Not sure why he’s so sweaty, it looks pretty cold out
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Dick Tracy, 2/9/26
I haven’t really been keeping you up to date on this guest-written Dick Tracy storyline, but the short version is that a watch Dick gave long ago to his first partner, “Jerry Gould,” was dropped by a mysterious fleeing villain. Jerry does not appear to have an entry in the invaluable Dick Tracy wiki, so I assume he’s a new character invented for this plot and given the last name of strip creator Chester Gould as an homage. Anyway, it turns out Jerry left the force and became some sort of damn hippie with a guitar and a ponytail, although the flattop haircut he received upon joining Neo-Chicago’s MCU remains permanently grafted onto his skull.
Judge Parker, 2/9/26
Oh, it turns out Randy has been imprisoned for four and a half months somewhere where there is “only ice and time,” so, I guess … Norway? Like, he went to Norway to track down his wife by any means necessary, except some of those means violated some local laws and he was arrested and then duly tried, convicted, and sentenced? Seems fair to me. If you didn’t want to do the time in the cold, you shouldn’t have done the crime in the cold, Randy.
Gil Thorp, 2/9/26
Look, man, you’re going around creepily whispering in your rivals’ ears and you deal with high school ruffians all day, I’m pretty sure you can find your way to understanding the mindset that results in a little light vandalism. It’s fun! Have some fun with it!
Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/9/26
“That’s an awful big word, dad. Did you forget that I’m not very bright?”
84 replies to “Not sure why he’s so sweaty, it looks pretty cold out”
Judge Parker:
“This would be a lot more tolerable if I weren’t forced to wear this dweeb hat!”
Gil Thorp:
“Why are there localized cloud formations coming out of our mouths?”
RMMD:
“Do I have a big scar?”
“Well, only an emotional scar from being forced to live in our household!”
Wary Morth:
Ring ring, mobile ring
Jeff’s there
“Mary how you doing?”
“I’ve been meddling, as you’ve seen
But I was replaced
By a parrot called Sunny.
There’s no use sighing about what I couldn’t appall
I couldn’t meddle that story arc at all
Just come on along to the Bum Boat
And we’ll let my platitudes sing.
“Wing ding, we’ll talk on the sand
I won’t let you hold my hand
While you let my praises ring.”
____________________________________
Wrecks Moregone:
Jimjohnny aged 15 years from getting his appendix removed. Is the appendix the fountain of youth? Does Mary Worth consume them to stay immortal?
Maybe Randy sneaked across the border into Russia, got arrested for illegal entry, and will be offered a remission of his prison sentence if he signs up for service at the front.
At least that might be interesting.
Is Sid, Agent To The Animal Stars, on holiday? My current storyline needs him to get the paperwork in order, stat!
JP1: Good grief, the NOTCIA captured Santa! This is the long-awaited sequel to that smash hit ‘Red One’!
JP2: Okay, that prison establishing shot has to be based off a photo of a real place, and I’m guessing it ain’t Norway…
JP3: I refuse to believe that a panytwaist like Randy could grow such a magnificent beard, let alone keep it so nattily groomed while in this NOTCIA prison.
RMMD: You could have just said ‘yes’, you pompous axx…
MW: Speaking of which, guess who’s going for a ride on the HMS Humongous? Meanwhile, the parrots are still speaking Spanish while watching ‘Friends’ with SAP mode on…
JP: Figures, Randy’s one friend in prison is the unibomber.
RMMD: Yes, that’s an awful big word, alright. Here are a couple more: POSTOPERATIVE PERITONITIS.
RMMD: No fair that Dad gets a bad-ass eye patch after his operation, and I barely get a scar.
Gil Thorp: ” ‘Goshen Stinksl’ is a weird message. I wonder what it means?” ” ‘Stinksl’ is the plural of ‘stinkl,’ which rhymes with ‘tinkle.’ They’re greeting us in the name of our famous Outhouse Row, which the town is actually very proud of.” “Oh, well in that case, Goshen Stinksl to you! Goshen Stinksl to everybody!”
Rex Morgan: ” ‘Laparoscopic’ is an awful big word, Dad! I wonder why the two medical professionals who raised me never explained anything about different surgical procedures — which is why I only refer to them as ‘slice-’em-ups’ and ‘take-’em-outs.’ “
DT Whats that ‘whump’ in the final panel? Did Jerry drop his guitar case in the snow or did Dick fart?
JP Meanwhile, on the ice planet Hoth…
GT “Goshen Stinksl”? Didn’t he play for the Red Wings?
RMMD “Now you get to rest and recover” and we get to read about it, over the next couple of weeks…
MW: The forthcoming recap at The Bum Boat should be interesting. Mary has to spin her role in the parrot saga to be the crucial factor in the happy resolution of Toby and Ian’s failing marriage. Jeff, eating his surf and turf, will adopt his usual aspect of mild interest in the wacky residents of Charterstone, all in the forlorn hope that he’ll get some, after their evening walk on the dock under a full moon.
DT: Frank Grimes faked his own death to get out of Springfield and start a new life. Taking out a gunrunner like RayCzar was just warming up for his ultimate goal, to destroy the indestructible man: Homer Simpson!!
JP:
“Maybe I can break the ice — so to speak — by chatting up Edmond O’Brien here about his star turn as Kris Kringle in the 1947 holiday classic Miracle on 34th Street!”
Gil Thorp:
The guy on the right in the first and second panels kind of looks like an antimatter Captain Kangaroo.
I’m not really up to speed on the current stable of Gil Thorp antagonists, so I’m choosing to believe those are students. Possibly held back several years, or maybe Goshen has some sort of 21 Jump Street situation going on. Either way, you really stepped in it this time, Milford! They’ve got a guy in the sheriff’s office!
In “Judge Parker,” we have ice and time. In “Dick Tracy.” we have snow and…no time, because his watch stopped working.
JP:
“In time, global warming will melt the ice, which means that there will be time, but no ice, and we’ll be getting somewhere, not nowhere.
“Wait a minute — did I just think that?”
DT: That’s the denoument? The master assassin gets caught by botching his own escape and dropping an old wrist watch. It seems that deep down he really wanted to be caught.
GT: Say what you will about the insanity of the coaches, both high schools have pretty nice walls with their names on them.
JP: Naw, don’t be played and get all sympathetic for Randy. He is just taking some time off away from the whole JP universe – do some work outs, read some books, grow out his beard, and really get in touch with himself.
RMMD: That’s pretty impressive diagnosing June – over the phone with no physical exam. Wonder what the pathology report reveals – ? “normal appendix” – oops, it was just overdoing the school snacks again.
MW:Thus far, we have a girl who has some aqua-man like powers to communicate with animals, and now Toby who has a deep spiritual bond with her parrot familiar Sunny. Ian has been thoroughly tamed and can now barely eat without drooling. Is this giving Mary ideas? Nope, she already has the doctor and his power boat fully conditioned.
@Ukranazi Stepan: Well, that prison certainly isn’t Polar Owl or Black Dolphin.
JP: According to the Michael Moore documentary ‘Where to Invade Next’, Norwegian prisons, even for murderers, consist of little cottages, etc., not something that looks like the Pentagon. Hey – with the weather the way it is right now – you don’t think…
GT: Any of the fictional teenage vandals in this strip would be a vast improvement over the actual artist.
DT: I misread Tracy as saying “And here I always thought you liked to watch.”
@Bob Tice: Yes, I’m being pedantic, but it was Edmund Gwenn who starred in ‘Miracle on 34th Street’.
Edmond O’Brien, meanwhile, played the title role in the minor noir classic ‘D.O.A.’ so I can understand how such a mixup could happen.
JP:
“I’ve been shoved and put aside
I’ve been shushed by crimes, untried
And my role has been Marciulianocized
Time has come today!”
@The Quiet Man:
You are not being pedantic. You are quite correct!
Interestingly, both Edmond O’Brien and Edmund Gwenn played in the 1953 film noir “The Bigamist.”
DT You’d think someone getting paid to do the art to bring a comic strip story to life would consider showing the guitar/gun case in hand in P1 / P2 or some movement lines to it to get some visual context to the “whump” in the final panel.
GT Given the kindergarten-level insults I think it is meaningful to ask what’s wrong in the heads of the high school delinquents – could brain injuries already be developing from the rough wrestling and football training/competition regimen?
Judge Parker: Finding out what happened to Randy after all this time? Boring, a disappointment, and probably a harbinger of worse to come, i.e., the return of April. Finding out that Randy’s new setting requires him to monitor the skies for CIA-spawned dragons? Say more (not about April).
CS: Seriously? Is ANY school system in the year 2026 policing phone usage on the bus? This seems somewhere between unconstitutional and dangerous.
Dick Tracy: On the bright side, Jerry’s career is finally looking up, as he joins the Neo-Chicago Prison Symphony Orchestra.
Judge Parker: “That’s an awful big word, Dad. And those are awful big knives in your hand. Why are you looming over me? What do you mean ‘practice’…?”
Phantom – Yes, the Ghost Who Walks is still a buff action hero, but do we really need panel 2’s ultra tight close up on his gun, with his pinky finger pointing us to his ultra tight striped ass to remind us?
@nescio: Agree wholeheartedly. GT’s artist stinksl.
@lynn:
What is more, under Section 124 of the Courts of Justice Act, criminal hearings, proceedings and decisions rendered are all done in public, with unrestricted access by the media and to persons on the street. Norway is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights which provides these guarantees, an international treaty to which Norway became a party in the 1950s. You can also request records of specific proceedings or information about specific individuals.
Of course, this is the same strip that brought us April Bower locked up incommunicado in some clandestine CIA building location in the United States.
Slylock Fox: Cassandra Cat is now just literally making up excuses to get Slylock to come over to her house?
RMMD: “If that word is too much for you, you’re not gonna like this one: colostomy bag.”
RMMD: Again, “Big words are hard to understand and pronounce!” What is this, Gasoline Alley?
Curtis: Geez, when the Joker said, “All it takes is one bad day,” I never thought it would involve the audible declarations of a middle-school stalker echoing in the halls.
Blondie: They came up with ‘Rockefeller’ after finding out all the other relevant references were in the Files.
JP: -sighs- remember when Kermit the Frog was mistaken for his evil doppelganger and sent to an icy Russian gulag. But it was all wacky and even had a musical number?
I’m not asking for Judge Parker to become “silly” but the comic could stand to loosen up a little.
“There is only ice and time”? Au contraire, there also seems to be a large building, and Randy Parker, and another guy. You can’t fool me, Judge Parker narration box!
Genuinely tickled that the Milford graffitists retaliated with a cool S of their own.
DT: So our assassin is not only betrayed by his engraved keepsake watch, he insisted on wearing the watch which could easily be used to identify him even though it stopped working a long time ago. This has got to be the worst hitman ever.
GT: Is there a rule that when you graffiti your rival high school, you need to include a Cool S somewhere?
JP: Is Randy supposed to be in Siberia? Because somehow he ran afoul of Russian agents in Norway and was extradited and imprisoned in gulag? I dunno, it makes about just as much sense as all the geo-political stuff surrounding April and Randy.
RMMD: I kind of feel for Johnny. I know I wouldn’t want Rex Morgan lecturing me about medical terminology when I’m in post-op.
DT:
Canonically, Tracy’s first partner was Pat Patton, who was promoted to chief of detectives sometime in the 1950s.
RMMD:
“Johnny, none other than Truck Tyler composed a stanza for you, to speed you on your road to recovery!”
“Cool, Dad — what exactly did he have to say?”
” ‘I’m sorry that you kinda started to vomit
While watchin’ some reruns of Wallace and Gromit.
I know it ain’t easy to just be yourself
When all that you’re wantin’ to do is to ralph.
‘Appendix come out? — as a matter of fact,
Your table of contents is still quite intact!’ “
“Randy Parker, day 135 on a baseball team with Santa!”
Based entirely on panel 2, that’s my headcanon, and I’m sticking with it!
@The Quiet Man: Edmund O’Brien had a beard like that when he was a crusty old saddle tramp in “The Wild Bunch.”
@The Quiet Man: Edmund O’Brien had a beard like that when he was a crusty old saddle tramp in “The Wild Bunch.”
JP: Looks like one of the supermax prisons you find in the US more than anything you’d find in Norway. Did Randy forget to delete all his Epstein texts before handing his phone to the TSA at the airport?
C’shaft: Why would the district mandate no phone use on the buses? Classes, absolutely, but busses? Nobody gives a crap if you’re playing Candy Crush on the bus.
Dustin: Dustfriend may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but at least he didn’t reverse-engineer this clumsy setup for a “joke.”
MW: There’s a Wilbur story coming up, isn’t there? I mean, if I were about to focus on Wilbur I’d spend a month on a pointless denouement so that absolutely anything becomes preferable by comparison.
Rex Morgan, M.D.: (patronizingly) “That’s an awful big word, Dad. You didn’t hurt yourself, did you? Are your teeth okay?
Oh dear, the infamously harsh Norwegian prisons. Randy was probably forced to make that hat himself in a brutal crafting class. The bastards will probably limit him to two marshmallows again for his hot chocolate when he decides he’s had enough exercise for the day with his good friend and cribbage partner Lars Beardson there.
***
They are sick in the head. What kind of teenager writes fucking “stinks” in their graffiti?
GT — Any chance that Mimi is ginning up a Spectresque graffitti war between two men she knows are rivals? Nah, that would involve a less than obvious plot development. My bad.
RMMD — All you need to remember is that chicks dig scars.
JP – The narration box has a misprint. It was supposed to say “there is only ice and LIME,” in response to the question “do we have the necessary ingredients to make margaritas?”
GT – “This means war!” “Really? I thought it meant that our high school is fetid.”
Bizarro : While looking up what the official title of “Snow White and the Seven Bogatyr” is*, I found out that there actually is a mockbuster with today’s “joke” as its title. “What if Snow White, instead of meeting a bunch of cute, bearded gnomes
**, met a bunch of badass warriors?” isn’t that original or subversive of a concept!*It’s “The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights”, actually.
**Damn the lack of generic terms to describe “tiny, magic dudes from fairy tales”. Damn the genericization (Tolkienization) of the Fantasy genre!**********
Dick Tracy : bad guy is instantly caught on monday? And he surrenders without a (gun)fight? This is a fakeout, right? Because, otherwise, what’s the rest of the week going to be about? Dick trying to pull off a Mary Worth-esque victory lap?
***********
Gil Thorp : it’s going to turn out that the initial grafiti that started this incident wasn’t even from Goshen, it was either an inside job, or Oakwood (who are sick of being burnt in effigy at every Milford bonfire).
**********
Luann : this week, Luann meets a bohemian guy who has decided to spend his entire life in academia, and since he’s more attractive than Phil, she decides to give up entirely on that whole “turn my life around and get a REAL career” thing, and go back to taking random classes to linger at
Kindergartencommunity college.(If I’m right with this prediction…)*********
Slylock Fox : that plushie Cassandra owns… yeah, I guess THOSE stories would survive the Animalocalypse, since a whole bunch of them feature humans who surpass their peers by taking on the traits of animals (if only through a costume).
MW: “Oh, hi Jeff. What a coincidence. I was just watering my pansies.”
FC: In a “if a tree falls in a forest…” moment, Dolly fails to consider her audience as she muses on the nature of infinite set theory.
RMMD – “I know it’s a big word, son. That’s why I put the ‘what’s called’ in front of it, to subtly imply that I’m assuming you’re an uneducated simpleton. Don’t take it personally, I do it with all my patients. Keeps them in their place.”
Don Abundio, translated:
“Whatsamatter, baby?”
“You said you wanted to re-create ‘Christina’s World'”
“I can already hear the critics booing this stupid idea”
“That’s not exactly booing”
“They can’t criticize what they can’t see, right?”
He comes from the land of ice and time
From the prisons of people who crime
– Led Zeppelin, Randy’s Song
RMMD: Jeez, Rex, Boomhauer has enough trouble with one syllable words. Don’t go throwing laparoscopic appendectomy at him.
FC – Don’t talk about your father that way, Dolly.
MW – We’re just one non-jagged word balloon stem away from a huge plot twist.
RMMD-Rex is getting use out of that medical word a day calendar.
MW-Yay! It’s time for the obligatory dinner and boat cruise where Mary will sum up everything and take credit for it.
FC-“Do you think they’ll find their way back,” Thel asks. “Let’s hope not,” Bill replies.
Pearls Before Swine-Pastis does it his way.
@Anonymous: Yeah, I can’t wait to see how Luann’s going to lose THIS guy! One thing’s for sure: it won’t be her fault!
Slylock: Petty Theft Digest is subscription-only since they had to discontinue newsstand sales.
“Governments were never moral beings, except when they locked up Randy Parker.”
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Guitar?! Oh, dear GOD, am I the only one old enough to recognize a hidden tommy gun?
JP:
Oh My God. Not the 135th day in prison. If you knew what was about to happen to that man, you’d never sleep again.
@Bob Tice: There is a YouTuber named Arthur Dark who has done a series of ‘tombs of the Hollywood stars’ videos.
In one of those videos, they ‘discovered’ the urn containing the cremains of Edmund Gwenn in a storage area of a mausoleum.
Dark held a fundraiser and a ceremony with his fans to find a proper place and marker for the urn.
RMMD: Is Johnny relieved or disappointed? Did he want to have a big scar to show off to his classmates, like Madeline in Ludwig Bemelmans’s book?
REX MORGAN M.D.: Jokes on all of you! Johnny there is actually is talking about the word “they“
DT: “The Thing stopped working years ago.” “I know. He’s retired and living off a Commish’s pension.”
@Downpuppy: If it makes you feel better, no you weren’t.
While the gentleman in Dick Tracy is, admittedly, concerned about how the Canuck letter is going to effect his primary chances in New Hampshire, he’s not sweating. It’s just melting snowflakes.
SFx: I’m not sure about “preppy Bryn Mawr sophomore” being a good look for Cassandra Cat. She seems more comfortable in “slinky femme fatale” or “brazen slut.”
DT: I’m not actually sure if that’s a ponytail or just part of his coat’s collar. Either way, Jerry Gould looks like a sad sack alt-universe Peter Parker who was understandably skipped over in Into the Spider-Verse.
GT: Keri & Co. ended the declaration with a vertical bar, indicating that they fled in the midst of calculating a probability related to the stinkiness of Goshen.
9cl — Tall Amos is playing the long game on a 3-way with twins, and you’ve got to respect that a little.
GT: Keri and Her Gang also retaliated by copying the weird “S” that Goshen left at Milford. For maximum eerie mystery symbolism they should have gone with Himmler’s spooky “Black Sun,” a muted post-horn, or an appropriate hexagram from the I Ching.
Why does Johnny has that tube under his nose? His lungs were not involved and he has no problem with breathing. When they removed my appendicitis, they did not put that thing on me, what’s the medical need? Is it because it is a for-profit hospital and they get to charge the insurance two thousand bucks for this useless addition? Seems likely
“They’re sick in the head”: he’s right, but for the wrong reason
You might think that it is disrespectful to call this storyline’s murderer “Gould”, but “Chester Gould” is responsible for killing hundreds of people in the Tracyverse in perverse and sadistic ways. In universe, he’s the answer to problem of evil
“This means war!”
“You are overreacting. If you go on social media like TikTok, Mudlarks are calling you a pedophile and claiming you torture dogs!”
“But that’s just how social media work! Graffiti is really out of bound!”
Crank: Congratulations to Yondr, a company with a name so stupid, Batty couldn’t think of a stupider one for the Funkyverse version. (Actually, I’m surprised he didn’t go with “Beyondr”, for the Marvel reference.)
DT, meta: While I agree that, in Tracy’s world, leaving the force and getting a ponytail is probably more concerning than also becoming a mob hitman or whatever, I suspect that guitar case doesn’t actually contain a guitar.
FG: It’s a truism that Mongovian technology is better than Earth’s in some ways, and worse in others. Often these balance out or give Mongo the edge. But I think we can be proud that they may have invented flying cars, but we invented having little electric lamps on the outside of our boring ground cars, to make it safer to drive them in the dark!
JP: Given Ces’s usual research and grasp of international law, I assume this is a CIA blacksite in Norway, somehow. Well, okay, more of a CIA whitesite, really.
MW: Jeff, I’m begging you, don’t ask her what’s been happening with the Camerons since the non-event with the electrical fire! Say literally anything that seems likely to move this strip on from the programming loop it’s been stuck in for weeks. Ask about the Westons, even! Heck, ask about Keith Bellend! I would much rather get back to hating Keith Bellend and everything about him that sit through another recap of nothing.
Phantom: Boy, Stripey’s going to feel so silly about making assumptions when that helicopter takes out General Chuma by dropping a huge box of mint chocolate cookies on him!
S4th: I love how quickly Sally’s gone from “It’s genuinely unbelievable that Ralph can ski” to “Well, if Ralph can ski, it can’t be that big a deal anyway.”
Gil Thorp: I feel that a recurring issue with newspaper comics is they try and do stuff that the strict censorship will never allow them to truly depict, so they have to do it in the stupidest, most toothless way possible. In this case, this whole plot involves Milford and Goshen dealing with rage-inducing vandalism, but there’s no way that the creators would be allowed to show actually offensive graffiti, so instead we get the most embarrassingly pitiful attempts at insults imaginable.
Rex Morgan: “The important thing, son, is that it’s not a visually impressive scar, meaning it won’t overshadow my badass new eyepatch. Very lucky for you. We all know what happens to people who overshadow me…”
Ziggy-They’re just jealous because Ziggy is such a free spirit.
JP-135 days of Randy being somebody’s girlfriend.