Folks with problems
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Pluggers, 9/15/26
Sorry, pluggers! The FDA just declared the cyclospora outbreak over, and we all trust the FDA on this, right? [nervous laughter] Anyhoo, my point is that you are, once again, behind trend, and also shitting your guts out in a port-a-john for unrelated and uncool reasons.
Dick Tracy, 9/15/26
Oh no! They shot Widescreen! They shot him right in the gun. Or maybe the gun blew up, what with Sten guns being notoriously unreliable and Widescreen probably ordering it from some extremely dodgy online retailer? Unclear. The point is, he seems dead now, or at least dead-ish.
53 replies to “Folks with problems”
Pluggers:
Now, are those things called ” ‘Gianni‘ on the spot” at construction sites in Tuscany?
I call foul, pluggers do not eat salads.
They live on a diet solely of fried foods, pie and beer.
MW Nelly should be more careful – Tommy’s not making an I-must-tell-this-juicy-tale-to-others face, that’s an oh-crap-she’s-discovered-our-secret-illuminarti-cell-activities and since she’s clearly not as dim as Toby (who accepted “book club” the last time they got together to set up an oil crisis)., looks like somebody’s about to get the Aldo Kelrast special treatment…
RMMD I call foul – a coherent anecdote answering the “how was school” question? No kid’s going to answer beyond “I forgot” or “nuthin’ “!
MT So is it an artist or a writer fail that Cricket Bro is shown upright and accessible to rescuers rather being squeezed and/or trapped head-down. Sure, if they can’t get you out you’ll die. Of old age. After many years of being The Cave Hermit with people bringing you supplies.
Pluggers:
If this plugger truly had cyclosporiasis, he wouldn’t even have time to think.
FC-Billy then mockingly laughs.
RMMD-“And I learned the teacher will trade favors for higher grades.”
DT Actually, it was a 3D-print job. Which unless you have some pretty special industrial-grade metal printer, would have been a gun-shaped-object made of plastic which Widescreen was lucky managed even one shot before failing. Soooo … are Computers Bad by making the gun plans available in every home or Computers Good by making the gun design fail when used?
Dick Tracy:
It’s always a winning life strategy to waste precious seconds grinning maniacally and tossing off faux-clever bon mots when someone is pointing a gun at you.
Pluggers: Be warned. The “hills” in Penn Hills, PA aren’t what you think.
JP: Boy, I hope I get to hand out a few death sentences today!
Pluggers: In a glorious act of passive-aggression, submitter Pauline has been feeding her husband massive salads since the outbreak started.
RMMD – we’ve waited what feels like years for our titular hero to return and save us from the epically dull Twins saga. Only to remember that Rex and his brood are somehow even less interesting. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to read this strip daily.
For Pluggers, the “Cyclosporiasis trend” is using the outbreak as an excuse to avoid eating any vegetables.
Explosive diarrhea! Sure! Great punchline material! Ball’s in your court, Marvin!
Pluggers Before reading the caption, i just assumed the joke was “A Plugger’s strict diet of meat, bread and cheese-like products can be violently disturbed by even a hint of roughage.”
MW: I can’t wait til Tommy rushes home to tell Brandy the latest hot gossip, whereupon she looks at him and says, “What the hell is WRONG with you?”
RMMD: Cake? Unplanned, unsupervised, unapproved CAKE FOR LUNCH? Here comes the next Morgan crisis!
PLUGGERS: Please. Pluggers are survivors. They (we) swore off vegetables at the first murmur of trouble. And we’re giving plenty of time for it to REALLY be gone.
RMMD:
“Mom says that this is the time of year when the two of us start turning into human Petri dishes, Dad! — what do you think of that arch, slightly snotty commentary?”
DT: I had to know what game Widescreen was playing, so I checked back a few days, and it confirmed my suspicions that this looks like a Star Trek-themed skin of EVE Online? This nerdiness is entirely too specific for a newspaper comic. I miss the days when the most realistic gamer plot on the funny pages consisted of a spotty teenager with a joystick saying “Not now mom! I’ve almost got to the next level of Blood Skull Theft Auto! Awesome, I got the high score power-up!”
@Schroduck: Yeah, but would a true nerd take time out from his World of Spacecraft session to shoot back at the cops? He took a hit to the citadel!
RMMD:
“You know how Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman, Dad? Well, our teacher read a story to us in class today called Death of the Collared Shirt, and she was looking directly at the two of us! — you know, I think she was being sarcastic….”
MW: “Professor Ian Cameron spends more time with Mary Worth than with his own wife!” “Oh, haven’t you heard? They both caught Disproportionately Tiny Hand Disease and the CDC is making them quarantine together to stop the spread.”
Mary Worth:
“Slainte mhath, Ian!” [clink]
“Oh, I just love it when you speak Scottish Gaelic to me, Tish — er, I mean Mary!”
@Schroduck: I believe the game is called World of Starcraft, so presumably it’s some knockoff MMORPG from the mid-to-late Aughts when Blizzard dominated that market.
Pluggers think the lettuce in Taco Bell’s Crunchwrap Supreme counts as a “salad.”
(Credit where it’s due: “Johnny on the Spot” is a great name for a port-a-potty company.)
@TheDiva: I wonder if pluggers can get sued for using the brand’s name.
Plugging — And to think I believed all those lies they told us about bears sh*tting in the woods!
Dustin: “Heh-heh, yeah. I’m at the top of the social demographic food chain and anything I say or do is treated with respect. Now go get me a sammich.”
GT: So for reasons beyond my control I ended up catching the tail end of Miracle, the 2004 movie about the United States’ legendary underdog victory in the 1980 Olympics. The story, though remarkable, made an awkward fit for the traditional sports movie format as the winning goal was scored halfway through the third period, meaning the film had to try and wring drama out of the US running down the clock. And yet it was still more effective than whatever the Hell is going on in Gil Thorp right now.
JP: “I’ve forgotten what a thrill it is to sit in judgement over my fellow man, deciding their fates on a whim!”
Luann: Man, wonder why TJ never made it as a chef.
MW: “Have you met Mrs. Cameron? I mean, Mary’s conversation isn’t that much better, but still…”
RMMD: “I learned our adult heads on children’s bodies frighten other kids.”
MW: Tommy looks like he should be making ‘ook ook!’ noises…
JP: Dang it, Ces! Yesterday we had folks speculating that you’d given yourself an out, that it was all a dream! You could have been on the glide path to put this strip out of its misery by the end of the week!! Speaking of which…
CS: ‘They’re not onto us yet! Operation: The Burnings starts tomorrow!’
Luann: Pizza! From Sorrento’s*! On you, TJ!
*Spelled ‘D-I-G-I-O-R-N-O-S’
@TheDiva:Lol, I hope Blizzard’s lawyers don’t read the comics page
Pluggers: When a plugger says “salad,” he means egg salad. As far as he’s concerned, there is no other kind! And unfortunately, the FDA did recently declare a Class 1 recall of certain eggs in six states after an outbreak of Salmonella Enteritidis. So enjoy your time in the off-brand porta-potty, buddy — you’re going to be in there for a while.
Pluggers are so bound up with meat, cheese and french fries, that if they need to go more than twice a week, they consider it explosive diarrhea.
LH: Umm…Why is Loretta’s friend greenish? I thought only Mary Worth did weird stuff like that to their non-white characters.
Dick Tracy: That final panel…? Did I miss a recurring video game metaphor referring to Widescreen as “The Citadel?” Why wouldn’t they simply cut to a “Game Over” screen?
(Contemplates catching up on Dick Tracy)
Guess there’s no way to know!
DT: Now there’s a nice, splattery Dick Tracy death if I ever saw one. True, it’s not as literally visceral as seeing a man being eaten alive by rats, and it lacks an appropriately wet sound effect like “SPLUT!”, but the care Charles Ettinger put into that silhouette, making sure we can trace the full path of Dick’s hollow-point bullet as it slams into Widescreen’s anterior triangle and explodes out through his cerebellum, his mouth wrenched into a gaping, silent howl, and with a concomitant spray of blood, bone, and spinal fluid that one would expect with such a fatal and gruesome injury, tells us this is a artist who understands Dick Tracy and Dick Tracy readers.
DtM: Of course George is closing his eyes. He doesn’t want to see that his right foot is horribly transforming into a hoof, and judging by that slender ankle, he himself is transforming into a satyr. Martha is more excited by the prospect.
Pluggers – Does a bear shit in the woods? Well this one shit in his pants!
Pluggers aren’t used to having fibre in their diets – they got this far on meat and potatoes just like their dads who keeled over at 59 and it was good enough for them goddammit – so they’re not exactly free flowing in the first place. Cut them some slack and order a couple of extra portapotties to get them through this crisis.
***
Well, now we know the Charmin bears aren’t pluggers they’d welcome explosive diarrhea with open opens and ecstatic smiles.
@Charterstone: Dune: The other day there was a reference to the Comics Code imposed in the 1950s to make comics ‘wholesome’ and how Dick Tracy had been freely disseminating bloody mayhem to newspaper readers since 1931.
Well, as dramatic as this second panel is, it doesn’t hold a candle to what Gould got away with in the 1930s and 1940s…
Foob: This zombie strip’s continuity continues to baffle me. People are using huge PCs with CRT monitors, there’s no mention of the internet, they use corded landline phones, etc. But it simultaneously takes place after HM Queen Elizabeth died.
Also, Elizabeth was Queen of Canada, too. Is Lynn a secret anti-monarchist?
@Schroduck: I think there’s some kind of detente between Dick Tracy specifically and Blizzard. Blizzard added a legally distinct Dick Tracy outfit for one of the characters in Overwatch, and a few years ago Dick Tracy had… whatever Dick’s granddaughter’s name is, dress up as a character from legally distinct Overwatch in a Halloween costume contest.
Pluggers: The owner of the Johnny-on-the-Spot portable outhouse business sees this and thinks: “Well, that’s gonna cost me.”
DT: It was a 3D printed gun by a guy who didn’t even now how to tune his own 3D printer – He had his underling (whom he later blew up) do it. After one or two shots, the heat, and stress on the material probably just failed and the gun misfired. But is that enough to kill him? Is that a Sten which was designed to be cobbled together quickly from basic tools and stuff from a bicycle shop?
GT: Here is your problem. Not only is the game badly underlit but the QB’s arm is twisted around (see his thumb and hand). There are MANY reference photos on line from high school football that could literally have been traced! (Thank you Wally Wood).
MW: Of course Ian and Mary are buds – they share the same hair dye and hair dresser to keep that particular shade of grey-white. He only sleeps with Toby.
Phantom: Will this turn out to be a warning about AI?
RMMD: Now it is the boys turn to occupy the spotlight. We’ll see all of the shenanigans they get up to and the whole town is oblivious to the dangers they pose.
“Hits to Citadel! Get it!”
“Jaysus, Tracy, a man’s dead. Sure he was tryin’ to kill us, but . . . my god, man, show a little respect. This is all going in my report to Internal Affairs.”
Pluggers: C’mon, Andy. You’re a bear. There’s woods in the background. Have you forgotten what Baloo taught you about the bare necessities?
Pluggers: Potato or macaroni is about as salad as a plugger will go.
FC: How was your day, mom?
Fine. Now take this towel and go wash up, ya filthy munchkin.
MW: Get a clue, Nelly. Professor Cameron is obviously studying Mary in her natural habitat. He’s already deep into volume two of ‘dealings with Wilbur’.
H&L: We’re not happy!!
“Welcome to my world, Bub. Have you met my neighbor.”
Pluggers have already forgotten about having COVID-19. Twice. Because they refused to get vaccinated.
@Bob Tice: No, they are just “un w.c. chimico”
DT – Oh my God, they killed Sten! You bastards!
Pluggers Definitely unplugged: So a Plugger has the firehose squirts immediately after eating salad. That sounds completely on-brand, but I wonder: what’s cyclospora got to do with it?
GT: “Can Milford tie the game?”
No idea. Instead of the score,, time left, and other trivia, all we’ve got is “making life difficult”, “another interception”, and “can’t be thrilled”.
This comic strip needs an in-game chyron.
Blondie: Where did their dog and chairs go? Is this some dream sequence nobody told readers about?
Don Abundio, translated:
“Ready for the publicity photos?
“Sure, guys. How about this pose?”
“Do your wanking afterward!”
[Technical note: That type of old-fashioned camera with a cloth hood at the back is called a view camera. It would make no sense to click the shutter that fast, because the film (typically a large glass plate) had to be manually changed between each shot.]
@Voshkod: Sam is cheering as he closes in and blows Widescreen’s ship!
Pluggers: “That’s what I get for eating a salad. From now on, it’s nothing but blocks of pure Wisconsin cheese for this guy. NSA. Never. Shit. Again.”
DT: Oh, I get it! They call him Widescreen because he’s a computer guy and computers have screens. Also, he’s fat. That feels … unnecessarily cruel and judgmental.
Phantom: Uh, actually, he’s right there. I hope he brought along a book or something.