Is there a Plugger crisis?!

I was just thinking,"It's been so long since I senselessly ranted about the latest Gary Brookins/reader-submitted anti-elitist human/animal hybrid horror that promotes prescription drug abuse on your friendly neighborhood comics page. I should find a recent shitty panel and ramble about how much I hate it." So, like I usually do, I just Googled "Pluggers," and what should come up under the usual "Pluggerville" or "Pluggers.com" but this:



WTF?! I like how it says, "Where did Pluggers.com go?" and then proceeds to not answer the question. Apparently you can still read it online, but I am (vaguely) concerned about this latest turn of events. The panels from yesterday and today are totally reruns! Yesterday's identifies it as a "classic," but there is no mention of a source at all on today's. Suspicious. Is Chief Plugger Gary Brookins just on vacation? Do Pluggers take vacations, or is that too French-y? I highly doubt America's working-class, comics-reading, cheap, poor, curmudgeonly, old, drug-addicted-types have run out of bad puns, so why two days in a row of shitty reruns? What is the problem?

Normally, the repeats wouldn't really catch my eye, as the basis of every edition of Pluggers is the same poorly-told joke over and over again, but with the disappearance of the website with no explanation worries me. Did they shut it down due to low traffic? I know real-life Pluggers probably haven't figured out the internet yet--SEE: the fact that Pluggers submissions should be sent to an AOL address--so maybe it just wasn't worth the work to keep it going. I don't know, guys, I would be really pretty sad to see Pluggers disappear from the comics page forever. Sure, I hate other comics, but none with the combination of tenderness and rage I feel for the horrifying anthropomorphized blue collar beasts featured by Brookins. For now, I will keep my eye out for any Pluggers developments. God only knows what life would be like without it to mock and berate.