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Archive: Pluggers

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Grim Saturday

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Hi and Lois, 5/14/22

As readers of this blog well know, I like that Thirsty has in recent years been allowed to once again be the moderately functional alcoholic he was intended to be when this strip launched in the ’50s. Sometimes this is the crux of the joke, but sometimes it just adds to the strip’s flavor. Like, it’s funny that Thirsty is standing next his friend like, “Doing a chore, huh? Couldn’t be me” but it’s funnier that he’s probably had a buzz on since about 10 am.

Mary Worth, 5/14/22

I certainly hope that Helen has slipped her resignation letter under the door of the School Management office and is heading out of Santa Royale forever tonight. How could you ever show your face around town if people knew you held lifelong feelings for Ian? Toby, of course, is far beyond human shame now, but Helen must still have a shred of dignity.

Pluggers, 5/14/22

You’re a plugger if your life isn’t worth living anymore because the only people who still talk to you are the ones coordinating the elaborate series of pharmaceutical interventions necessary to keep you alive.

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Josh contemplates human frailty with varying degrees of sympathy

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Pluggers, 5/11/22

The historian Ronald Syme wrote that the Emperor Augustus, who died at 77, “outlast[ed] the friends, the enemies, and even the memory of his early days,” and I think about that a lot as I get older, about the way that, if you’re lucky enough to live to a ripe old age, you become something of an alien, as the world you grew up in recedes further and further in the past. And what do you get by way of compensation? Well, there’s more life, I suppose, which is not to be sneezed at. And old age maybe takes the edge off a bit by softening our vision and our minds, so we come to perceive the world through a comforting and gradually thickening haze. Unfortunately, modern society and so-called “advanced” medicine has allowed us to reverse this process, so that we can see, with abrupt clarity, the ruin that we have become. As usual, Pluggers, a strip I have been forced to respect more and more, has given me much to think about today.

Gil Thorp, 5/11/22

Speaking of seeing, Nolan Ryan could see, so I don’t know what to tell you, kid. God bless Scooter for sticking up for his tragically blind friend, but as a guy who was once a loser tween who blurted out some ill-thought-out defenses of his fellow losers, I can guarantee you that he will only feel more embarrassed in the coming innings, as Valley Tech sends Greggg flailing aimlessly at bunt after bunt after bunt that he can only hear.

Dustin, 5/11/22

“Can you imagine? It’s 2022! How would we even cash it?”

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Seriously, Hi, get a grip

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Dustin, 5/6/22

Dustin is a truly amazing strip, one whose whole purpose is to poke fun of the foibles of young people despite clearly having no real sense of how young people live their lives, and one of the ways this manifests, as I have frequently griped, is that the young people characters go to fern bars in order to seek out romantic entanglements, like it’s the god-damned Reagan Administration or something. I guess some garbled communication has filtered back to Dustin HQ that modern hookup culture is entirely focused on dating apps now, which could explain why this young lady is at a fern bar but also on her laptop for some reason.

Hi and Lois, 5/6/22

I was going to make fun of Hi for seeming so shocked that Chip and his date might go dutch, but then I realized he has that same slack-jawed befuddled look in panel one as the conversation begins, too. Honestly, he looks like that a lot of the time! That Hi Flagston, just a befuddled dipshit stumbling his way through life on the funny pages!

Pluggers, 5/6/22

Ha ha, I absolutely love the look on that dog-man’s face. It’s gonna be real horror show in that house and this guy knows it.