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Pluggers, 2/2/20

There is a surprising amount to unpack in today’s Pluggers! Let’s start with the idea that Groundhog Day is some kind of national plugger holiday, like the Oscars is for us coastal elites, and they get up early to catch all the shadow-seeing action on TV — or, if they live in DuBois, PA, a mere thirty minutes from Punxsutawney, drive to see the event in person. Then you have a thought balloon from the poor groundhog, indicating that he’s capable of sapience, which reaffirms all our worst fears about the blurry lines between “humans” and “animals” in the world of Pluggers. Finally, there’s the content of that thought ballon: Punxsutawney Phil feels like he’s done this before, implying that he’s stuck in the same hellish time loop that ensnared Bill Murray in the 1993 film Groundhog Day, only he doesn’t have access to the possibility of the redemptive love that freed Murray’s character. Real grim stuff!

Dennis the Menace, 2/2/20

Not only does this panel feature Dennis engaging in actually menacing behavior — and with malice aforethought! it’s menace in the first degree! — but it also features a movie theater worker who isn’t some teenager who can laugh this off as a story to tell his buddies because fuck this stupid job anyway, but a man who looks like he’s in late middle age, probably lost his full-time job due to outsourcing or computers or apps, who can even keep track, and who took a minimum wage job to put food on the table, just while he’s looking for other work, just so he can keep a little dignity. But it’s hard, man. It’s hard to hold onto your dignity when they make you wear that hat, and it’s even hard when you have to deal with little shits like this. Real grim stuff!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/2/20

Ha ha, it’s funny because … Hootin’ Holler, economically impoverished and physically isolated, has only one medical professional serving the community, and it turns out he’s a fraud? And nobody cares? I’ve said it before, but: real grim stuff!

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Funky Winkerbean, 1/26/21

“Man,” thought Harry Dinkle, “I remember back in the day, these conferences used to be fun! People had a sense of humor, liked to joke around. Now they’re a bunch of stick-in-the-muds who’ll bite your head off for no reason. Also, totally unrelated, it used to be a lot easier to find someone who had cocaine.”

Mother Goose and Grimm, 1/26/21

Strips like Mother Goose and Grimm really veer back and forth between “These characters are basically humans who happen to look like animals” and “These characters are animals with animal-like traits,” and I want to make clear that I fully recognize that this is in fact part of the fun of the strip, not a “goof” or a “mistake” or whatever. Still, I think the veering back and forth can sometimes veer into unintentionally awkward territory, like today, when the joke is supposed to be “Ha ha, Attila is a character in this strip who talks and thinks like a person but is also a cat,” but the execution, especially the whisper and look of panic on the sales lady’s face, really gives off a strong “please help me escape from this abusive relationship” vibe.

Dennis the Menace, 1/26/21

Speaking of which, I don’t usually look at a Dennis the Menace punchline and say “Jeez, I hope this is a sex thing,” but for the sake of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, I sincerely hope this is a sex thing.

Pluggers, 1/26/21

Fun fact for those of us rapidly aging into the plugger demographic: the “More Cowbell” sketch first aired in 2000! Can you imagine! Anyway, a better caption here would be “It’s been about 20 years since pluggers have been able to stay awake late enough to watch SNL.”

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Crock, 1/23/21

I’ve had to acknowledge to myself that a big part of doing this blog consists of me staring at a sentence in a comic strip for a long time — like, not hours or anything, but longer than I stare at most sentences, and almost certainly longer than the writer spent thinking about it before they wrote it — and wondering, “Why did they phrase it like that?” Such is the lot of the critic, alas! Anyway, I’m kind of tickled that instead of saying “Oh yeah?” or “What do you mean?” or deploying any other fairly neutral phrase to smooth the glidepath to the punchline of this joke, Poulet in panel one says “You must be mistaken!” I’m choosing to believe that Poulet, perhaps alone amongst the Legionnaires in this Maghrebi outpost, truly believes in France’s civilizing colonial mission, and is heartbroken to learn that the occupation government’s arts budget isn’t as generous as he imagined.

Pluggers, 1/23/21

We’ve all spent lots of times arguing the “What is a plugger?” question over the years here on this blog, but I’ve always assumed that this feature’s mission is fundamentally one of in-group self-affirmation: “This is what we pluggers are like, and that’s a good thing, even though we might have our foibles!” However, with today’s installment of “You’re a plugger if you have incipient dementia,” I may have to reassess that judgement.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/23/21

Ha ha, it’s funny because the residents of Hootin’ Holler live surrounded by piles of their own garbage!