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Pluggers, 8/25/20

The old era of Pluggers has ended and a new one has begun! How will these new-look pluggers distinguish themselves from their predecessors? Well, pluggers have traditionally be depicted as hard-working blue-collar folks, whose very name comes from continuing to “plug” away reliably even though society’s deck is stacked against them. But new pluggers? New pluggers have realized they can just take a nap and they honestly don’t even feel bad about it! Plugging away at things is for suckers! I’m both excited to see where this strip is going and terrified at what pluggers will do now that they’ve rejected the societal norms that have served as guardrails for their behavior up to this point.

The Lockhorns, 8/25/20

Maybe it’s a bit odd, but I’m more willing to accept change in Pluggers than I am in The Lockhorns, who in my opinion are inhabitants of Levittown circa 1965 and should stay there and then, forever, and should definitely not be watching shows only available on streaming services. Anyway, that fence is nowhere near tall enough to block out spoilers, neighbor! Leroy may be a gnomish three feet tall, but he can still easily shout audible spoilers into your yard! The only solution is to enclose their entire property under an air-tight dome, which frankly you should’ve done a long time ago.

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Mary Worth, 8/22/20

Hmm, is this Mary Worth storyline wrapping up? Well, Madi is sitting up straight, making direct eye contact with the reader, and outlining the positive life goals she’s developed for herself, so all signs point to yes! Apparently all you need to cure a young girl’s grief is to listen to her with an open heart and show her that no matter how badly off she is, at least she’s smarter than Toby.

Pluggers, 8/22/20

Speaking of wrapping up, it’s time for longtime chief plugger Gary Brookins to retire from his work on Pluggers. The strip, along with the very notion of pluggerdom, will continue under Rick McKee, so keep sending in those suggestions, folks, we know you want to. Anyway, Gary handed over the keys to the hallowed AOL address to Rick, and he’s decamped over to Instagram, because he’s a god-damned influencer now. See ya, suckers!

The Phantom, 8/22/20

Yes, Bangalla is a thriving post-colonial democracy, with a vibrant economy in which all it takes to get a good-paying job is a personal relationship with the head of the local government-backed paramilitary force, who in turn takes orders from the mysterious, anonymous warlord who holds sway over the nation’s president and operates outside the structures of any democratically responsible institution!

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Mark Trail, 8/11/20

So as anyone would’ve predicted, this abandoned cat was befriended by Andy, brought into the Trail household/menagerie, and dubbed “Tabby.” Mostly I’m showing you today’s strip because it seems wild to me that Cherry, whose father is literally a veterinarian, is shocked to learn that sometimes people abandon their pets. But if Doc has indeed sheltered his daughter, who I’m reasonably sure is now in her 30s, from the more sordid aspects of the life of domesticated animals, it could also explain how she apparently doesn’t really know what sex is, either. (Remember, this is what Cherry thinks sex is.)

Funky Winkerbean, 8/11/20

You know, I’ve always had a sort of unreasoning hatred of Tom Cruise as an actor, to the extent that sometimes I avoid movies he’s in that I otherwise might enjoy. But when Vanilla Sky came out in 2001, its marketing campaign teased that Cruise’s character would become hideously deformed over the course of the movie, and I was like “Tom Cruise? Hideously deformed? Hell yeah” but it turned out I hated that even more, somehow! What I’m trying to say is that Funky Winkerbean is trying to stop me from doing more rants about how this isn’t the way urban wildfires or LA geography works (are they driving from … Burbank? Hollywood? NONE OF THIS MAKES SENSE) by at least teasing me with the prospect of Les and Mason becoming terribly burned, like maybe their whole faces will get burned off, but sorry, you’re not going to fool me again! I still hate it!

Pluggers, 8/11/20

I was going to complain that the whole point of pluggers is that they hold down honest, solid jobs in factories and on construction sites where literal equipment malfunctions are actually a workplace hazard, but then I realized that this is probably a half-remembered reference to “wardrobe malfunctions” and I think it means that we as a nation are finally, finally getting over the time where we almost but not quite saw Janet Jackson’s nipple during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2004.