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Dick Tracy, 8/26/24

Someone who’s had some weird romance arcs in his time is Junior, Dick Tracy’s son in the comic strip Dick Tracy. Long ago he was married to Moon Maid, daughter of the Governor of the Moon, and he had a half-Lunarian daughter with her, but then she got blown up by a car bomb meant for him. Later he married Sparkle Plenty, daughter of comical rustics B.O. and Gertie Plenty; that relationship was briefly thrown into turmoil when Moon Maid seemed to reappear, but then it turned out some gangster had modified his hapless girlfriend with Lunarian DNA, and the poor woman eventually changed her name to “Mysta Chimera” and accommodated herself to her new life as a hideous genetic abomination and platonic pal to Junior and his family. However … is there a new contender for his love? How else do you explain that he’s chosen a tastefully glamorous photo of Rikki Mortis, the goth lover of notorious corpse-criminal Abner Kadaver, as his desktop wallpaper? More on this Tracy family romantic drama as it (probably fails to) develop!

Hi and Lois, 8/26/24

One thing I love about legacy comics is how they freeze certain stereotyped images and settings in amber, even when the journeyman artists and writers tasked with churning out the comics are young enough that they themselves only remember them from older comics. One example is the idea, omnipresent in the comics, that upscale fine dining restaurants feature plush decor and white tablecloths; in fact, that hasn’t been true for newer restaurants since the ’90s, and even the old timers have mostly transitioned to the new aesthetics, which are all about high ceilings and hard, industrial-style surfaces. A 2018 Atlantic article that I think about all the time chronicles this transition and points out that the result is a much louder dining experience, which restaurants like because it’s less conducive to sitting around pleasantly chatting and thus increases customer turnover and restaurant profits. Anyway, I was reminded of this today because another aspect of modern restaurant design is that it features large, open, continuous spaces instead of the warren of rooms you might have found in a traditional eatery, so there’s no longer any place to stash the Flagston family where the other, more desirable patrons can’t see or hear them.

Mary Worth, 8/26/24

I dunno, Ed, this seems like a great way to show up at your wedding and discover that the theme is “WHY WON’T MY NEW HUSBAND PAY ATTENTION TO ME????”

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Dick Tracy, 8/10/24

It looks like Dick Tracy is finally getting back to the “How is B-tier villain Silver Nitrate doing in the joint?” plot they teased us with last year, and the answer is, uh, not good, I guess! You know, there’s lots of questions that I think would be fun to see Dick Tracy explore, like “How would cryptocurrency work in the heightened world of Dick Tracy,” but there are others that I don’t think would be fun at all and would actually be pretty depressing instead, like examining how someone who doesn’t seem like a hardened, violent criminal would do in the traumatizing hellscape of the U.S. prison system. Still, I have to admit that once I squinted enough to read all these scary prison whispers, “Dude, stop farting!” made me laugh.

Gasoline Alley, 8/10/24

“Wait, what? Comics readers like it when a beloved character starts hoarding small animal corpses? Gross, but these numbers don’t lie. I guess that’s our next storyline, if we want to stay relevant!” –the Gasoline Alley creative team, probably

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Hi and Lois, 7/31/24

Trixie Flagston has, notoriously, been a baby for nearly 70 years, longer than most of us have been alive, and thought-balloons in complete sentences, so we think of her as having the mental capacity, knowledge, and experience of a much older child, or maybe even an adult. But if we are to take the narrative of the strip at face value, she is a baby, probably less than a year old, and we must therefore assume that she is constantly encountering new concepts and categories of object for the first time. Like today, for instance: she hears Ditto say “blocks” and assumes this castle will be made out of the stackable wooden cubes that she’s accustomed to smashing into and scattering with delight. Little does she know that these are new, unfamiliar Lego blocks, which will snap securely together, and which were possibly acquired by the twins specifically to protect their creations from their disruptive little sister! Surely that smug grin will be wiped off Trixie’s face when Dot or Ditto simply turns their castle back upright after Trixie’s attack, and a new a distressing fact about the world will settle into her mind.

Dick Tracy, 7/31/24

Hey, remember that guy who was being blackmailed over some salacious photos and was paying his mustachio’d blackmailer in cryptocurrency? Well, it turns out he owns a baseball team, or runs some other kind of “enterprise” for which he reports to the Commissioner of Baseball. Would that have made this storyline more interesting, if we had learned it earlier, before the MCU arrested all the bad guys? Maybe! But I guess we’ll never know, now.