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Pluggers, 2/27/23

Look, I’m not going to say that there are no plugger or plugger-identified referees, but I feel comfortable in saying that for the vast majority of pluggers, when they see a referee on TV, their first thought is not “ahh, there’s another regular working man, just like me” but is instead “HOLDING? YOU THINK THAT’S HOLDING? FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE”, so I don’t know how well today’s Pluggers is going to land. I do think it’s accurate that pluggers would never rise to a career level where they might come to know interesting corporate or government secrets, though. That part I buy.

Judge Parker, 2/27/23

“I mean, it’s only Monday. He’s gonna be monologuing for the rest of the week. You want him to wrap up on Thursday and then we have to sit around in awkward silence for two more strips? We gotta stretch this out.”

Family Circus, 2/27/23

“And maybe some new glasses. You see how close he’s sitting to the TV?”

Hagar the Horrible, 2/27/23

You know, Hagar the Horrible usually focuses on small, mundane little moments in the life of a band of Viking warriors, but every once in a while you get a glimpse of a hugely important historic moment — like today, when the Varangian Guard was founded.

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Slylock Fox, 2/21/23

So I guess these nightmare-bugs are supposed to be … termites? Or some other horrible bug that feasts on wood, but I’m not going to bother researching what that might be because I’d probably end up seeing actual photographs of these nightmares, which is definitely not something I’m up for. My point, though, is that clearly whatever sinister process granted sapience to the animals of the Slylockverse did so to even the very tiny and very gross among them. The question that today’s strip raises is whether these bugs, as part of their transformation, achieved human-scale proportions in defiance of the square-cube law, or if they remained tiny but their chefs carve bits of wood into miniature replicas of full-sized logs, as part of a elaborate culinary culture that we’re just getting a glimpse of here.

Pluggers, 2/21/23

Pluggers is, of course, a fundamentally sad text, a ongoing and often quite grim paean to a supposedly bygone set of mores. Today, however, may be the first panel I can remember in which the practice being held up as an object of nostalgic longing is just obviously, demonstrably worse than what we have now. “Oh, can you kids today block that creepy guy you work with on Instagram so he doesn’t post borderline sexual comments on every one of your selfies, and also complain to HR about him? In my day, if I didn’t want to know he was jerking off, I would have to just leave my phone off the hook so that he couldn’t call me and nobody could either, and also quit my job!”

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Gil Thorp, 2/10/23

Huh, so I guess while Coach Martinez reigns supreme in football, in basketball he must answer to “Coach Kim,” who I assume his delivering his line here with gutting, icy disdain. The coaching hierarchy remains mysterious! Not exactly sure how Luke’s Thorbsession has led to today’s disastrous Valley Tech performance, though. Maybe the team had set aside one practice to master “not throwing the ball to the other team” but Luke never showed up because he was busy powerflexing in the mirror or something.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/10/23

Look, man, I don’t claim to know everything about the gender politics of Hootin’ Holler, but I feel like I’ve spent more time thinking about the worldbuilding of this strip generally than just about anyone else, and I’m confident in saying that the menfolk do not let their wives tag along on fishing trips. The whole point of the fishing trip is to create segregated homosocial spaces, and also avoid being nagged about not having a job. I refute this!

Pluggers, 2/10/23

I stared at this a long time wondering if pluggers think a turtleneck is like a backwards shirt, but I think the joke is just that pluggers’ necks are bigger now than they were 40+ years ago — or, in the case of the plugger on display here, that they now simply have no neck at all.