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Archive: Dick Tracy

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Soapy catch-ups

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Dick Tracy, 12/20/23

So Dick and X. Libris’s sword fight ended with X. tumbling to her death from a spiral staircase, which was in a library full of her beloved books, so I guess we’ll count this is as an ironic comeuppance? It’s marginal but I’m feeling generous about it. What I’m not feeling generous about is that the strip is spending this whole week making sure we understand the emotional repercussions of her life of crime, which, BORING. This is a strip where people used to get eaten alive by rats, we don’t care about, like, ruined businesses or whatever else this Hayes Code-ass epilogue wants us to think about. Those cops don’t really care either. Look at those numb facial expressions. “Yeah, it’s called a ‘warrant,’ I guess? I’d never heard of one either. Anyway, your business is ruined.”

Mark Trail, 12/20/23

Haven’t kept you up on what’s happening in Mark Trail for a while, and what’s happening is this guy’s trying to get rid of a bat infestation and is spurning Cherry’s offer of PPE so he’s gonna die of rabies. Rabies! He’ll be foaming at the mouth and screaming and Cherry is going to have put him down as an act of mercy with a shotgun blast to the head. It’ll be as exciting as any boat explosion, and twice as messy.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/20/23

IS RENE STILL IN THE HOTEL??? HE MIGHT BE!!! STAY TUNED FOR FURTHER RENE-HOTEL NEXUS DEVELOPMENTS!!!!!!!

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Magnanimous Thursday

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Crock, 12/14/23

Not that I will ever give up on my long-running feud with Crock, but even I have to admit that this is a decent joke. Sure, in order for it to really work for you, you have to know a little about the characters and understand that Captain Preppie’s whole bit is that he’s handsome and egotistical, but for my sins, I am someone who does in fact understand Captain Preppie’s whole bit, so it does, in fact, work for me. Sometimes you just have to give the devil his due (in this analogy, the syndicated newspaper comics strip Crock stands in for the Adversary, the Lord of Lies himself).

Dick Tracy, 12/14/23

I was about to do a riff here about how today’s Dick Tracy is aimed at the fairly narrow audience of people who like to erotically ruminate on the prospect of being bested in combat by Cate Blanchett weilding a rare book case in one hand and an épée in the other, but honestly that doesn’t seem like a particularly narrow audience now that I think about it. It’s probably significantly broader than the audience for the Dick Tracy comic strip, if we’re being honest.

Pluggers, 12/14/23

I’m on the record as being cranky when Pluggers just generalizes the long-contested definition of a plugger into “pluggers are old”, so I appreciate today’s strip, which tells us that pluggers are old and also their refrigerators are more disgusting than you could possibly imagine.

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Her cheekbones are weird, but they could be MUCH weirder

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Dick Tracy, 11/30/23

I have to admit that it’s a little discomfiting to learn that X. Libris, a wealthy, sinister rare book collector who dresses in a severe black suit all the time and looks exactly like Cate Blanchett, belongs to a Planet Fitness where she goes after work to lift free weights of whatever. I was going to grudgingly acknowledge that this humanizes her a bit, but you know what? Part of Dick Tracy’s whole deal is that its villains are inhumanized, in the sense that their skulls and faces are deformed in disturbing and biologically improbable ways and they die impossibly agonizing deaths, so I’m going to have to give today’s strip a thumbs down.

Gil Thorp, 11/30/23

Welp, it took more than a year, but it seems finally everyone’s acknowledged that Gil is a Newly Divorced Dude, and so the question arises: Is he getting the emotional support he needs as he goes through this huge change in his life Who’s he gonna have sex with? Is it this kid’s grandmother? Apparently everyone in town wants a piece, but this kid was thoughtful enough to get dibs for his grandmother.

Hi and Lois, 11/30/23

“Please, just a few moments of human contact! You usually leave me alone on the floor in the middle of the living rooms for hours at a time. You don’t even close the curtains! I’m so sunburned!”