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Archive: Pluggers

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Single-panel Saturday

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Dennis the Menace, 5/20/17

Ooh, look at that facial expression on Dennis: that’s the look of a kid who, against his better judgement and true sentiment, is about to agree with a bigger, meaner kid and mock his good pal Mr. Wilson for his low-tech ways. Dennis is about to become the most menacing things around: someone who, under social pressure from a bully, turns on one of his friends.

Pluggers, 5/20/17

Whoa there, this panel is veering dangerously towards questioning plugger orthodoxy on the Second Amendment, which among other things dictates that boxes of ammunition should be the easiest kinds of packages to open! Anyway, this plugger’s facial expression indicates that someone in the supply chain that produced this bag of chips is soon going to be tasting hot lead; unfortunately, it’s probably going to not be the packaging engineer who designed the bag but rather the poor sap at the gas station who sold it to him.

Family Circus, 5/20/17

As a rule, I assume all Family Circus panels consist of repurposed art from 1975 or earlier, and sometimes when the caption refers to contemporary pop culture or technology, I try to guess what the original was. In this case, I’m thinking it was “You hang that up right now, Jeffy! Phones don’t work in cars! This is the devil’s work, do you hear me? THE DEVIL’S WORK”

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FUN FACT FOR THE DAY: We’re all slowly dying!!!!

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Judge Parker, 5/16/17

Everyone who had “the kidnapper is Abbey’s half-sister from her dad’s secret family” in the pool, stand up and take a bow! I’m enjoying the punchline of “Sam doesn’t recognize what his own wife looked like as a child,” though I suppose in a scenario where you see a picture of a kid that looks more or less like pictures you’ve seen of your wife as a kid, and the kid in the picture is standing in front of someone who’s definitely your wife’s dad, you would just kind of assume. Plus the hair! Who else would have that clownish color of hair? It must be a Spencer gene that passes down through the male line but only expresses itself in females! The fact that the grownup kidnapper has bland brown hair means nothing: clearly she’s keeping her Spencertude in disguise, waiting to reveal it at just … the right … moment. Either that or the syndicate coloring folks have been doing it wrong this whole time, ha ha, who can tell!

Pluggers, 5/16/17

A Twitter follower pointed out to me last week that the length of time I’ve been writing this blog is longer than the entire run of Calvin and Hobbes, which is definitely a fact that doesn’t make me want to hop into a coffin and close the lid behind me, at all! Anyway, one of the signs of time’s inevitable passing and my own impending death is the treatment of technology in Pluggers. Way back in the early years of this blog, in the mid ’00s, pluggers hated and feared the Internet so much that they’d rather thumb through an almanac than get access to the wealth of knowledge online. Today, they’re still eschewing the Web’s more educational functions, but they are definitely not above joining their children and grandchildren in the performative dance of social media, in which our every waking moment becomes a quantum of digital information to be shared and ranked.

Crankshaft, 5/16/17

At least I’m not so old that I’m excited about the appearance of some pro golfer in Crankshaft, though! CONFIDENTIAL TO PEOPLE WHO EXPERIENCED ANY GLIMMER OF ENTHUSIASM FROM READING THIS STRIP: it’s just a drawing, and there are lots of reference photos online, he didn’t actually have to participate in the creation of it in any way, SORRY

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Crimes against nature aren’t in Dick’s jurisdiction

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Pluggers, 5/11/17

I kind of admit I’m not … entirely sure what’s going on here? Like, it doesn’t matter whether you like iced tea or lemonade (THE ONLY TWO ACCEPTABLE DRINKS, and don’t try mixing them together to form the abomination that is an “Arnold Palmer”), and it doesn’t matter if you’re fundamentally an optimist or a pessimist if you’ve got … friends? I approve of friendship, of course, but I don’t understand why it needs all these false binaries as a setup. I also am a little unsettled by the anxiety behind the “just happy to have a glass.” Maybe this is why the plugger dog-man is sitting on an overturned bucket instead of a chair, because he had to sell all his chairs, and he only has his bucket and two glasses left. Remember, Pluggerville’s pawn shop is the most depressing place on earth!

Dick Tracy, 5/11/17

So it turns out the Margies’ CosplayCon scam involved a fake robbery to grab the cash prize for best costume, yawn. Anyway, with that out of the way, they’ve really kicked it up a notch for their next crime: digging up the corpses of prominent comics artists and reanimating them, using forbidden science! It’s a little on the nose for new-look Dick Tracy, but I’m on board.

Spider-Man, 5/11/12

Say, were you wondering how this week’s super-powered combat played out??? ANSWER: a guy hit another guy in the shin with “some kinda stick” and then ran away. THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN!!!