Let's get one thing straight right off the bat. "Pluggers," the single-panel cartoon that fills this book, is not about rednecks, blue collars or how animals might survive in a human world. It's about people. Real people, everyday people, good people: the pluggers of the world.
Pluggers, in real life, are the kind of folks you can depend on. They're the eighty per cent of humanity who do one-hundred per cent of the work-and manage to get a kick out of life, in spite of everything.
Pluggers are survivors, by wit and by grit. They lack pretensions and appreciate the small things. They honor at least some traditions-such as marriage, barbecues and the-one-who-cooks-doesn't-do-dishes. They use technology, but don't go gah-gah over it. They often have a good supply of duct tape or stick 'em notes. They love good deals, and know where to find them. They are equally adept at changing channels, changing careers and changing diapers. They've met deadlines, tasted failure and probably tested the speed limit a time or two. (On downhill stretches, at least.)
Pluggers are not whiners, complainers or shriekers. They care, but they've long gotten over the fact that the world isn't perfect. In fact, they kinda like it that way, feeling deep down that a perfect world would be about as interesting as a TV anchorman's hair.
Pluggers are neither easily shocked, nor easily impressed. They try to keep things simple, uncomplicated. In this effort they fail, of course. Modern life is like that. But given a choice, they try at least not to add to confusion.
Most of all, through the vast reaches of nonsense that make up much of the contemporary world, pluggers plug on, never losing heart...even if it's been triple-bypassed.
"Pluggers," the single-panel cartoon, is a comic feature that runs in many of America's finer newspapers. There were pluggers, of course, before there was "Pluggers." The comic strip is just a way of saluting the pluggers of real life-and reminding us that survival not only has its price, it has its laughs.
The idea for the strip grew out of circle of friends. A photojournalist in California who has covered seven wars. An entrepreneur in Oregon with three kids in college. A writer who has worked on the Alaska pipeline, TV sitcoms, and everything in between. A grass farmer and deSoto collector in the rolling hills of Virginia. The former CEO of a major American company who still puts in eight hours a day at his Manhattan office, even though he no longer has a job. Plus their five wives, sixteen children and one grandchild. Fortunately, the deSoto collector was also a cartoonist.
The real kick-off came at a creative pow-wow, held at a secret site code-named Plugger Bunker 1. Here, for four days, the founding partners and their wives ate, drank, brainstormed, and ate some more. (It being quickly determined that a fondness for food was a basic plugger value.) Through it all, the cartoonist kept his sketch pad handy, doodling Pluggers' characters to life.
Soon, the mythical community of Pluggerville began to take shape. At the center of this community were Andy "Plugger" Bear, his Australian wife, Sheila Roo, and their three children (two from previous marriages). Andy was a construction foreman, Sheila Roo taught aerobics, and together they struggled to overcome the challenges of a modern inter-species marriage.
Andy worked for Hamilton Ivory, an elephant businessman, and had coffee each morning at Ginger's Cafe-Ginger being a golden retriever, the kind who's never met a stranger. At the coffee counter, Andy would typically run into his buddy Merv Cooney, the raccoon proprietor of Merv's Bait & Tow, just up the road; or Al Litagator, the town's toothy lawyer; and certainly Lucy Waddle, the goosely waitress who called everyone Hon', and kept the coffee coming, whether you wanted it or not.
From this core cast of characters, the Pluggerville gang was expanded to more than forty archetypal represenatives of the pluggers among us. A new comic world was starting to come into being.
The next step was to convince someone that this new world should find its way into the newspapers. Fortunately, the cartoonist already had a strong relationship with the Chicago Tribune Co., whose Tribune Media Services division quickly agreed to syndicate the new feature. And on Monday, January 3, 1993, Pluggers hit the newsstands, appearing in over 80 papers and landing on over 10 million breakfast tables its first day.
In the beginning, the process used to produce the comic feature was simple. The various partners would write gags-most often taken directly from their daily lives-called "pluggerisms." Each week , these pluggerisms would be faxed to the cartoonist from around the country, and he would faithfully turn them into actual cartoons featuring the denizens of Pluggerville. This system was necessary mainly because the cartoonist already had about a dozen other weekly deadlines, and producing a new cartoon feature single-handedly was out of the question.
And so it went for about the first year and a half-until the cartoonist began to notice that a few readers were sending in unsolicited ideas that were every bit as good as those produced by his partners. Maybe even better. He started using a few of these ideas in the cartoon, always crediting the reader who'd sent it in with a simple flag of thanks bearing the contributor's name printed inside the cartoon.
Then, in August of 1994, at another creative pow-wow of the partners, a decision was made to bring the readers into the creative circle even more directly. A new "flag" for the cartoon was composed, one which presented both a post office box and e-mail address for Pluggers, in order to make it easier for real life pluggers to send in their ideas. Although the flag said merely, "Write to Pluggers...," Pluggers readers, intelligent types that they are, quickly saw this notice for what it was: a bald plea for help in coming up with a daily cartoon gag.
Send in ideas they did. Overnight, Pluggers began to receive more letters in a day than it had previously received in a month. E-mail messages rolled in too-at a clip of 10-15 a day (not counting those that said, simply, "Pluggers don't do e-mail." Yuk-yuk.)
And it wasn't just the quantity of mail that increased, but the quality. America, apparently, was filled with closet plugger gag writers who just needed a formal invitation to cut loose. Suddenly, the cartoonist was being presented with as many as 30 usable ideas a week! Even in their hot periods, his partners had never been good for more than about twelve.
To be truthful, this decision to solicit reader ideas was not born of desperation. Coming up with seven cartoon gags a week, between five partners, is not an insurmountable task. Rather, the partners felt that the true strength of Pluggers, the cartoon, was its link to the pluggers of real life. (One reader, in the early days of the cartoon, even accused the cartoonist of having a secret camera in his household as the source of his material.) By opening the cartoon up to suggestion, from any and all comers, that link just seemed to grow stronger.
Soon, readers' suggestions became the source of the great majority of Pluggers cartoons. Not that the readers were doing all the work, of course. The cartoonist still had to draw the cartoon, and put his own deft spin on the gag. (Pluggers reserves the right to make any suggestion funnier, if possible.) The other partners managed the business affairs, such as the compiling of this web page, and the sending of an original one-of-a-kind print, suitable for framing, to each reader whose suggestion actually made its way into the funny pages. But the net result was that Pluggers, a cartoon that from day one subscribed to the "big tent" school of humanity, suddenly had a very big tent of contributors indeed; and material that even more closely mirrored the travails, concerns and inside jokes of pluggers everywhere began making its way into the feature.
