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Archive: Dick Tracy

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Heroic Monday

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Mark Trail, 4/10/17

Welp, looks like Mark’s very self-important reveal of his employer has gone right over the bald head of his kidnapper. Sorry, Mark! Usually when you tell people that you write articles for America’s #1 glossy lifestyle magazine for the aspirational outdoorsperson, they show some respect. Not so when you deal with illiterates and ruffians, it seems. And yet … who’s this gentleman in panel two? Is he the real power behind this criminal gang, one or two steps up the Bald Guy Hierarchy? He’s wearing a suit and tie and has a neatly folded pocket square, which means he no doubt appreciates long articles about, like, new kinds of tents or whatever the hell it is Woods and Wildlife publishes. Anyway, I’m not sure if this guy is really involved in our story, or if he’s just some fellow passing through Rapid City Airport, or if he’s the Kingpin, heralding a crossover event that will establish Mark Trail as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but his little smile shows that he knows what’s up.

Dick Tracy, 4/10/17

I had to laugh at the “YELLOW MASK” label in the final panel, an explanatory box of the sort usually reserved in Dick Tracy for tiny gadgets or whatever. Then I remembered that, in theory, anyway, the primary venue for Dick Tray comic strips is the daily paper, where they’re published in black-and-white, so the need to label the visual joke makes slightly more sense. “Look, it’s, uh, it’s a mask, that matches his coat, which you also can’t see the color of but we assume if you’re reading this you know it’s yellow? Just a mask, for his eyes. We know it’s a little confusing. He’s not supposed to stick his dick in it or anything.”

Spider-Man, 4/10/17

One thing that comics are good for is creating new Homeric epithets out of whole cloth and just pretending they’re things that normal people would say in real life, like “badge-boys!” I also like Spider-Man acknowledging that while being a police officer is a full-time job, being Spider-Man is just kind of a hobby he indulges whenever he feels like it, because with great power comes great responsibility so long as there’s nothing good on TV.

Dennis the Menace, 4/10/17

I’m pretty sure that a young child putting his most treasured possessions in the collection plate at church is … about as non-menacing as you can get? Unless he’s trying to bribe God! That’s fairly menacing, theologically speaking.

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Ceci n’est pas une croque monsieur

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Mark Trail, 3/6/17

Mark Trail has had exactly three writer-artists in its 71-year existence — Ed Dodd, Jack Elrod, and James Allen — and Elrod and Allen both spent extensive periods assisting their predecessors before taking over the strip. Other soap strips have seen a higher turnover in syndicate-hired personnel, and I have it on good authority that, in the absence of organized archives, some of those writers resorted to using my blog’s archives for backstory on the strips they were taking over; but Mark Trail has institutional memory when it comes to the lore, man. That’s why the strip is able to casually bring back recurring characters like fecund Quebecker Johnny Malotte, who’s been around since at least the early ’50s. So even though I’ve been reading Mark Trail every day for the last 15 years and have never heard of Johnny Lone Elk (hmmm, Mark sure knows a lot of non-WASPy guys named “Johnny”), I have full confidence that the Water-World Theme Park Disaster was a real storyline that was published in newspapers, probably in the ’70s sometime, and was extremely hilarious. I am jazzed up for this next adventure, guys.

Hagar the Horrible, 3/6/17

I honestly love how Gus maintains his weirdly bug-eyed smiling expression even through Hagar’s blurted question in the third panel. You’d better believe there’s no ham sandwich, Hagar. There’s nothing Gus loves so much as blowing people’s damn minds.

Dick Tracy, 3/6/17

There are any number of hilarious things about this strip: The Spirit sleeps in his eye mask and white gloves! The Spirit has a bedside princess phone in his hotel! The Spirit thinks that a normal, comfortable way to talk on the phone is to lie face down on the bed and sort of rest the handset against the side of his head! Still, I’m a little disappointed that my initial interpretation of panel one, which as that the Spirit slept wearing a CPAP machine, turned out to be incorrect.

Slylock Fox, 3/6/17

Oh wow, it seems the colorists for today’s strip, in which notorious person of (green) color Count Weirdly implements an incompetent terrorist attack on a ceremony honoring law enforcement, have decided to suddenly portray him as Caucasian! Way to promote #whitgenocide, Slylock Fox.

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Crusading Reanimated Teddy Roosevelt seems like a legitimately possible Dick Tracy character

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Dick Tracy, 3/1/17

Dick Tracy started running in 1931, and The Spirit in 1940, which means that, at these characters’ origins, the early 20th century era of enthusiastic trust-busting was still within living memory, an era marked by this sort of political iconography:

What I’m trying to say is, in taking on this criminal “Supotoc” corporation, Dick and the Spirit may be rejecting the modern neoliberal Borkian approach to antitrust law and will instead be tackling monopolies the old fashioned way: with firearms.

Gil Thorp, 3/1/17

OK, my prediction is that probably what’s happening here is that Aaron’s mom has a crappy low-paying job with no insurance so they can only intermittently afford the prescription medication he needs to stay 100%. Maybe he has ADHD? That would be charmingly ironic, considering that molly and Adderall are both amphetamines.

Still, the funnier possibility is that Aaron is just straight-up into recreational drugs, despite his previous denial. It would really bear out the old Sherlock Holmes adage, “Once you’ve eliminated the impossible, maybe go back and check if you only think something’s ‘impossible’ because you asked a suspect whether he was guilty and he said ‘no’ and then you did no follow-up investigation.”

Shoe, 3/1/17

Hey man, I have to come up with funny material for this website each and every day, and I get that sometimes you’re tapped out. So when your dentist offers up a perfectly serviceable joke mid-cleaning, you don’t sit around fretting about, “Oh, my characters are all anthropomorphic birds, they don’t have teeth, this doesn’t make sense.” You use that shit, man. You use it and you don’t look back.