That plugger looks mad, as he should
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Mary Worth, 7/2/26
Obviously, as a long-running, hidebound artform, comic strips are remarkably static when it comes to depicting the details of everyday life — Dagwood still wears his tuxedo to work, even if he changes into a polo shirt for the weekend. Still, it seems like some strips are finally visually acknowledging one of the most important facts of modern life, namely that most of us spend most of it dicking around on our phones, even when we’re ostensibly hanging out with other people. If Martha Wilson is doing it, surely we can’t be surprised to see Dawn staring slack-jawed at TikTok while her father is ranting about how no daughter of his is going to be friends with an ex junkie.
Hagar the Horrible, 7/2/26
I was going to make a joke about how as a warrior, Hagar would be disgusted if his daughter married a low-status farmer, but then I remembered that Norse chieftains all owned farms worked primarily by enslaved laborers, and then this strip just got a whole lot darker.
Pluggers, 7/2/26
I can’t believe it, but I’m definitely arriving at a place in my life where I increasingly feel like pluggers are being done dirty by their own comic strip, which by rights ought to be a celebration of the gumption and folkways of the American working class but instead is more and more often just stuff like “You know you’re a plugger if you’ve got a big fat ass.”
Dick Tracy, 7/2/26
“Is it a sex thing? The two Xes in the name make me think it’s a sex thing. You ever have sex in a chair, Sam?”
57 replies to “That plugger looks mad, as he should”
MW:
“I’ll be able to hear you and pay close attention to you as soon as I stop shaking my Etch-a-Sketch, Dad!”
RMMD-So they’ve made a dollar today.
MW-Dawn should follow Wilbur. A man who fell off a cruise ship and let people believe he died or when he fell to pieces over a dead goldfish.
FC-“Workers of the world unite!”
“it’s a sex thing”?
Really?
it’s a sexx thing was right there!
MW: “Hey Dad, remember how your alcoholism almost led you to throw yourself off a cliff and did lead to you falling off a cruise ship and letting me think you were dead for two weeks?”
Six Chix: This poorly-drawn woman just came back from a date with Wilbur Weston.
Curtis: If you think that’s a grown up Jeffy from Family Circus MC’ing the contest, you’d be wrong: this guy has two nostrils.
Pluggers: You’re a plugger if you’re to fat to fit onto normal people-sized stools.
Pluggers:
No skin, and not a, um, “crevice” exposed there. I call fake.
CS: Okay, so no drunken car crash. I’m now predicting tomorrow we see Dinkle the Elder collapsed by the side of his bus, dead of a heart attack brought on from all the booze. Although, why is he bothering to load up the bus if all the band members quit?
JP: Sophie’s actually excited at the prospect of stealing Neddy’s token POC friend with a name that starts with ‘R’.
Luann: The TruFanns got started early today…
MW: Dawn assures her father that drug addiction is out of the question but sex addiction is another story. In fact, she’s looking at porn on her phone right now.
Pluggers don’t have regular hangovers. The trick is to keep drinking
[Narrator voice] “Dawn will be lured into addiction by Tommy Beedie. He’s harmful!“
DT: So you bought yourself a fancy gaming rig but stopped short of the fancy gaming chair to go with? Come on, Fritz Ann, if you’re going to abuse your department budget at least go all-out!
MW: I know we rag on Dawn all the time, and with good cause, but the fact that she’s blithely tuning out Wilbur’s petulant attempts to dictate her love life (like he’s done so very well in that arena) while browsing the Worthiverse equivalent of TikTok shows that there’s some hope for her yet.
Pluggers are miserable, joyless losers who sit around in diners all day wondering where their life went wrong. Oh, and fat, also.
This strip depicts Wilbur as an overprotecting, caring father when just a few years ago he faked his death to emotionally manipulate people, including his daughter. But it is not bad writing, it’s just that Wilbur is the least self-aware piece of shit ever
MW “I wont be lured into addiction by Tommy Beedie! He’s cute and all but definitely not to get me into hard drugs. It would take a solid Pedro Pascal level hunk for me to even snort anything…”
HtH Not to pick away too much at this anarchronistic universe, but is there another type of market than ‘farmers’ at this point?
Pluggers Some say that life is one big party, and Pluggerdom is the hangover. Theres not enough advil in the world, is there?
DT The hacker is a yakker? He hacks and he yaks? Is that what you learned from the tracker you put on thr hacker to crack the case?
An engineer Plugger rationalizes that his ass ain’t too big. It’s the stool that’s too small.
MW:
“Wow, Dad. It says here on my laptop that we’re celebrating our 250th anniversary as a nation this coming Saturday!”
“Really? — news to me, too!”
Hang around this blog for a couple decades and you start to figure out the Vikings were not nice folks.
Pluggers: No, I’m pretty sure a Plugger hangover is just a regular old hangover.
MW: “Now go get me a sandwich!” “But that’s your third one! You shouldn’t hang around with that shady Dagwood character!”
You’re a Plugger if you’re voted the winner of Fat Bear Week. And an alcoholic.
@Hibbleton:
Not going there. There is a line, and I finally figured out where it is.
Dustin: “I mean, I’m okay with them knowing my location, viewing habits, political views, and medical history, but THIS is just too damn intrusive!”
FG: Um, spoilers, “Next” Box!
JP: “The exciting TV project, I mean. Get someone else to look after the ankle biter.”
RMMD: Great, so six bucks and an expired coupon for a dollar off when you buy three or more Hungry Man dinners?
MARY WORTH: “Your half-assed under-parenting is way better that your half-assed over-parenting.”–Bart Sompson.
Just a quote that suddenly popped into my head. I dunno why….
PLUGGERS: By rights, that Plugger should’ve long ago given up sitting on anything he can’t lean back on.
MW: Tommy’s mother is an escapee from a Wilburship, right? I doubt that SHE’LL be thrilled with the prospect of increased contact with the Westons.
JP: Inspired by the new Odyssey movie, Marciuliano takes the strip in a new direction: Sophie and Charlotte go out for ice cream, get diverted, and thus begin a ten-year sojourn trying to make their way back home while having fabulous adventures along the way. Controversy arises when Sophie is recast as an Afrikaner refugee.
S4th: It’s official. Ronan is a Time Lord.
HtH:
“But wait a minute — what am I talking about here? If one both were a farmer and had the ability to purvey the foods one produced for profit, that would mean that one had access to land and controlled the means of sustenance — the most important economic attributes a person could possess in the Middle Ages!
“Oh, well. Another day, another anachronism for this strip….”
DT – He loves his Roxx chair, whatever that is. I’m investigating this case but I just can’t be bothered to look that one up.
I repeat — I’m pretty sure Martha Wilson’s holding a TV remote, not a phone.
Hey, at least Pluggers didn’t go with the old joke about Dunlop’s disease, and also Type II diabetes, arterial sclerosis and inflammation throughout their arthritis-ridden bodies.
MW — “I won’t be lured into addiction by Tommy Beedie. He’s harmless. Unlike the guys running my social media, who have me so hooked I can’t look up from my phone.”
Hagar – “I hope she comes home with a swineherd or something. Farmers tend to be tough and stringy.”
MW *sigh*, dad, the whole _point_ is to get influenced by Tommy – if he can quit hard drugs, there’s _some_ hope for conquering my screen addiction!
Plugged — Recently, I stopped at one of the last railroad car diners left in the country, and let me tell you, people one hundred years ago were either smaller or endured great big hangovers–probably the former. . .
Also Pluggers: So I see two things dying, or already dead, in this panel. There’s ol’ lardass on the stool, and subtext. (I’m less certain how to count the farmer Lardass mauled and stole the John Deere cap and clothes from.)
@Little Guy: Nah, nothing so interesting as that. Ces, for some godforsaken reason, just chooses to have these characters have extended breaks from reality so as to indulge his interminable 80s/early 90s nostalgia. I have no idea what his political leanings are, but it’s really the other side of the coin from those who complain that the ‘real’ America was the one they grew up in (that’s literally a bumper sticker on a car at my apartment complex I have to walk past every damn day).
@Hibbleton: I’m not big. It’s the stools that got small.
All right, Mr. McKee, I’m ready for my close-up.
DT If she took as much care checking the equipment needed to fit in with serious gamers as she did checking this ‘Roxx’ chair hook, those are old useless systems that will boot up with Windows XP and be completely unable to run the gaming platforms she wants to infiltrate.
Hägar the Horrible: Serious question for the the former Late Antiquity/Early Medieval scholar: the whole point of Viking raids was in fact to acquire enough wealth to buy a spread back home, no? I mean, in addition to the fun of terrorizing monks and villagers and stealing the odd pig or two.
C’shaft: My research has been unable to determine if the remains of the Chippewa Lake Starlight Ballroom are still standing after the 2002 fire (plausible, hauling away all that metal wouldn’t be cheap, but I still don’t trust Batiuk to be accurate on this). I did, however, learn that the site has been deemed haunted for years, unearthly big band music emitting from the decaying halls. Which fits perfectly with these characters: none of them have been able to move on from the memories of their youth in life, why would they do so after death?
GT: Had a bit of near-death experience script left over from the heart attack episode, eh Barajas?
@The Quiet Man: *shrug* given the lack of fun insanity like the Curtis Kwanzaa sagas, I’m interested rather than annoyed (especially with the new development of having two ostensibly sane people along for the ride this time).
DT: Sam – so you think there is only one or a few gaming sites where our would be hacker hangs out? So we just appear with our newbie logins and avatars and suddenly everyone one is going to spilling the beans for us? C’mon you just wanted a new gaming computer right?
JP: Sophie went to a East Coast university right? Or did I hallucinate that. At her present rate of regression, Charlotte will be baby sitting her.
RMMD: Okay, so these are some sort of fembots or androids? Or were they in a cult that June escaped from when she was younger?
Mary Worth: What we have here is a classic misdirection play: a story that is ostensibly about what a terrible person Tommy Beedie the former drug addict felon is turns out to be actually a story about what a terrible person Wilbur the angry dad alcoholic hypocrite really is as he tries to save Dawn the weak-willed dimwit and all-around terrible person. Oh, who am I kidding, they’re all terrible people, the story will about how Mary the narcissistic last-minute meddler is really a great person, just like every other plot in this blasted, godforsaken wasteland of a soap opera daily comic strip.
@CanuckDownSouth: To me that just makes it all the more infuriating. These people are basically Wilbur Weston drawn slightly more appealingly. They are probably actually in a modern shoebox McDonald’s holding up the line for the self-service ordering screens as they babble about 1987!
As for Ronan, I’m convinced ‘Ronan’s Creepy Mansion’ was either a mistake on Ces’ part or just more of the Forths seeing what the *want* to see because they are so disturbingly mesmerized by Ronan’s beard and they spent that storyline actually wandering around a two-bedroom condo in Santa Monica. Or, just sitting there, staring ahead but not seeing, as Ronan and Mrs. Ted Forth just carried on their day around them, checking periodically to see whether they’d soiled themselves.
MW: Ummm, Wilbur, that’s actually a tiny collectable mug that you’re drinking from, they’re not designed to be used as a vessel for actual liquids. Plus, I don’t even want to know what the picture on the mug is; from what I can see it does not look good.
Wilbur day-drinking sake from one of his hoarder’s collection of Hello Kitty mugs… what right does he have to talk about pernicious addictions?
MW: Maybe Wilbur’s gotten tired of his 20-something daughter hanging around the house (and not even getting a summer job) and has cleverly chosen “I forbid you to see him again” to drive her into moving in with Tommy.
I realize this theory founders a bit by assuming advice-columnist Wilbur knows anything about psychology, and runs hard aground on “cleverly.”
Skuld ignored the battle chieftain and focused on weaving the threads of fate. Her sister Norns were concerned she was spending so much time with this mortal, but the warrior was not her interest. The daughter, she had potential, she could ride among the Valkyrie one day. Unless she met a charming farmer at the market. A knit, a curl, a cut, and a young man fell dead.
@Uncle Lumpy:
Earns a CC yellow card but avoids the red by coming close to the line but not going over it.
Wilbur sure is judgmental for someone who once broke with reality and attacked random people in the street then never faced any consequences for that. Anyway, enough of that because sure, the victims believed he “saved” them. I wonder how many cruise ships Tommy has fallen off of.
***
That plugger is definitely talking to a New York Times reporter, isn’t he?
Don Abundio, translated:
“It’s a beautiful day for a drive”
“Maple Street is especially nice”
“We could be stopping for ice cream right now!”
“Knock it off, Don Abundio…!”
“You knew I couldn’t drive when you fired the chauffeur!”
CS: Welcome to Centerville, OH, and see our vast collection of charred remains of buildings, lovingly preserved for moody sentimentalists who just need to wallow in the pain of loss. (Opening soon: “The Montoni’s Pizza Oven Disaster of 2027!”)
MW: Wilbur tells Dawn Tommy is not a good influence while Dawn is watching an influencer on social media. Score one for Moy.
JP: Still no legal drama in sight. I think the last time we were in a courtroom was circa 2007.
JP: Welcome to Cavelton, where people of consequence from Los Angeles, Washington, New York, etc., just happen to drop by all the time.
FG: “‘Tis but a scratch!”
Blondie: Give ‘em an iceberg lettuce salad, no dressing, and all the mineral water they can drink.
Phantom: You introduce a space alien character with an Area 51 head and all he’s got to offer are drones? How about a Time Machine, so the Python can go back to 1926, walk through the nonexistent fence, then return to the present?
Pluggers: I expected this Plugger to be holding a beer. I don’t want “warts and all” (if you’ve ever seen the drunk driving rates in Pluggerdom, especially Wisconsin, compared to us ordinary suburbanites), but the idea that Pluggers don’t drink alcohol is hilarious.
Wizard of Id: C’mon, there’s a gag about chain mail for you right there.
BG&SS: This gag might land if you could convince the reader that Snuffy has cable or streaming on his CRT TV. You don’t even have to be an engineer to wonder how that thing shows a picture after 2009.
FC: I can’t tell if Dolly is trying to be Eva Peron or Margaret Thatcher, but I know a power trip when I see it.
Blondie: I actually appreciate the depiction of these Dieting Divas. It hasn’t been too long in newspaper comics time since “chubby woman” meant hilariously (sic) overweight.
I’m actually looking forward to the upcoming gamer angle in Dick Tracy. Sam’s user name will be “Definitely NOT a Cop,” as he wanders aimlessly in whatever MMPRPG she brought along.
Pluggers:
One of the many ways you can tell that Pluggers primarily takes its suggestions from old and out-of-touch people is that having a fat ass is presented as a bad thing here. That might’ve been true in the ’90s during the heyday of heroin chic, but today big badonkadonks are in! Of course, the illustration still manages to make the idea profoundly unerotic, but as a furry, let me assure you that there are plenty of pictures of anthropomorphic bears with huge butts out there that don’t make that mistake.