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Archive: Pluggers

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Blasts from the past and/or eternal present

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Crock, 3/18/25

I kind of admire the thought process that went into constructing the current installment of “The Men Of Outpost 5 Read Letters From One Of The Men’s Hillbilly Hometown.” Obviously, you have this great joke about how the one guy is a dumb hillbilly who may have mastered the mechanical art of tying a shoe but doesn’t understand how the process fits into the larger context, where you generally tie both your shoes at once. But what gets me is how they decided to set that punchline up. What if he’s prompted to reminisce on this subject because his beloved friend and mentor died? What if he’s in mourning? That sure adds a fun little twist to the gag!

Marvin, 3/18/25

Marvin, the comic strip, debuted in 1982, so if time flowed normally for its cursèd inhabitants, then Marvin, the character, would be in his early 40s, and his parents would have long ago forgotten his awful infancy, which only lasted a couple of years, after all, or at least they would have sanded down the edges in constant retelling into a “we can laugh about it now” situation. But time doesn’t flow normally, and Marvin will remain a baby forever, and his parents will neither know the escape of him growing up nor ever truly get used to the horror. Thus the exclamation points in the second panel here: while this is the sort of bad behavior we expect from this terrible child, his parents are forever shocked anew, each psychic wound inflicted never healing into protective scar tissue.

Pluggers, 3/18/25

Pluggers long ago lost the ability to feel sexual arousal. But products? Well, pluggers sure do love a good product — looking at them, assessing them, trying to figure out how much they cost, then either nodding their head at a good price or shaking their heads at how expensive things are these days. They still have those pleasures, at least, even though others have long passed them by.

B.C. and Wizard of Id, 3/18/25

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the courting mores of modern times were mapped onto a previous era — the Stone Age, say, or a vaguely medieval period that also had magic in it? Well, today’s B.C. and Wizard of Id have the answers for you, my friends!

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For the birds, who are against each other

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Shoe, 3/10/25

Man, it would be concerning if you were a bird parent from a species that primarily ate fish and your son didn’t want to eat fish, especially considering that, bird-wise, the main way you get fish for your kid is to eat it yourself and then barf it up for them. I can see why you’d write a pleading letter to the editor of the local paper, though it’s pretty funny that said editor would just be like “ditch your ungrateful kid and get with a cat instead.” This may be affected by said editor’s species: Shoe is, as helpfully pointed out by a surprisingly comprehensive table on the Shoe (comic strip) Wikipedia article, a purple martin, a largely insectivore species in contrast to his fish-happy employees Cosmo Fishhawk and Loon. Everything else aside, domestic and feral cats are also one of the main predators of bird species, but the purple martin’s current conservation status is “Least Concern,” so I guess he’s not too worked up about that either.

Heathcliff, 3/10/25

Now that I’m returning to Heathcliff on the regular, I must report that it’s still following its late-era dream logic to surprising and disquieting places. Heathcliff hates dogs, sure. The local dogcatchers are a tight-knit society with their own social institutions, I buy that. Said dogcatcher community respects Heathcliff because of his aforementioned hatred of dogs, makes sense. And so they … get lower back tattoos of Heathcliff’s face? To signal all this information to one another, sexually? Yes, the chain of reasoning holds together, but if the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

Intelligent Life, 3/10/25

I once cruelly but accurately described Intelligent Life as being “about a number of unpleasant people who are obsessed with ‘nerd’ franchises (i.e., most of modern film and TV entertainment) in the most boring way possible.” I guess I should’ve added a compliment about its one redeeming feature, which is that it’s almost never about pissing and shitting. Too late now, I guess!

Pluggers, 3/10/25

Oh, you’re telling me that a plugger will substitute lower-cost calories when the price of a favorite foodstuff goes up? Are they ever so special and financially rational? Should we tell everyone? Should we throw a party? Should we invite Professor Hal Varian, who’s written extensively on economic substitution effects?

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Their cruel, vicious hoots echo through the arena

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Pluggers, 2/26/25

I’ve been reading and making fun of Pluggers for nearly 20 years now, and over that time I have against my will acquired a certain amount of information about the individual beast-people who make up the cast. For my sins, I know that the cat-man plugger’s name is Claude, and somewhere in the back of my mind I have it that he’s supposed to be the intellectual of this bunch, although I can’t really find evidence to that effect in my archives; instead there’s just the usual stuff about how he has more prescriptions than friends and his underpants are constantly on the verge of falling off. But what I’m definitely sure of is that he doesn’t have a wife. There are only a few she-pluggers in this strip — the chicken-lady, the kangaroo-lady, and I think a dog-lady? — and none of them are with Claude. Reading the horoscopes in order to find out whether your pretend wife is going to be in a bad mood is a pretty baroque little fantasy, I have to admit. Maybe I was right about him being an intellectual, or at least profoundly neurotic, which is kind of the same thing if you think about it.

Six Chix, 2/26/25

I guess the joke is that this guy is the husband/partner/babydaddy of the pregnant woman, but honestly I think it’s even funnier if you assume he’s just wandering through this medical facility hoping to horn in on someone else’s sonogram session. “Hey, lady, since you got that thing lubed up already, d’you mind checking out my digestive situation? I need to know when I’m gonna have to shit, I’m trying to plan the rest of my afternoon.” (Anyway, sorry about all that, I know it was gross, but it’s not even close to the grossest sonogram-themed Six Chix I’ve discussed on this blog.)

Dick Tracy, 2/26/25

For too long Dick Tracy has focused on hideous mutant criminals and their violent interactions with law enforcement. I’m excited that this storyline is going in a different direction. What if there were two nephews who sucked? Just terrible, incompetent nephews? Nobody in the history of literature has dared to ask this question … until now.

Gil Thorp, 2/26/25

Hey, remember when they suspended Marty Moon for being drunk all the time? Well, I don’t care how sober the person they replaced him with is, they need to stop saying “tonight” at the end of every sentence. And they should be talking more about owls! Poor Leo Atazhoon has been on the receiving end of a vicious owl attack! We don’t have time for Rodney’s ongoing drama, the birds are finally rising up against us!