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Pluggers, 4/24/06

I have tried — I mean, really, really tried — to restrain my college-educated, East Coast-dwelling, liberal urban elitism while reading Pluggers, holding my tongue as I am lectured day after day about how simple, down-home folks are morally superior to me. But this one really just pushed me over the edge, and I’m not what you’d call particularly clean. All right, Pluggers, listen up: If your response to spilling something on the floor is to aimlessly push it around with your sock, you live in filth, OK? I know your kitchen tile is already invisible under a layer of grime and sticky Fanta residue, but try to make a goddamn effort, for Christ’s sake. I hope social services comes and takes away your undernourished kids, the Humane Society comes and takes away your chained-up dogs, and the dentist comes and takes away the last of your meth-loosened teeth. And don’t try to tell me that you represent the “real America,” because I live in America and we have these things called paper towels.

Judge Parker, 4/24/06

Meanwhile, in the other America — the rich, white, freaky-red-haired-fright-wigged America — Sam and Abbey have turned from ruining Ned’s love life to cramping Sophie’s academic style. See, earlier this morning (by which I mean two weeks ago, JP-time), Abbey’s youngest received praise from her teacher on her latest school paper, which praised the concept of outsourcing. Today, the upcoming conflict is being telegraphed with a total lack of subtlety: Sophie is outsourcing her homework to India! This presumably includes the aforementioned paper about outsourcing, which may be a desperate attempt on the part of this strip that it does too understand the concept of irony.

Who’s to blame for this sad state of affairs? Evil, greedy CEOs, who have set a bad example to the nation’s youth by demonstrating that labor should be sought at the lowest possible prices, wherever you can find it? The Indians, for being so smart and yet working so cheaply that good old fashioned American fraudulant-paper-writers can’t compete? My vote goes to Sam and Abbey: I don’t care how many acres your estate is and how many pretty, pretty horses frolic prettily on it, nobody Sophie’s age (which is indeterminable due to crappy artwork, but is surely somewhere between 8 and 13) needs access to international wire transfer capabilities.

Sally Forth, 4/24/06

Boy, is Hillary in luck! She’s bonded with a moody goth girl just in time to learn about death!

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Pluggers and They’ll Do It Every Time, 3/1/06

We continue our desultory romp through some new comics with two that were interactive before the Interweb make interactivity cool: Pluggers and They’ll Do It Every Time. Both start with a seemingly sure-fire plan: give their readers what they want by actually having them write the jokes. But they take this idea and run with it in radically different directions.

Pluggers aims to celebrate the simple, upstanding, stoic blue color types who form the backbone of this great country. But I’m guessing that it’s unintentional that the life of a Plugger is made by these little anecdotes to look suicidally depressing. The Plugger never complains despite the daily helping of indignities heaped upon him or her. Check out the disoriented look on our protagonist today: you can tell that for a brief moment, he thought that the good-morning kiss was coming from a special someone who’s now gone, like his ex-wife, who’s presumably left him for, I dunno, a raccoon or something. (As a side note, the fact that the anthropomorphic bear Plugger owns a non-anthropomorphic dog doesn’t make this any easier to parse.)

But while Pluggers specializes in selfless nobility as a cover for self-pity, They’ll Do It Every Time serves as a channel for its readers’ pettiest rages. Heavy on the expository matter, it presents a parade of unredeemable jerks saddled with subtle names like “Migraina” who serve as the helpless punching bags of the strip’s ire. Supporting characters exist mainly to complement the main target’s awfulness (the little girl’s “Oh, Mommy … what you said!” is simultaneously incomprehensible and revolting to me). According to Don Markstein’s invaluable Toonopedia, this panel, which dates back to the 1920s, was originally intended to illustrate “the little ironies of everyday life.” If the last couple week’s worth are any indication, today’s version illustrates the little ironies of everyday life, inflated to the subjects of hateful mean-spiritedness.