Vikings aren’t pluggers (they love exploring new lands, and are also fun)
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Pluggers, 6/14/26
I’m beginning to suspect that some of my sense that Pluggers is increasingly all over the place on explaining plugger identity is that the strips have gradually shifted from out-group messaging (pluggers explaining to non-pluggers what pluggers are like) to in-group messaging (pluggers talking with other pluggers about the plugger experience, anticipating a good amount of background knowledge and sympathy in advance). Take this panel, for instance: I am reasonably sure that the thrust of it is “We’re all pluggers here, and as pluggers we love to garden but we know how hard it can be, right? Plants always growing in the wrong places, haha!” But from an outside perspective, what it looks like it’s saying is “Pluggers are terrible gardeners. Just awful at it. Grass growing where it shouldn’t, but their attempts to coax it into growing elsewhere fail miserably. Pathetic.”
Hagar the Horrible, 6/14/26
I realize that the main character in this strip is specifically called “the Horrible,” and not to be all like “Things are meaner and baser now than they used to be,” but I kind of feel like Hagar the Horrible used to be less explicit about “the main character in this strip, Hagar the Horrible, is a cold-blooded killer who hunts his fellow human beings both for profit and for sport.” I mean, I laughed at this, so I guess I’m part of the problem, but still!
39 replies to “Vikings aren’t pluggers (they love exploring new lands, and are also fun)”
Hagar the Horrible-Hagar returns several years later after going out for Italian.
RMMD-What do you have to say to your agent who is worried about you?
MW-“Can we be friends with benefits, Dawn?”
Pluggers: I recently tried reseeding a patch of my lawn and was quite dismayed to see that immediately after I was done, a flock of sparrows descended and gobbled up that fine Kentucky bluegrass seed. So Dog Man, with all due respect, you are married to a chicken, right..?
HtH: It honestly took me a minute to realize that those throwaway panels were supposed to depict Hagar’s gurgling stomach and not some kind of demonic possession.
The Fro-Yo industry has decided that placement in the comics – from Mary Worth to High & Lower – is a winning strategy to capture the youth market.
Hagar:
“Shouldn’t we have asterisks next to our dialogue bubbles to indicate that we’re speaking ‘ *in the Old Norse tongue’ — you know, like they do with ‘Bandar’ in Phantom?”
Hagar: I enjoy the fact that when Hagar snores, he makes nonsense sounds running the gamut from a Polish word made famous by Mad magazine (“potrzebie”) to the famously edible creatures from Li’l Abner (“Shmoo”) to, for some reason, the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (“COLREGS”). He might be dreaming about slaughtering the innocent so his family can have a free supper, but he sure sounds funny while he’s doing it!
Pluggers:
You’re a plugger if you reason that if grass seed causes things to sprout from rocks, it might work for the top of your head, too.
Hagar:
Is that supposed to be onomatopoeia for borborygmi in the second panel, or is Hagar dreaming in Esperanto?
Hagar:
“PSISHI” — didn’t she used to be the White House press secretary?
I think everyone is grateful that Pluggers are bad at spreading their seed
Pluggers – You’re a Plugger if you don’t have a chip on your shoulder – it’s a 40lb bag of shit….
I don’t get the first two panels of Hagar, they seem disconnected, like it’s a separate joke. “Hagar is a terrible cook?”
Yet it still seems to bleed into the rest of the comic, as both are about Hagar getting something to eat.
Him snoring seems to have nothing to do with anything? Just a filler panel?
Mary Worth: Tommy is floating the possibility of being Dawn’s “friend” — without realizing that a friendship with Dawn comes with no benefits, and in fact would probably result in a net loss in your quality of life, even if you factor in the mediocre sex.
Rex Morgan: “Maybe you should do an interview or two just so they’ll go away?” “I’d rather not, but I might have to just to get rid of them.” Geez, Mae Mae, I understand that this other guy has no idea how the entertainment press works, but you were a celebrity, for cripes’ sake. Why not just drip some honey on your body and lie down in a field, and hope that will be enough to satisfy the ants?
There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism and Hagar has opted out from ideas such as “buying”, “commerce” and “paying for stuff”. I guess that pillaging and slavery are still not ethical but they are a different kind of non ethical!
MW *sigh* Tommy is skipping the “try to ask the girl out” step before the “pretend to settle to ‘be friends’ instead” on the Nice Guy path to romance. Soooo… inappropriate ‘closeness’ followed by Brandi discovering them, Tommy being justified in his inappropriateness by Brandi breaking up officially, Dawn is forced to acknowledge he’s a Nice Guy and then they actually end up together? by the end of summer?
H&L I’m not sure what looks less like a food truck today – the hot dog one that, with the standard bun&wiener, offers so little, or the all-the-frozen-stuff one which must be packed to the gills with freezers to have a variety of ice cream *and* gelato *and* fro-yo
Also, Chip, you might try tasting your food instead of inhaling it in the time it takes to walk to the next truck over.
JP: In a rare moment of honesty, one of the characters admits that recent plot events make absolutely no sense.
MW: Looks like we’re back to Brandy definitely, positively having broken up with Tommy, not that we ever saw it. Either that or his addictive personality has turned to alcohol this time — with comics lettering, he could be saying “I’m still getting over brandy”.
H&L – proof the artist is phoning it in. “Draw a truck? Screw that, nothing but close-ups today… backgrounds are work and the golf course awaits.”
@Bob Tice: Thanks for “borborygmi,” always nice to learn a new word. Although it might be his stomach actually speaking — if “potrzebie” came up in a game of Balderdash, I’d probably answer “a Polish meat dumpling,” and “mambo jambo,” “phoo,” and “rippi psishi” all look vaguely like food names.
HTH: If anyone could explain why Hagar shouts “MUGG ZILLA!” in his sleep, I would be very grateful. Mambo Jambo in advance.
Plugged-Up: Old enough to remember when the definition of “Pluggers” in this strip was “Them who, whatever life throws at them, just keep on pluggin’,” (“Keep on truckin'” is apparently copyrighted by Robert Crumb). So the fact that Dog-Man just stares at his failure blankly and apparently goes back to work, instead of freaking out, hurling his bag of seed into the trash, letting loose a string of obscenities and quitting gardening forever means he IS, indeed, a Plugger.
The strip has drifted so far from its original intended audience that now we celebrate woke Pluggers who refuse to use toxic herbicides.
@The Rambling Otter: Often, the first two panels in a Sunday strip are “throwaway panels” that many newspapers omit to save space. They tend to either make their own joke or just sort of exist. Why the syndicate doesn’t just ask the comic creators to make a shorter strip, I’m not sure.
H&L: We say Luann is dumb (she is) but traveling to the “best” food truck in town to order a hotdog with mustard is a special kind of dullard.
Dick Tracy: I can’t believe they showed this in a newspaper comic strip: Soly Tare whacking off Bob Hope!
HtH — An empty stomach has no conscience, but apparently it knows quite a few languages. . .
Hagar the Horrible:
Let me state it simply: I do not understand the throwaway panels here. Both the interpretations I came up with, that Hagar is snoring and that his stomach is rumbling, have already been proposed by other commenters, but I remain unsatisfied by them. I think the latter is the “correct” solution, since it makes more sense with the second throwaway panel and the rest of the comic, but I refuse to concede that any human involuntary biological process, whether involving the respiratory or digestive system, could produce sounds that are best rendered as “mambo jambo” and “mugg zilla”. It’s almost enough to make me believe Hagar isn’t a biological organism at all, but the punchline reveals that in his use of violence to get what he wants, he is all too human.
Pluggers:
Maybe I’m an elitist, but the phrase “landscaping rocks” sounds entirely wrong when said by Pluggers. It should only be spoken by overpaid home designers hired by upper-middle-class suburbanites, not pathetic salt-of-the-earth beast-men.
Hi and Lois: Mr. Freeze is totally horned up for Hi. Look at that “come hither” look on his face and the phallic symbol in his hand.
@CanuckDownSouth: Also, Chip, you might try tasting your food instead of inhaling it in the time it takes to walk to the next truck over.
Er, have you ever been the parent of a teenage boy?
@Vulpes: Totally agree. Oooh we’ve got a curved gravel path with large flat stones in among smaller ones. True pluggers would never.
@BigTed: I’m assuming “POIT!” is a several-decades-late reference to “Pinky and the Brain.”
DT – You know Double Up is hurt bad when the caret in his first grawlix is missing from his second grawlix. He’s fading fast!
“Landscaping rocks” seems a bit up-market for classic Pluggers. Maybe they’re trying to pivot the very definition of Pluggerdom? We’ll know for sure if there’s ever a strip that introduces Pluggers to feng shui or cottagecore decorating.
Gasoline Alley has discovered Gaither’s Pond. You have been warned.
Crankshaft: That silver-plated trumpet really looks brassy.
Lockhorns: Of course he loves the art of that diagrammed football play. The defense only has nine players, almost guaranteeing Leroy’s Jets a first down. Eventually.
H&L: If you need any further proof that food trucks have gone upscale bougie, our 1960s suburbanites have discovered them.
Dustin: This was a good, low-key entry. Tune in next time when, during the aftermath, Dustmom utters the five most frightening words in the married English language, “You know what you did”.
Blondie: It’s college summer break. Doesn’t J.C. Dithers Co. have an intern doing this for “exposure” whom they can abuse for this kind of menial task?
Slylock Fox: Wait, is Max a child, or a small adult mouse? I always thought he was a sidekick type, but looking at him with a kid-sized fishing pole is giving me doubts.
Pluggers – A plugger’s “landscaping rocks” are whatever rocks are in the drainage ditch where all the soil has been washed away.
Don Abundio, translated:
“Will you help me, please?”
“Yes, sir”
“Is this car an MG?”
“No, Tonka”
MARY WORTH:
….with benefits?
HTH: I recently learned, thanks to The Skeptic, that the horns on viking helmets are actually not a thing, and were invented as an add-on for operatic purposes to distinguish various actors. I guess reading HTH more as a series of acted out vignettes makes more sense now.
@BigTed: Re: Rex Morgan: Give Terry Beatty a break, people! It’s not like he knows anything about being so popular and talented people will go to any lengths to interview you.
Hagar the Horrible: It’s funny because the chef and his staff will probably die, no matter what they do!
Seriously, though, I’ve never been this baffled by the throwaway panels in a Sunday strip. Is the joke that Hagar is completely enveloped by chaos, or that he wakes up and his family hates it when he’s conscious?