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Pluggers, 10/21/17

Oh, hey, remember Elam, the extremely unappealing guest character who served as a sexual rival to Rufus in Gasoline Alley a few months ago? Well, I don’t think I ever made it clear at the time, but he was obviously based on Jack Elam, an actor who mostly played villains in westerns and gangster flicks in the ’50s and ’60s. Anyway, is there any particular reason why this guy, who died in 2003 and never intruded into my consciousness until July, is suddenly popping up everywhere? Are we in the midst of some Elamssaince to which I’m not privy? I guess we should follow Occam’s Razor and accept the simplest answer: that the there’s a pretty wide overlap between Gasoline Alley’s readership and the set of people who submit things to Pluggers.

Shoe, 10/21/17

It’s a funny world when you wake up one day at the age of 43 and realize that you spend quite a lot of mental energy, as part of your job, parsing the body language of a couple depressed middle-aged bird-men killing time in sad bar, isn’t it? Life is definitely a rich tapestry in that respect. Anyway, in panel one I kind of like — no, “like” isn’t the right word. Let’s just say that I respect the work that’s been put into Shoe casually leaning towards the Perfesser as he taps out his cigar ash, creating a little bubble of intimacy as he asks about his friend’s romantic life, and clearly expecting the answer to his question to be “Sex. Sex is how it went.”

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Family Circus, 10/13/17

Man, I almost resent how blatantly the “Jeffy will someday experience a psychotic break in which his mind will beg his hands to stop the killing, but they won’t listen” joke is being lobbed my way here, but, whatever: this is what Jeffy’s going to say to the cops in 20 years after he strangles a bunch of people, probably.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/13/17

“I didn’t, though! I died! Of cancer! Don’t forget me, damn it! Don’t forget me or I’ll haunt the shit out of you”

Pluggers, 10/13/17

You’re a plugger if your body is already starting to mold itself to fit perfectly into the piece of furniture where you’re going to die.

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Pluggers, 10/7/17

My first thought on reading this was basically “An app? For yard sales? What does this even mean?” I thought it was a variation on “pluggers don’t need GPS” or something like that. But then I did a little research (i.e., 30 seconds of Googling) and guess what? There are tons of yard sale apps out there, which show you all the sales in your area so you don’t have to drive around looking for signs taped to utility poles like a chump. And really, why wouldn’t you use them? What the hell is wrong with pluggers that they don’t? Do they not like being able to easily find the things they’re looking for? What I’m trying to say is, I didn’t go into today’s Pluggers expecting to emerge with my feelings of smug superiority over its downwardly mobile beast-people characters reaffirmed, but I’m not complaining that that’s how it all worked out!

Mary Worth, 10/7/17

“Hey, ma, have you considered Vicodin? Sure, it’ll numb you physically — but what you may not realize is that it’ll numb you emotionally as well!”