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Archive: Dick Tracy

187

Maybe there was … a big stake on the front of it or something?

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Dick Tracy, 10/28/20

Dick Tracy doesn’t gruesomely murder its villains like it used to, but I have to admire how efficiently this plot has wrapped up: Professor Stokes swooped acrobatically away from Dick and Liz, only to immediately be turned into hamburger by a cop car that was on its way to deal with an unrelated and presumably more normal crime. I like the focus on Dick dropping shattered remnants of the artificial fang apparatus into the evidence bag, just to remind us that, hey, you know who wouldn’t have died after getting run over by a car? A real vampire.

Mary Worth, 10/28/20

I gotta say, if your girlfriend saw you talking to a friend while he was waving a crack pipe in your face but you never actually ended up smoking crack with him, you should probably immediately tell her exactly what you did or didn’t do when she confronts you about it — or maybe even before! — rather than just saying vague, fake-sounding stuff like “It wasn’t what it looked like!” On the other hand, if you’re going to sassily tell your boyfriend that he needs to “tell it to the hand,” you need to shove the palm of said hand at his face, not just wave it around vaguely in his general direction. There’s plenty of blame to go around here, is what I’m trying to say.

Family Circus, 10/28/20

Yeah, Billy, the fundamental laws of mathematics that underlie the very fabric of our reality do in fact remain constant, sorry you find that so boring

143

Parental Monday

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Six Chix, 10/26/20

Look, I know it’s “spooky season” or whatever but I honestly did not want to spend a lot of my day thinking about how ghosts interact with physical matter, ok? Like, we all know they can pass through solid walls at will, but also apparently lounge on furniture if they want. But what’s their relationship with gasses like? Do they have the ability to detect vibrations in the air and process them as sound, the way we do? When they “talk” to one another, are they doing it via audible noise or direct mind-to-mind (soul-to-soul?) communication, and thus maybe the “ears” in this statement are metaphorical, or a memory of what it was like to have a physical body, who knows how many centuries ago? Anyway, I’m not sure if I’d be obsessing about this less if any of these ghosts had visible earholes or anything, but I would’ve liked to have found out.

Dick Tracy, 10/26/20

There’s a been a lot of hilarity in this weird Dick Tracy vampire storyline, but the fact that Professor Stokes is swinging off the roof on a JAZZ FEST banner is the absolute funniest thing we’ve seen in this strip in a long time. I can’t quite explain why I’m sure a biology professor who’s into extremely chintzy mechanically-assisted vampirism would also be very into jazz, but I’m very sure that he would be. Professor Stokes is probably sad that his artificial bat wing apparatus is still in the prototype stage at the moment, but if he can’t fly away, at least he can make his escape with an assist from his beloved jazz fest.

Dustin, 10/26/20

God, I love that Dustin’s dad is absolutely seething in the second panel. He went through all this trouble of buying a big suburban house, just like society says he was supposed to, and now he finds out he has to maintain it, just like he has to maintain his failing body? This is bullshit. Bullshit.

210

All the officer-involved shootings are another similarity, of course

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Dick Tracy, 10/22/20

Despite the fact that Dick Tracy wears a bright yellow coat and has a rogue gallery full of weird mutants, his strip is actually a fairly accurate depiction of police work in several senses, including the fact that there often isn’t much mystery involved in any given crime. Oh, did an heiress die from being drained of blood, vampire-style? Probably she was killed by the local professor guy who’s part of a gang of vampire cosplayers who think they should’ve inherited the money instead, and he’ll be going after the other sisters next! Anyway, I genuinely enjoy how the tubes coming out of Professor Stokes’ mouth make him look particularly pathetic. You’ll never be a real vampire, buddy, no matter how goofy an overcoat you buy!

Mary Worth, 10/22/20

It has been brought to my attention by my more drug-savvy readers that this could also be a pipe for smoking meth, not just crack like I said before, so really, who can say what Tommy is resisting here, but the point is that if you don’t enjoy the sight of our boy staring at a pipe with eyes the size of dinner plates, then I respect your opinion but I think you’re missing out one of the fundamental pleasures of Mary Worth.

Dennis the Menace, 10/22/20

A fun fact about Socrates is that he was put on trial for various trumped up charges of “corrupting the youth” of Athens, and was convicted by only a very narrow majority of the jury, but then in the penalty phase of the trial he got to give a speech about what he thought his punishment should be, and he said the Athenian government should give him free room and board for life like they did for Olympic champions, and then a much larger portion of the jury voted to have him executed. What I’m trying to say, Dennis, is that a much smarter and more menacing man than you has already tried this little strategem, and it very much did not work.