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Apartment 3-G, 10/23/06

Boy, Tommie sure is looking smug for someone who just yesterday was wandering the streets of New York aimless, confused, and unloved. Based on their unusual prominence in the third panel, I’d say those keys are the key to Tommie’s brand new attitude. Maybe they’re the keys that Alan left behind and she’s started going to Lu Ann’s creepy possessed studio, figuring that dream lovers are better than no lovers at all. Maybe she’s just returned from a swinging key party. Maybe she’s got Ted’s dismembered corpse locked up in a storage unit in Jersey City somewhere. Or maybe she’s decided that the hipster New York existence isn’t working for her and now she’s become a plugger.

Mary Worth, 10/23/06

Yes, Mary is making the universal “Call Me” gesture with her right hand. Yes, this is as angry as we’ve seen her since the capisce incident of this past August. Yes, Dr. Jeff had better call home soon … or not at all.

Pluggers, 10/23/06

Some pluggers need two labels to identify an object in a cartoon.

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Family Circus, 10/18/06

I’m going to ignore the main joke here, which involves the sort of smothering middle-class suburban overparenting that’s going to leave Jeffy a bed-wetting basket case well into his thirties, and just say: what the hell is wrong with Mamma Keane’s waist? I mean, look at it. I could put one of my hands around that. As if it isn’t enough that Big Daddy Keane made her pop out four kids with enormous heads, it looks like he also bullied her into getting some ribs removed to maintain that girlish figure. Yipes.

Pluggers, 10/18/06

A plugger knows he has to keep his Oedipus complex pushed deep down inside if he doesn’t want to get a divorce.

People ask me why I read Pluggers every day. If you pay attention over the long term, patterns and character traits and plotlines emerge over time. I would urge you to revisit this cartoon, involving the same family, to really get a sense of the psychodrama going on here.

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Pluggers, 10/7/06

“Hi Cousin Mabel! How are things in California? What? 4:30 in the morning? No, I think you’re wrong, my watch says 7:30. ‘Time zone’? Oh, I forget that you crazy Californians always have to do things differently! Ha ha! Yeah, I know we go through this every time I call, but I just don’t understand why you silly liberals don’t get on real American time.”

Seriously, though, I can derive no other message from this strip other than “Pluggers will call you at a totally inappropriate time just to save a few cents a minute on long distance,” or, to put it more succinctly, “Pluggers are assholes.” I note that contributor Lauren Williams is herself an inhabitant of Santa Barbara, California, which is one of the lower plugger-density cities in America, so I have to assume that she’s not admiring the plugger’s thrifty ways but rather attempting to publicly humiliate her plugger relatives who call her in the dead of night. Sorry, Lauren, but you should know by now that pluggers don’t feel any shame.

Judge Parker, 10/7/06

Yeah, Raju’s going to have a pretty awesome time at that party, all right.