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Cleats, 11/6/08

This is Cleats! I almost never talk about it, except when it becomes a scene of nightmarish horror; but, seeing as it’s ostensibly a good-natured, light-hearted look at the world of youth athletics, that happens more than you’d think. Anyhoo, Edith there is a slightly bookish young lady who enjoys goaltending and fencing. She has terrifying, inhuman mouth-parts that she uses to feed on soccer balls, and rotting flesh.

Pluggers, 11/6/08

You know you’re an impoverished plugger when you live in an apartment so tiny that your can barely fit your legs between your TV stand and your chair, which is just as well seeing as you can’t afford any other furniture. Also, you know you’re an impoverished plugger when you’d like to eat your cat, but you can’t move quickly enough to catch him because you’re weak and keep fainting, because of the hunger. At least this poor bastard hasn’t had to resort to the ultimate plugger indignity: hocking his television.

Mark Trail, 11/6/08

“Raccoons like to wander a lot … around in nature! That’s because they’re wild animals! They don’t care a whit about you, or your family! You’re lucky Sneaky managed to ‘sneak’ out, or else he probably would have ‘snuck’ into your room at night and bit you on the face, for no reason!”

Also, I challenge you all to use the phrase “That will make it easier to chain to a log” in casual conversation today.

Shoe, 11/6/08

“Also, I’m old and dying! So the future can pretty much bite me, you know what I’m saying?”

Psst! If you’re interested in discussing the election, this would be a good place to do it.

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Archie, 10/30/08

Today’s Archie reveals just how primitive the AJGLU 3000’s graphics subsystem is. Rather than portraying a pizza box as a collection of surfaces and enclosed foodstuffs that can wobble, flop open in mid-air, and splatter pepperoni, sauce, and grease everywhere to hilarious effect, it instead assumes that it is a simple, monolithic object that flies into the living room serenely, describing a perfect parabola before miraculously coming to rest in Jughead’s hands. I’d guess that whole system is based on Atari System 2 hardware, which explains the mysterious paperboy reference.

Hi and Lois, 10/30/08

I was going to go into a diatribe about how it’s silly that Ditto is regarding his lunch with wide-eyed shock in panel one seeing as it’s (a) one that he packed himself and (b) awesome, but then I caught sight of those two … brown … things in panel two. Are we supposed to assume that those are his two candy bars, both of which he carefully unwrapped and then set down on the lunch table to enjoy later? Yes, yes, let’s assume that, please.

Spider-Man, 10/30/08

You have to give the creators of the newspaper Spider-Man credit for always exploring new frontiers of total lameness on the part of their characters. In one corner, we have Big Time, a criminal mastermind so committed to his laughable clock theme that he has some sort of clock-shaped pop-gun that spits out its minute hand as ammunition and is thus presumably useless after two shots; and in the other, we have the Amazing Spider-Man, who boasts of his “spider reflexes,” which will help him dodge a projectile that hasn’t managed to cover about three feet of space in the time its taken him to thought-balloon a sentence and a half — only to have said reflexes completely disabled by a loud noise. Determining the winner in this battle will be like a philosophical conundrum: can an object with no mass be moved by an infinitely weak force?

Pluggers, 10/30/08

Pluggers know it’s cheapest just to get plastered at home, in front of the TV set.

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Pluggers, 10/27/08

It’s well documented that the definition of “plugger” is notoriously slippery. For instance, before today, you probably didn’t realize that typical, average Americans who sit around the kitchen table out of their minds on a psychedelic mix of prescription medications are in fact pluggers! The shocking revelation that even pillheads can be pluggers leads us to ask: who else is a plugger?

Apartment 3-G, 10/27/08

Alan’s parents are probably pluggers! That’s why they hate and fear the great city of New York, refusing to bury him there, instead taking him home to a simple, all-American rural Maine cemetery. This move on their part has put an end to Margo’s brief experience of something resembling human tenderness, as she prepares to leap to the defense of her home city, and I have to come in on her side here. After all, it’s not as if Alan’s going to overdose at his own funeral, seeing as he’s already dead and all. And if his burial service is thronged by crazed junkies who ultimately pull his body from the casket and attempt to grind it up and smoke/snort/inject it so as to enjoy the residual dope still in his veins — well, isn’t that what he really would have wanted? It would certainly be more fun than the “private service” his parents have planned, with the glassy-eyed, pill-numbed plugger hordes drooling aimlessly in the pews.

Wizard of Id, 10/27/08

The peasants in Wizard of Id are also pluggers, because they’re staying cheerful and making do with what they’ve got! In this case, “what they’ve got” is their rickety wooden furniture, and “making do” involves burning it for heat. Because they live in desperate, crushing poverty, you see! Ha ha! The nonstop larfs will continue as they turn first to prostitution and then to cannibalism.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/27/08

The Funky Winkerbeaners are perpetually glum and despondent, so they do not in fact qualify for plugger status. I find it interesting that Les needs to consult the yearbook so as to successfully navigate his high school reunion. True, everyone in the cast has aged horribly, due to various cancers and general soul-blighting depression, but as far as I know, virtually all of them have remained in town, so it’s not like their current wizened state should be a surprise to Les. Hell, half of them work with him, either at the high school or the pizzeria, Winkerburg apparently being a black hole of misery from which no joy can escape.