still only on day 2 of Olive’s “mini-vacation.” We’ll probably suffer more of this until late November, when Moy realizes she simply has to do the usual Thanksgiving strip, and ends up resorting to a Judge Parker style “skipping ahead a few months”.
FRAZZ: “The cheap seats”– that’s the inoffensive if bland term. At events I love working high in the bleachers (food or tshirts) though we make less per sale simply because kids and elderly are such fun, enthusiastic customers. Really can’t see over the wall though.
Crankshaft is still trying to make “climate damage” happen. It’s kind of adorable, really.
DT: I refuse to believe that Dick Tracy would have opened that door without having his gun already drawn and at the ready.
MW: I was racking my brain trying to figure out why Saint Olive of the Tummy Brainrot would use her special and unique “gift” to summon Greta and Max for help. Then it hit me: Olive kept claiming that she saw fairies and she probably mistook Saul and Eve for the Fair Folk.
Pluggers are actually aware that football is incredibly boring, but can’t face the peer pressure that insists it’s exciting.
Never mind “Plano, Texas is a suburb where the median household income is six figures.” That ship has sailed. Plano, Texas is so legendarily dedicated to high school football that I, an arrant Yankee, know about it. Why are you, Plano Plugger, falling asleep in front of a prime-time NFL game instead of falling asleep in the (googles) John Clark Stadium stands, like the good lord intended?
MW: they’re stuck in a tree. I’m old and unathletic but I’d climb down. What’s wrong with these people?
@matt w: Admittedly my information is from Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, where in “The Romance of Football” she says that Plano is usually in the championship, and quotes a fan saying that he always roots for Plano because even the thrill of being the underdog who wins the big game can’t beat the mortification of being the favorite who loses. And that book is from 1991, whereas I see that last week Plano got annihilated by Allen 56-0. So I guess with the ultra-suburbanization of Plano, Plano football has fallen, which I think it would be in the true spirit of Pluggerdom to be seething about, and a true Pluggers would… oh crap I’m a meta-plugger.
@Professor Well Actually: But then Mary and Olive won’t be the center of attention when the media shows up to try and get the story. They need to foolishly keep themselves in danger and soak up the accolades, especially when Olive talks about how she was the one who saved everyone by using her Shinning to summon the dogs.
DT: “Of course, subrider 27C contains the usual legalese: ‘This contract null and void in the event party of the first part zaps cops to death….’ You know, the ‘death ray clause.’”
DT: For a nerdy kinetochem researcher/engineer, Tess has serious Quick Draw McGraw moves.
DT: Cite this next time people scoff at comics
According to the Internet (Wiki) and not some hallucinating AI, electrothanasia was a term to describe humane death by electricity as opposed to electrocution, and appeared in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1889 (later would morph into the New England Journal of Medicine)
Volume 121, No. 11, Page 265 under the heading of “Miscellany” in reaction to electrocution as a death penalty. It appaered as part of the American Social Science Association meeting held in Saratoga, NY.
‘ Dr. Frederick Peterson, of New York, discussed and opposed “ Electricity as a Death Penalty,” maintaining that there is a want of harmony between electrothanasia, as it takes place, and the humane ideal of death by electricity as it seems to have been pictured in the minds of the promotors of the new law.’ So is this what Faust as the agent for Diet Smith wants? or is this Faust’s own agenda? The zapped utility workers didn’t seem to be humanely treated.
Also on the program, Dr. Pliny Earle of Northhapmton read a paper on “Popular fallacies concerning the insane.” Dr. Stephen Smith then presented a paper on “The committment and care of the insane”. This was followed by Dr. Louise Fiske Bryson with a paper on “The dangerous classes and the modern doctor.” By dangerous, she listed “criminals, inebriates of all kinds, the insane, the feeble minded, the illiterate, the poor and the uneducated.” In particular, she notes “the poor, illieterate , the uneducated… are necessarily dangerous”.So I supppose Dr. Fiske Bryson would be in fair of electrothanasia for the dangerous classes !?
And again, why is Tess flipping out and why borrow from a loan shark? One solution is that she is secretly a drug addict and takes amphetamines to allow her to work for days on end, but that has slowly made her paranoid and dangerous. She takes loan shark money to feed her habit and now she is over the edge.
JP: Okay, now we can move on and never speak of the Norwegian fiasco ever again.
MW: From this it is clear that Stanley is a leper within the ballooing community. A pair of dogs and codgers were able to drive and find them and no one seems to have even noticed! Stanley, wise up, The Santa Royale Balloonist Association is just cliquish bunch of snooty balloon operators who will never welcome an outsider like you! They just want your annual dues and a place to dump customer they woudl not want to deal with.
Forgive the typos – fat fingers on a small screen
Pluggers lead such empty joyless lives that they spend each summer looking forward to the return of something that bores them into a coma, then spend the next summer convincing themselves they miss it again.
Garfield: I know of Garfield, Jon, Odie, Arlene, Nermal and, presumably, Floyd the mouse (that was the name of the mouse on the Garfield and Friends animated series). But has the big purple dog ever been given a name? He’s been a regular for the past 20 or so years, but what’s hit name??
Sorry, “his”. I mistyped!
MW: “We’re going to get help…and be RIGHT BACK!”
Saul and Eve start across the road to the Vast, Deep Forest Shopping Mall. Saul opens his large mouth as he swivels his incredibly large head back in Mary’s direction and yells, “Can we pick up anything for you while we’re there?”
MW: “You know how to make a million dollars playing jazz saxophone? Start out with two million dollars. Ah ha ha ha. Ah ha ha ha.” — Wayne Shorter
Phantom: ”Shoot myself with the gun? The gun is pointed at you. I am flying on a military aircraft so it’s pretty likely I know how guns work. This is a real brain teaser, this is.”
I am trying to parse Blondie … is Dithers about to pull a Vader “I have altered the deal” to their contractual vacation days? If so, one week per year for salaried work is pretty skimpy even by US standards. On the other hand, Dagwood is a typical employee there so the workers probably couldn’t get hired anywhere else even if they were the boss’ kid.
But it really sounds like the company offer an extra vacation (for everyone at the same time, as the company’s “week off”??) which they’re going to reduce from a week to a day? Which… doesn’t make a lick of sense, but when has that stopped a cartoonist?
(I assume this is for the 2026 contract renewals and Cipher Company can continue to produce its vague outputs with a reduced workforce, so they either aren’t concerned or are even hoping for employees to quit rather than take the reduced benefits, so *that* part doesn’t bother me)
Dick Tracy: Every conference room has a ghoulish name. “The Electrothanasia Room.” ” The Poisonarama Room.” “Guillotine Lounge.” “The Suffocatearium.” Diet Smith Industries pays like crap, but it’s fun to work there.
DT – Don’t you just hate that? You’ve had a dedicated Electrothanasia Room sitting empty for years, and just when you finally have a use for it, the cops show up!
Pluggers think they’re asleep.
Slylock Fox Mystery: How could you be so wrong, Mouse. It IS the EVILSCARYCLOWN. It’s right there in the name, EVIL! Right there in front of you, bigger than life.
Don Abundio, translated:
“I’ve been sweating buckets, Doc”
“And it has this weird chemical smell, like formaldehyde!”
“It’s nothing serious, is it?”
@17 nescio: You’re a plugger if your hideous furniture doesn’t match.
Luann: Are the Evansii planning to pull the plug? Usually having a character finally do something, when pointedly NOT doing that something that has been a running gag since the strip began, is a sign they want to wrap things up on a big shocker.
JP: Tomorrow’s strip, “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnndddddddddddddd so, we turn our attention back to… uh… that black chick Randy, or Sam, or whoever, was briefly interested in when she ran for Mayor.”
RMMD: Uh, everyone? Why is Rex doing his ‘Dopey Dad’ shtick while looking at the audience? I’m scared!
@Schroduck: More mad scientist dungeons could use a complimentary buffet of coffee and cookies.
@42 Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women: I’ve had far too many meetings in “The Suffocatearium.”
DT: That’s not a coffee-and-cookie buffet. To me it looks like an ice bucket, fresh rocks glasses, and two bottles of brown liquor. Roberta is submissively sipping her coffee but is secretly dying for a big glass of Scotch, neat.
Blondie: At first reading I assumed Dithers was cutting the vacations but going for a four-day week, giving his employees 52 paid days off yearly. Generous in one sense, but making it nearly impossible for anyone to ever leave town. It would cost a lot of money, but would keep them all miserable.
Fun fact: during the “Current Wars” between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, Edison wanted “electrocution” to be called “getting Westinghoused” because alternating current (Westinghouse’s preferred mode of electricity delivery) was thought to be–and in fact is–much more dangerous than Edison’s preference, direct current.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_currents
Dick Tracy: Oh no, Mae Martin is going to kill Dick Tracy!
@treetown: Love your 1889 conference synopsis.
I wonder what the papers were like.
I suspect that they had helpful suggestions like Brian Kilmeade’s “involuntary lethal injections” for homeless people (delivered live on ‘Fox & Friends’)
I remember reading an article which said Thomas Edison created the first mass media smear campaign (planting stories in newspapers) to promote electrocution as capital punishment. Tommy said it showed his Direct Current system was safer than George Westinghouse’s Alternating Current.
@Lot_49: Apologies, Lot.
Great minds think alike.
I saw a guy the other day wearing a t-shirt with advertising mascot Reddy Kilowatt.
Reddy was shaking hands with a child while holding a butcher’s knife in his other hand.
Caption: “be careful. Electricity will kill you, kid.”
The fools! They weaponized Nickelodeon’s slime! By the gods, they will learn the error of their ways when their children ascend to adulthood and release the fearsome power of skibidi toilets.
Dick Tracy: And here I thought this meeting room was dedicated to bringing the power forward Athanasios “Thanasis” Antetokounmpo from the Milwaukee Bucks to the Neo-Chicago Bulls? You know, something interesting?
Pluggers: I’m relieved to see it’s not Andy in that recliner, because somebody needs to make sure this plugger is still alive, and I’ve always heard you shouldn’t poke the bear.
Stripey Pants: Boy. Kit is going through a lot of trouble to get a plane for his trophy room.
Maybe he should try EBay.
Prince Valiant: After hearing Aleta’s offer, the Travellers quickly form a ‘sniffer’s row’ in the forest.
Say what you will about Pluggers, at least they know how to program a smart TV. (Henry Mitchell: not a Plugger.)