Gonna need a good editor to put this Nitrate back together
Post Content
Pluggers, 3/30/26
Wait, so we’re saying that pluggers … don’t like sports? Watching the wildly popular NCAA basketball tournament is non-plugger behavior? Pluggers prefer to pore over their financial statements, like a bunch of fucking nerds? Is that what pluggers have come to these days? This is much more shocking than them being poly now or whatever.
Archie, 3/30/26
I have to say that a dark horse for “most unrealistic aspect of Archie comics” is that Veronica, daughter of the most cartoonishly wealthy family in town, attends the local public school with the plebes. That having been said, this is a decent joke, and in my opinion what really makes it is that it’s Archie who’s been assigned the task of delivering the RSVP, despite the Lodges canonically having a butler.
Dick Tracy, 3/30/26
Oh, hey, I guess we know why Silver Nitrate has had such anxiety since he’s been in prison: turns out he’s a snitch! I sure hope none of his fellow prisoners read the syndicated newspaper comic strip Dick Tracy.
93 replies to “Gonna need a good editor to put this Nitrate back together”
Pluggers: Ha ha! Pluggers are too stupid to learn from the mistakes they make every year for the past half-century. Or is it, “Pluggers are too lazy to keep basic organization of receipts”? Or is it, “Pluggers are too poverty-stricken to afford 8 file folders to sort their tax records into”? I can’t seem to work “Pluggers are fat” and “Pluggers are disease-ridden meatbags” into this entry.
Today’s Pluggers makes me wonder if Indiana named a town Pennsylvania, solely for the sake of doing a bit.
DT:
“B.B. Eyes tried to recruit him for an escape…but he was too busy preparing himself to go as Lyle Lovett for Halloween!”
It’s not snitching, it’s revenge for being bothered in the library. Can’t a Nitrate read The Brothers Karamazov in peace?!
Archie:
“What is it?”
“She’s accusing me of looking like Otto Preminger!”
Pluggers:
“Indiana wants me…Lord, I can’t go back there — because I live in Pennsylvania.”
— Commenter Gene J. Jones, channeling R. Dean Taylor
SF: And they both get pneumonia and die, Hilary disappears into the foster care system never to be seen again, comic strip over! Please? PLEASE??
JP: Well screw you too, you little raspberry-haired brat!!
MW: John Long??? Moy, you did NOT have to give this guy a name at this point in the story. You could have just had him be ‘a desperate young man’ for the time being. That’s as lazy and unimaginative a name as… as… Mae Mae!
Luann: I suspect Les was consulting the Love-Matic Grampa in the men’s room for Tara to suddenly be all ‘you rotten, conniving, despicable sweel lil’ angel!’
Silver Nitrate is so anxious, his picture winces when it hears his name.
Pluggers:
Pluggers who are trying to do their taxes are distracted by reading Judge Parker because they observe April Bower engaging in March Madness.
Archie: He shows no favoritism yet obviously he sent her an invitation to detention to which she’s responded. Unlike the rest of the plebes to whom he just points his finger and says; “I’ll see your ass, after school!”
Pluggers: I call foul. No plugger earns enough to require that much tax paperwork. It’s 1040 EZ all the way.
Pluggers haven’t noticed that the IRS stopped taking manually filled in paper forms because God hasn’t granted them the serenity to accept that things change.
“Say, did the entire hallway just change colors for a second there when Archie came by? I knew I shouldn’t have used that Tabasco that expired in 1997.”
Pluggers have medical deductions out the wazoo, which reminds them: they really need toil have their wazoo looked at…
Archie Really thought that was going to be a document stating that Veronica now owned the school, and maybe even Mr Weatherbee’s life, but RSVP, that’s pretty good too.
Oh boy, the Mudges are learning of the delights that is Indiana, Pennsylvania! Fun fact: It is older than the state of Indiana, having already been in existence as a town when it was incorporated as a borough in 1816, the year Indiana was admitted to the union as a state. However if I’m reading the history right, the Indiana territory was organized in 1800, while the Indiana name in Pennsylvania originates with the creation of Indiana County in 1803, so the Pennsylvanians were still somewhat copying the Hoosiers. And California, Pennsylvania was absolutely a rip-off.
MW: The way Mary is rolling her eyes upwards as she says “you’ve been scammed,” she might as well have added “you fuckin’ asshole!” Save your self-righteous smug for your doctor boyfriend or Wilbur, Mary.
Asshole, indeed.
MW – Please tell me that Long is actually his middle name and that his last name is Silver.
Pluggers: March Madness for Pluggers is when they come out of hibernation and their annual hormonal heat cycle kicks in, and they spend one month fighting other males and furiously rutting with any equally hormonal mate who comes within sniffing distance, before heading out to find a den and mark new territory.
Archie: Canonically the reason that Veronica’s father sent her to a regular school, was to humble her, hanging out with regular teens, so that she doesn’t grow up into a snob (it didn’t work but at least his heart was in the right place)
Dick Tracy: I wanted to say he was pouring coffee, but is that… Milk? Does Dick have an old-timey milk jug in his fridge? For milk related purposes?
@Baja Gaijin: My interpretation is “Pluggers pretend to be working-class when they actually have complex
inheritancesinvestments that require something behind H&R Block and a 1040EZ form.”MW: It took me a good fifteen seconds to realize that “Long” was a last name as opposed to a modifier for “escapes.” And why not tell us his name from the start?
DT: “Silver nitrate spoke to me” sounds like the sort of a thing an alternative medicine person would say before inadvertently giving themselves chemical burns.
Pluggers: Doesn’t Gene J. Jones sound like a side-character in a superhero comic?
(Just thinking here)
Archie: Miss Grundy is missing her true calling as a quick-change artist—unless her private interactions with Mr. Weatherbee necessitated her quickly changing her skirt before Archie caught them in flagrante.
“Gene J. Jones” is such a Stan Lee names! And he put the name of a state as the name of a city! Clearly someone who is faking his identity to cover his many, many crimes, but still feels the urge to contribute to “Pluggers”!
Also for the sake of Suspension of Disbelief… I’m genuinely surprised that Archie actually managed to deliver the letter unscathed.
@Lauralot: The better question is, why are we following any of these characters at all? This is another Keith Hillend story, where Karen Moy summons dull characters into existence for Mary to… well, let’s just say “interact with,” because meddling might actually have been helpful in this case.
And if the story ends with “I let you get ripped off because I knew someone in Cambodia needed your money to escape a horrible situation”, I will smash something tasteful.
MW: Those security tracking labels on the soles of John Long’s shoes are certainly a space-saving improvement over the gigantic rover balloons that were previously used to retrieve escaped prisoners.
The only basketball-related madness Pluggers have is when they go ballistic trying to explain to their grandchildren that it is racist there are not more white players in the NBA
Wary Morth:
“Now, with all the experience I’ve gained, it’s time to begin a career of scamming on my own, where I get to keep all the money!”
JP By the time April and Randy show up, the writers will have completely forgotten that Charlotte was a preK/K kid when they left less than a year ago – will Randy and April be confused by their practically-grown-up near-teen’s mature reaction to their absence?
RMMD Got it, so: “motel customers getting room service” = just one cook, I guess the cleaning staff brings the orders to rooms, “two customers at a time plus room service” = cook can still handle it, need a waitress to deal with tables, but “more than two = THREE customers plus room service” = cook overwhelmed and needs a sous chef. Maybe this is the world’s most disorganized cook… or there are a LOT of dr*gs involved and he can’t stand having food requests harsh his mellow more than once or twice an hour?
Mr. Weatherbee’s look tells me he’s joined the mob. “She’d better be there, or she’ll wind up sleeping with the fishes.”
@Banana Jr. 6000: Oh, it’ll definitely end that way. How else could Mary claim any responsibility in her victory lap? She can’t exactly brag to Dr. Jeff that someone indirectly freed an enslaved person by ignoring her advice.
Archie – Kudos to Mr. Weatherbee for using Cathy’s trademark index-finger-to-the-sky to emphasize his point. I was kind of hoping for an “ack!” when Archie told him it was an RSVP.
Moose, a violently possessive young man who savagely beats the other boys into an inch of their lives for even talking to his girlfriend, Midge, is never seen getting punished despite being a clear and present danger to the male students of Riverdale High. I don’t know why Veronica is being sent to detention but be prepared to face the most expensive lawyers you will ever come across in your life, Weatherbee.
***
Pluggers create enough paperwork for their taxes that it piles up from the floor to almost reach the top of their desk. For the love of God, will someone please save pluggers from themselves?!?
Dick Tracy: If this winds up recapitulating the greatest scene from the early-aughts HBO series Oz, where David Johansen gets cornered by two rival gangs in the prison library and winds up dying of a heart attack, I will say that the strip is on its way back to gruesome glory. I mean, a little, anyway.
Gene J. Jones and John Long sound equally made-up. They’re both way too generic.
Pluggers: You believe Pluggers are more interested in basketball than tax paperwork. I sat with my mother for four hours sorting out (most of) her tax paperwork. We are not the same.
If that’s the case, his name should be John Dong, not John Long.
@Pozzo:
Weatherbee: And on another topic, our new transfer student from Scandinavia, Lucky Eddie is also sleeping with the fishes.
Grundy: What did he do?
Weatherbee: Nothing, he’s just a weirdo.
Also Dick Tracy: “Frickin’ stainless steel carafe, filled with wholesome 1% milk, not vodka, I could shoot a guy in the face…” “Internal monologue, Dick.”
Pluggers desperately search for a way to deduct the massive amounts of toilet paper they buy each week.
“that Veronica, daughter of the most cartoonishly wealthy family in town, attends the local public school with the plebes.”
Theory: Riverdale is small enough that it can’t support a private school and the public schools, and the Lodges, having been the wealthiest family in town since its founding, consider it a point of pride to keep everything going, so the local government services, including the public schools, are actually pretty good quality.
(Also, any families with “disruptive” kids are quietly given large sums of money to move elsewhere)
@Tom:
“(Also, any families with “disruptive” kids are quietly given large sums of money to move elsewhere)”
Moose and Reggie?
MW: H___y and scammer finally meet through Mary when pornstar Johnny Lo-o-ong seeks out his favorite fluffer, Wilbur Weston.
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: You legit made me go back to check to see if the Plugger depicted was Andy Bear.
March Madness for Pluggers is about remembering whether you file in your strawman persona or real name, where to put the purple wax seal that invalidates the power of the IRS, how to claim capital gains on your redemption account, and finding the red pen you use to cancel UCC debts. You don’t want your SovCit buddies in the militia to laugh at you, do you?
@matt w: And Indiana, PA is the hometown of Jimmy Stewart, which gives the opportunity for this:
“Gene’s tax paperwork isn’t in his house, it’s in Bill’s house!”
MW: The “fraud den”? Were Moy and Brigman unable to think of anything better, or did they run out of room in the text box?
Hopefully they’ll focus on “John Long’s” escape, because Mary and Harv’s “Fraud!” “Not fraud!” routine has already worn out its welcome.
DtM: So Dennis is the sole child in the world who’s given the devil’s screen and hasn’t fallen into the “rat pushing bar for pellet” dopamine cycle?
Tune in next time, when he’ll be the first person to have read an EULA.
Zits: will Jeremy return The Scarlet with pages stuck together?
@Ken: It feels like an old N.E.S. game where every name forces the writer into an eight-character limit. Help MARYWRTH and HHART rescue JOHNLONG from FRAUDDEN! For great justice! Conglaturations!
Archie-Veronica has been very naughty and needs to be disciplined.
Slylock Fox-Slylock then arrests Smitty on false charges of balloon theft.
MW-H-rvey, your bank should have told you that you have been scammed. It’s such a shame that you had to hear from an acquaintance.
Archie: It would be funny if the butler showed up for detention. He would say something like “Miss Lodge was otherwise engaged,” and then sit at a school desk and read the British soccer results or something. Hey, after (checks) decades of reading Archie comics, the things just write themselves!
Dick Tracy: Why do they still have pictures of their favorite prisoners on the wall of their conference room? They can’t be wanted posters, since these people are in jail. Are they just for decoration, or as motivational art to go with the “Hang in There” swinging-kitten poster? And what ever happened to short prison haircuts, anyway?
Pluggers: Don’t tell pluggers that you can do your taxes on a computer with helpful software and submit them electronically, and it’s a lot easier, and this has been available for 20 years — it’s funnier if they don’t know!
Gassed Up Alleycats: Is Walt going to use the bible to claim he’s Methuselah?
@Ken: Considering that Rupert Holmes made a more complicated “escape” than this guy, I kinda hope we don’t. (“Now how am I going to get out of this exotic and bizarre country? Maybe I’ll ask the people of that condo complex two blocks down? That’s like, the American consulate of this place, right?”)
ARCHIE: This is how she handles her dates with Archie so I don’t know why everyone’s so surprised.
Pluggers: I was assuming that Pluggers, being of retirement age, shouldn’t have an overly complex tax profile. but then I remembered they’re probably working at least two jobs to supplement their meager Social Security check, as well as paying off enormous amounts of medical debt, so…yeah, this tracks.
DT: “Sorry, it’s just the silver nitrate talking.”
Dennis Minus Menace: Dennis feeling up Bo Peep behind Woody’s back?!? Highly menacing!!!
JP: Of all the things that an actual child of Charlotte’s age would not say, this is perhaps the one she would not say the most.
Luann: Remember, kids, when someone lies to you because they’re trying to get into your pants, you should take it as a compliment!
MW: Good job giving John Long a surname that could be either European or Asian, further confusing where exactly this fraud den is supposed to be.
@Hibbleton: “Fluffer” sounds like a term for a Furry Pimp.
MW: “Cambodian dragging on… John Long.”
@Banana Jr. 6000: THRILLHOU doesn’t appreciate you mocking him (You can make it up to him by buying him Bonestorm or go to Hell!)
MW: Wasn’t John Long a 70s pornstar? I thought he died of AIDS years ago.
It would have been funny, if after scaling the wall, he ends up at the Charterstone Pool party.
Like in the show Undergrads, where Gimpy’s computer was being hacked. After he leaves his dorm room, the hacker leaves her room at the same time, and reveals that their rooms are right next to each-other.
BB: I thought we’d left “Julius is a fairy” way behind, along with “Miss Buxley is a bubblehead who spills out of her clothing.” Yet here it is, back, sigh.
Blondie: This IS a shocker! Blondie doesn’t make gravy from scratch?
Dustin: What, no insult? I scrolled down to the final panel fully expecting “The weather forecast is irresponsible, JUST LIKE DUSTIN.”
JP: Hey, Chesty Neddy is back! This could be a good week, after all.
LUANN: “Now that I realize I can get you to stupidly risk your own life to appease me, I realize I kinda like you. Funny how the timing worked out of that, huh?” (giggles coquettishly)
Hey, kids, let’s learn some fun facts about Silver Nitrate! Did you know it explodes when exposed to ethanol? That it’s toxic but can be used to cure gonorrhea? That it’s a skin and eye irritant? That it’s a snitch who will soon be bleeding out in the library, dying somewhere between the graphic novels and the law books? Silver nitrate; don’t eat or drink or trust it.
@TheDiva: Today’s strip is a good example of how Plugger is too broad a label. The “lower middle class work-until-they-die” Pluggers wouldn’t have complex tax returns. Only the “upper middle class trying to pretend they’re regular people but aren’t” Pluggers would have complex tax returns. And today’s submission is from Indiana, PA, which is a small, rural, and not especially wealthy locale. So I think Gene J. Jones just outed himself as a fake Plugger.
I eagerly await the beginning of the Plugger civil war. Hopefully with lots and lots of casualties.
@Guillermo el chiclero: You’re thinking of John Holmes. Alongside Long Wang, Hung Well, and Enormous Genitals.
Phantom: “And don’t bother getting dressed.” After midnight tete-a-tetes in the Colonel’s private lair? This is pretty fucking suspicious, Patrolwoman; I’d bring along a sidearm and a chaperone.
SFx: I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am finding Smitty’s belly tee extremely disquieting.
Zits: Next week’s assignment is “Billy Budd,” Jeremy. Unspeakable filth!
FC – Jeffy: She’s worn out trying to memorize two lines of a poem? And they think I’m a moron.
PJ and Barfy: We’re the brains in this outfit.
Thel: She’s worn out, but she’ll spend all evening repeating her version of those two lines, probably saying something like “choppin’ down the bunny’s tail” over and over. Where did I put that new bottle of vodka?
S4th – Hmph. That wouldn’t bother Frazz and the lady teacher. Maybe you two would tolerate it better if you insulted someone else behind their back while you ran.
Pluggers – Pluggers hate the basketball March Madness. They’re pissed off when those basketball games preempt Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy.
JP – Horsie picture – check. Condescending, snotty child-speak – check. This can be remedied by a bonkus to the conkus.
Rex Morgan – Yeah, keep hiring so that every customer has their own personal server. That’s exactly like every restaurant I’ve ever been in.
BLONDIE: You can either hang up the phone now or listen to your husband getting pummeled by the boss at the other end.
Luann: I’ve been to a climbing wall a couple of times, and there is NO WAY they are letting ANYONE scamper up a wall without a harness on. Les would be getting drop-kicked out the front door right now.
JP: Charlotte may be precocious, but tact clearly isn’t amongst her strong suits.
GT: “Marty Moon here. Finally admitting that he doesn’t really work, Gil Thorp goes back to school today to try out for the golf team. It’s not looking good based on that form.”
@Weaselboy: The important thing is that you realize that his first name ain’t “Baby.” It’s Trixie! (But it’s “Ms. Janet” if you’re nasty though. Which Mr Hart certainly is since he’s obsessed with a “woman” just because she sent him a few pic of her big AI-generated boobies his way.)
@Banana Jr. 6000: How dare you ignore famous Roman actor Bigus Dickus.
Pluggers do like sports, they just prefer the NFL and NASCAR
RSVP is a funny acronym, because 75% of it is “s’il vous plait“, which is just “please” and does not convey any useful information. Répondez is the only part you need, the rest is a useless peacock tail!
Nancy: today’s sign that it’s time for a legacy strip be put to bed. Permanently.
Most recent new artist Caroline Cash admits in Sunday’s strip that she’s already run out of ideas and began a journey to the home of previous most recent new artist Olivia Jaimes.
Wary Morth II:
So how, sans passport or money, is Trixie planning to get home after the Great Escape from his pig butchering scam centre/prison in Myanmar or Cambodia?
Whoa, did someone change the settings on the AJGLU-3000? Today’s strip is actually solid.
@UncleJeff: re: Caroline Cash: Wouldn’t it be refreshing to see a self-depiction of a young new female cartoonist wearing a pinafore or a frilly apron with a hair ribbon and a pair of Mary Janes? Is there a Union stipulation that they all come to work in overalls, stomp boots, motorcycle jackets, and chains?
A Plugger’s interest in March Madness might be rooting the Final Four to include the service academies, or rooting against whatever college that Newsmax is currently accusing of spreading a woke mind virus.
DT – “Silver nitrate spoke to me. It said it wants to go back to being called ‘lunar caustic.’ I think that’s pretentious.”
Don Abundio, translated:
“Let’s get that cute waitress over here again”
“You’re still ogling that waitress? We’ve been here an hour! Surely you asked me here to discuss some business!”
“No, I just like having an audience…”
@Banana Jr. 6000:
It’s a good thing Mary doesn’t give a shit about anything happening in southeast Asia, so that’ll never happen. (Remember when Jeff got his “dream job” healing underprivileged kids in this region and Mary went there and almost literally dragged his as back to the States, cause no way was her man going to work in some filthy “third-world” hovel sense of “fulfillment” be damned, because that’s just how compassionate and considerate Mary is? Of course, that requires us to still pretend like John Long is in another country and not at, like, the rival condo complex down the block.)
@Ukranazi Stepan:
“…anyway, I won’t bore you with the details of my miraculous escape from the country…”
DTM: “Video games are okay, but there’s nothing like the feel of a real toy.”
…said no kid ever.
JP: Wouldn’t it be nice if Moy didn’t take the easy route and Charlotte wasn’t portrayed as a “wiser than her adult caretaker” precocious youngster.
Plugg: This is getting a little too close to home. I literally just got back from delivering all my tax paperwork to my tax service, when I saw this strip. Fortunately most of the stuff is downloadable now, which our Plugger Dogg-Mann doesn’t seem to know. Or perhaps it’s not an option in the Pluggerverse.
@Hibbleton: The Andy Griffith Show comes from a different era, when (harrrumph!!) kids respected their elders and get off my damn lawn.
The “Dumb Dad” trope seems to have ramped up in the 1980s, to such an extent that producers got embarrassed and began to dial it back within the past few years.
@Voshkod: I was referencing a 1970s classic comedy movie, but it wasn’t Quest For The Holy Grail. And I got the order wrong: Hung Well should actually be first. (Someone, please, tell me you got this reference.)
@2+2=7: Very true. But Mary’s lack of interest in anyone outside her immediate circle, and the fact that $200,000 is a very survivable loss for anyone who can afford to live in Charterstone, won’t prevent Mary from being the self-appointed hero of the story. It’s all she ever does, really.