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Pluggers, 4/5/26

I feel like the way you’d do a panel like this if you thought the overall vibe of the Pluggers comic should be “Pluggers and their foibles! They’re just like us!” would be to have several plugger children and other family members looking disappointed or bored in the background while dad plugger searches for the eggs he hid just a little too well. That’s relatable, and cute! But if your goal for Pluggers is “Pluggers don’t know where they left things, and really can’t remember if they even had the things they’re looking for in the first place, they’re alone and confused and increasingly scared,” then I think you’d do something that looks more like today’s panel.

Mary Worth, 4/5/26

“Busy with my family, my job, my side business…” is a pretty good way to get rid of some near-stranger who has somehow managed to acquire your phone number. It gives no specific information that she can use against you, but implies that you have a number of legitimate reasons why this conversation needs to end as soon as possible, and it’s even sorted so that you make clear that you know your kids are more important than your money-losing hobby of hawking LuLaRoe leggings on Facebook or whatever. Mary’s made of sterner stuff, she’s not going to be shaken off so easy, but I do appreciate the effort being made.

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Family Circus, 4/1/26

Happy April Fool’s day, everybody! As I’ve noted over the last few years, the “trick” the passage of time has played on me is my growing appreciation of the Family Circus’s whole deal, which is that the kids are annoying on purpose, like that’s the whole joke. Look at Ma Keane’s face here! She wants to die, and maybe also to kill!

Crankshaft, 4/1/26

If I’m remembering right, for a long time Lena was a never-seen off-panel character that the other characters at the bus depot would constantly complain about, and then we started seeing her in person and she was always depicted as a perfectly nice woman that everyone is unfathomably cruel to for no reason. Look, in this one she briefly believes they’re being nice to her! That’s the “prank”!

Pluggers, 4/1/26

At least that’s intelligible as a prank, though. Is the prank here … on us? Like we’re supposed to believe that Mr. Whipple sent a letter to Pluggers HQ from beyond the grave encouraging them to do a panel where his successor as Charmin spokesbeing comes into a plugger’s home and takes a huge dump? “Look, pal, you’re in the wrong house,” says the bear-man, in what is becoming less and less what anyone would consider a “prank.” “I don’t get all that excited about toilet paper. I appreciate its utility in keeping my butthole and buttcrack clean of feces, but I’m not really invested in it emotionally.”

Intelligent Life, 4/1/26

Not even going to engage with the prank content on this one. These guys know what movie tickets cost! They see movies in the theater all the time, and talk about box office numbers while they’re there! Instead, I just want to point out that in panel one Skip has responded to “Wow … it’s April Fool’s Day,” with “Woot!”, which is absurd. Nobody’s excited about April Fool’s Day. This is just another example of these losers responding to any cultural reference they recognize with a sort of Pavlovian noise of general approval. It says a lot about society, and it sickens me.

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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.