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Archive: Pluggers

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The dog-man looks so happy that I hate to break it to him

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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!

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Time keeps on slipping

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Beetle Bailey, 1/11/21

I refuse to believe that Beetle and Sarge are watching PBS or that Camp Swampy shells out for premium cable, so I’m left to assume that nobody at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC knows that you can pause streaming video.

Blondie, 1/11/21

“Did I think you looked goofy? Well, the two of us are, what, 40? 45? Not much older than that, surely, which means that when I saw you wearing bell-bottomed jeans it was the mid ’90s at the absolute earliest. So yes, I absolutely thought you looked goofy. Or wait, are you referring to JNCOs? Because those were exceptionally goofy.”

Pluggers, 1/11/21

Speaking of the shift of cultural signifiers over time, I feel like either Pluggers or I have absolutely lost the thread. Wearing shorts when there’s snow on the ground, usually on a day where it’s unseasonably pleasant but still “cold” by any objective standard, is something I associate strongly with my college days and therefore Gen X generally, which means that [checks Wikipedia for generally accepted dates for beginning of Generation X, subtracts from 2020] oh my GOD no, no, please, absolutely not

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Does one truly “roll up” in a Chevy Astro

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Gil Thorp, 1/9/21

So what’s going in with Gil Thorp, literally several of you are wondering? Well, it turns out that Vic Doucette is killing it at P.A. announcing during the basketball games, thanks to his wordplay that dazzles the Mudlark players, whose prowess lies in the physical rather than the verbal realm. Also, it turns out that, like Vic, Doug Guthrie is a nerd, and in fact is the one kind of nerd that jocks truly respect: a car nerd, who may drive a sweet classic Pontiac but is fascinated by automobiles in all their forms, even utilitarian GM vans from the ’00s. It also came up that Vic has cerebral palsy, not that you can really tell from the art, and Chevy Astros are apparently commonly converted for wheelchair use, but Vic doesn’t use a wheelchair so this may or may not be relevant? Maybe Doug is a car monomaniac and literally has to ask about the make and model of every single vehicle he sees. He’s just another brightly colored piece of glass in the rich mosaic of Milford High.

Family Circus, 1/9/21

Jeffy is a simple child, and looks smug because he thinks he’s about to get a cookie. But Billy? Billy, for all his faults (and there are many), plays a longer game, and has realized that even the guy who graduates bottom of his class from the easiest medical school to get into has access to a prescription pad, which will open up a lot of opportunities for a guy with frankly not much of a moral compass.

Pluggers, 1/9/21

Hey, Pluggers, a more succinct and better caption here would’ve been “Plugger CSI,” you’re welcome