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.
169 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!”
Rex Morgan, MD – There is many a jersey-chasing women who hope to get knocked up and get 18 years of child support, but not in this case. Varla wanted to raise her own boy, a new Elvis, so she raise a roots country singer. Then she made sure to surround her bastard son with the right music so he would have the nature and nurture to be a star on his own, without nepotism.
Well, he ended up a session musician, and Varla died of a broken heart wondering how she may have failed her son.
Crankshaft – Crankshaft, visiting the Freedom Tower and 9/11 Memorial: “That reminds me, I always forget to take my memory meds.”
Pluggers – Chicken Lady read about the Native Americans using fish to fertilize their corn. Are fish sentient in this animal universe? We never see them, so maybe nobody in this world would miss one (except for the fish family).
@Banana Jr. 6000: It took until post #17 to mention Mary Worth? Come on y’all, get with it! You’re falling behind the curve!
I don’t think Mary’s personality is being sacrificed. I mean there’s nothing to stop her from, say, spending another week praising herself for “fixing” their relationship issues* over greasy overcooked carp at the Bum Boat.
*Which is not what the problem was, but abuse and mental illness violence don ‘t correspond as well to trite platitudes, so, shh! Don’t tell Mary!
@Activist: Phantom – dunno, in the Phantom-world maybe ghosts are real and the crash was a ghostly vision. It looks like this is the first moment anyone has physically reached the wreck. And the strip does mention the kids disturbed the fallen somehow by finding something closer to home as the reason the ghostly crash was seen.
and Crankshaft is apparently viewing the Washington Square Arch
@Activist: CS: Yes, it’s real. It’s the Washington Square Arch, in Greenwich Village near the NYU campus.
@Activist: CS: real query: does NYC have a place like this or did they get magically whooshed to Paris? Yes, that is Washington Square Park near Greenwich Village. The arch was built during the Gilded Age and commemorates George Washington.
MW: Finally, here comes the Mary Meddle, a day late and a dollar short.
@2+2=7: No spoilers, but I’ve seen enough to know that is NOT going to happen.
DT: Look, I’m a Doctor Who fan, so when I say the Dick Tracy team shouldn’t do sci-fi nonsense because they’re bad at it and it never makes any sense, this is coming from someone with a high tolerance for sci-fi nonsense that doesn’t make any sense.
MW: “I’ve seen your father through several romantic ups and downs in his life, and frankly, I don’t think he’s got enough interiority to actually experience trauma.”
@Rube: I think it’s more that Manley is originally a comic book artist, and The Phantom is more in line with his genuine artistic sensibilities and talents (unless until Manley can convince Marciuliano to start letting him put people in skin-tight, low-cut tops again.)
Pluggers: This one hits close to home. Whenever a woman in my life says “I have an idea” or “I’ve been thinking” it means I’m going to be stuck doing all the heavy lifting in this new scheme of hers.
@TheDiva, @John Plugger Mellencamp, @Rube: To be fair to Manley, he’s possibly also limited by what Drøbak actually looks like. Although, having said that, I haven’t seen that fancy clock tower in any of the pictures online (it’s definitely not the church spire, which is much more squared off). The wood-panelled buildings are right, although I think Soph and Reena might be living in a tourist shop.
@Horace Broon: #96: Wasn’t there a Doctor Who episode where time travelling aliens were financing their schemes by going back in time, buying art cheap from famous artists when they were young nobodies, and coming back to the present selling the art for a fortune?
It would be like going back to the early 1900s, picking up one of Picasso’s Blue Period pieces for probably a hundred francs, and now it’s worth millions.
@95 Banana Jr. 6000: I can’t see future strips but I’m confident in saying Mary won’t be slapping the everloving shit out of Wilbur, much as he needs it. I guess it’s all for the best; I don’t want to overburden Mr. Allora cleaning it up.
The exact sound those boxes make! BTW :Clunk!’ is also the correct SFX for a 8-Track player changing tracks! :P
@Be kind and rewind: @Activist: @Joshua K.: etc etc: See #44, which even includes a link. Everybody fucking posts, nobody fucking reads.
JP: I’ll give Manley this one. To these two apple-pie bimbos, who grew up among suburban strip malls and fast food outlets, “vaguely European” counts as “beyond charming.”
”Look, Reena! A man in an apron is bringing a china cup of coffee — and a SAUCER — RIGHT TO that lady’s table! She didn’t even have to get up and fill a cardboard cup by herself! What sort of wonderful magical place IS Norway?”
Five words no plugger wants to hear: “Honey, let’s have sex tonight.”
CS: Canuck, Joshua, Guy #91, 92, #93, thanks for the info. I’ve been to NYC only twice so guess id better go again as there’s far more to see and do. Wonder if Pam would be my guide.
@Guillermo el Chiclero: Art dealer: “If it’s a genuine Picasso from his blue period, why is the paint still wet?”
In my house the shower doubles as a think tank. I can be 100% certain that when my spouse takes a shower they will emerge with an idea, solution or a plan. My showers are mentally uneventful but my spouse’s showers can solve the world’s problems if given enough time.
@Banana Jr. 6000: Both Mary Worth and Ed Crankshaft are being pushed out of their own comic strips
__________________________________________
Making way for the debut of “CRANKSHAFT& WORTH – A-HOLES FOR HIRE” coming soon to a desperate newspaper near you!
@Baja Gaijin: Are we ever going to see Mr. Allora again or does Brigman have an aversion to drawing people who aren’t WASPs or pale faced Asian NPCs?
Barney Googled and Snuffed Out Smith: Aunt always said “Don’t play with your balls in the broken down shack!”
“Ha ha, it’s funny because” isn’t a bit, it’s just stupid and repetitive.
@Joshua K.: @Activist: CS: Yes, it’s real
__________________________
But is it spectacular?
@Nobody: My baths or showers help me think, but only useless trivia such as “I believe that Mr. Clean may be a genie”
I mean, he does that arm-fold, wears an earrings, teleports everywhere, and has a product called “Magic Eraser”
@Chicory Cat: Pluggers. Why does the chicken lady have breasts?
_____________________
To supply that fancy McArnold’s in NYC with McNuggets.
Today’s Beat Up Bailey is fart joke, right?
@Guillermo el Chiclero: Pluggers: This one hits close to home. Whenever a woman in my life says “I have an idea” or “I’ve been thinking” it means I’m going to be stuck doing all the heavy lifting in this new scheme of hers
_____________________________
How long were you married to Lucy Macgillacuddy-Ricardo?
It’s not just Crankshaft that’s a bad person, tbh really it’s everyone involved in the making of it and Funky Winkerbean, and all the characters in both strips. Look at how smug everyone is in this Crankshaft, nauseating.
@Bits Should Be Funny: Kind of like dumb, on the nose, user names?
You just can’t help yourself can you?
@The Rambling Otter: He telaports?
@The Rambling Otter: He telaports?
@The Rambling Otter: I just thought he came out of the product container which also lends itself to your genie theory
CS: I’ve never complained about my arches hurting, nor have I heard anyone else complain about that..I have said my feet hurt, let’s find a place to sit down and maybe have a drink.
@GarrisonSkunk:
lol. Toot as in tooting his own horn I
imagine.
Fart joke: A couple is sitting in church when the wife taps her husband and says “I just let out a long, silent fart. What should I do?” The husband replies “Change your hearing aid batteries.”
CS: Pam let him buy hundreds of dollars worth of gardening equipment so he could be gone during growing season. I’d take that trade. Except I’d make it a one way ticket to pay back that bitch sister for leaving cranky to be cared for in perpetuity.
FBoFW: Dumb.
MW: “I’ll talk to him and try to help him PROCESS the aftermath…”
Mary would do better if she helped Wilbur process the FOREMATH, as a way to prevent him from endlessly repeating his relationship debacles.
@Nobody: Well, suddenly appears out of nowhere is sort of the same thing I guess.
You make a good point too though, about him coming out of the container.
@Anonyminimouse: I’m pretty sure that was the ending of a scifi short story about someone trying to enrich themselves via time travel(:
@TheDiva: You think Manley’s gonna put more effort into the art than Ces puts int the script?
Wait, I take it back. We’re more specific than “somewhere in Europe” so maybe Ces bought a Lonely Planet book.
@CanuckDownSouth: I’m pretty sure it’s led to the unmasking of Kopy Kat’s scams in about a dozen different Slylock Fox puzzles…
@richardf8:Uncle Lumpy once said something along the lines of “Judge Parker is a side hustle for both Ces and Manley, and it kind of shows”.
@Rube: So, JP is scraping the bottom of two barrels?
@Charterstoned: The best foremath for Dawn and Wilbur is to spay and neuter them.
@Nobody: Capybaras figure prominently it Nancy Beiman’s Furbabies. Did today’s terrific artist get Capybara fever at the zoo, from Beiman’s strip, or from living in a country that has them? Inquiring minds want to know!
It was cool Truck’s son rented the Emotional-Response Room. Colors change! From sea foam, to orange, to void, to sea foam, to sea fo…actually, it’s a whole lotta sea foam. Emotional Meaning: Hey, There’s That Guy
Nancy: What in the world kind of vehicle are they driving, where there’s a large bar down the middle of the windshield?
HOTC: The same text message is typed correctly in one panel but has a spelling error in the next.
A&J: Arlo is dead but hasn’t realized it.
@A Grave Mind: Since Truck put the Glenwood Motel on the map with his hit roots country single, the proprietors have remodeled it into a fantasy sex destination.
The Emotional-Response Room is fairly popular with the locals, but I was hoping Cody would get put into the T0rture Dungeon. “Come in, Pop! Say, you think you could get me out of this thing?”
JP: Wow! A building! What’l l they think of next?
@Ukulele Ike:
You’re sick and twisted, Uke. I respect that in a man.
@Lord Flatulence:
I wish I’d thought of this. You owe me a laughing fit, Flatulence!
@Anonymous: Happy to help.
@Ukulele Ike: Jane! Stop this crazy thing!
@Lord Flatulence:
Was me, botched that somehow. Funny shit, amigo
@Lord Flatulence:
Now you’re just making me look bad
@Tom T.: Janis moved out.
@richardf8: We can only speculate
@Ettorre: Wow. Pretty broad brush you got there. All Pluggers are 1488 people?.
C-Shaft: The Af-Am couple are smiling rather than wincing, so they must be out of earshot.
RMMD: “Yeah, she always said the original pressings would skyrocket in value when your wretched lifestyle brought you to an early demise.”
DT: All the other hipsters have made Pabst Blue Ribbon—once the brand of ne’er do well Frank Booth—too trendy, so now Icarus Lovejoy drinks the even sketchier Suds.
Dustin: Let Dustin take this as a lesson. If a young man who’s always wearing cargo shorts plays golf, it should be with frisbees.
HtH: Helga has somehow never looked up while she was in bed so she’s just learning that she has the Kielbasa of Damocles hanging over her head.
JP: Thank God someone else is with them. This was threatening to become the most boring week in Parker history.
Luann: Nancy probably graduated high school in the early 90s so yeah, maybe she could have married Jerry Seinfeld.
MW: Never mind romantic ups and downs, Wilbur has repeatedly come out okay—well, you know, by his standards—after falling off of boats in the middle of the ocean. The sea refuses to accept him, which is understandable.
@151 Artist formerly known as Ben: on HtH
Helga never saw the brocade of meat since she is always on top.
@Sequitur: @Sequitur: Ok…ewww…just…ewww
@A Grave Mind: It looks like he found an emotional response mailbox too, assuming that’s supposed to be a USPS box.
@146 Lord Flatulence:
The rapture came. Arlo didn’t make it.
@154 Sequitur: Janis is at the gynecologist getting a vay-jay-jay tightening. Arlo’s on the way to get another Polaroid camera to make more photos for their “special” archive.
@139 Lord Flatulence:
Wait until daylight and they see the rest of the city.
In honor of Spargelzeit!, how about a nice cool beverage?
I read a week ahead in Judge Parker. Just let me say they haven’t forgotten about April. But that’s for next Saturday.
@157 Baja Gaijin:
Asparagus, pimento, milk and lemon. What could go wrong?
Well, it is skim milk. That’s almost like water.
@159 Sequitur: What could go wrong? Almost everything. Gotta love a drink that Pluggers recognize as a liquid involved in colonoscopy prep.
PLUGGERS: “Honey, I have an idea. Our yard is surrounded by a very tall solid wooden wall, oops, I mean privacy fence, so no one gives a shit what our yard looks like except us, and we are a dog and a chicken, so we don’t give a shit either. Let’s save ourselves some trouble and just mow it occasionally so it stays about five inches high and supports short weedy blooming flowers that will help birds, pollinators, air, water, etcetera. Native landscaping would be better, but we’re lazy, so let’s just give ourselves and the planet a break. And now let’s carry these random tools and bags of whatever back into the garage and go inside and engage in some kinky activities that the readers of CC will not repeat not want to think about.”
@Sequitur: To quote from SOME LIKE IT HOT, I can think of a million things!
@Sequitur: Damn.
A&J: It’s 2025, and some of us, meaning me, are chronically uneasy. This does not help.
@Needless Exposition: Calling Dr. Ed Harding!
@161 Poteet:
You mean like Parcheesi?
By the way, their yard has chiggers.
CRANKSHAFT: Push him into traffic, Chris. You should know enough about NYC to arrange a good opportunity for that, and you owe it to Pam.
@Sequitur: I wasn’t planning to visit them, so no problem, hahaha.
@168 Poteet:
Be careful about signing up for a “Tour of Comic Strip Homes”. They might include pluggers.