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When I logged on to my custom Houston Chronicle comics page this evening, I discovered that, alone among my chosen strips, Pluggers was refusing to load.

What could have caused such a thing to happen? Was it the Democrats? Was Pluggers’ down-home wisdom too true for Nancy Pelosi and her chardonnay-swilling crowd? Eagerly, I rushed over to the Pluggers Web site to find out precisely what truth it dared to speak to power.

Pluggers, 11/10/06

I was kind of dissapointed. Ha ha, it’s funny because he’s bald! I’m a little concerned about the stream of black dots emerging from the back of his head, however. They seem to be the same color as his eyebrows, more or less. Are those the last chunks of his hair, flying away in the breeze? Was that fancy sports car really worth the last shreds of your head-covering dignity, bald dog-man?

One Big Happy, 11/10/06

I usually leave the silent penultimate panel watching to the Silent Penultimate Panel Watch, but the instance in today’s One Big Happy was particularly interesting. Panel three captures that awkward moment in which you’ve told a joke and nobody gets it and so you have to stare or gesture or something to drive your point home. Of course, the advantage of being in a comic strip is that such awkward moments don’t have to exist; Joe’s joke would have worked without that silent third panel. With that panel in there, however, I almost think the strip is supposed to be less a vehicle for Joe’s slam on Ruthie and more an examination of how poorly he told it. His use of the phrase “real fast” in the final panel is undermined by the silent frame that preceded it, which, since comic time is ultimately determined by the reader, could last as long as you care to stare at it.

Grandpa, as usual, would rather be somewhere else.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 11/10/06

Having apparently completely exhausted the inventory of things that they will do every time, TDIET has now apparently decided to move on to things that even it admits they will never, ever do.

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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.