Archive: Dick Tracy

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Dick Tracy, 9/30/21

One thing I’ve always respected about Dick Tracy is that it would be easy to portray Diet Smith as an eccentric but helpful inventor always willing to do his part to aid the authorities and stop crime, but instead it’s repeatedly hinted that he is a dude who is into some real sicko shit. Sure, he could use his Time Drone to solve mysteries or find buried treasure or whatever, but what if instead he acquired footage of our most beloved president getting his brains blown out in vivid 4K video and Dolby Atmos surround sound, and then he spent the next three days watching it over and over again, alone in his office, for science?

Funky Winkerbean, 9/30/21

Oh, say, how’s the current Funky Winkerbean plot, in which a running gag from the strip’s early wacky days is revived in pseudo-realistic fashion and revealed to be a source of profound trauma for everyone involved, going? Well, the memories that Holly’s return to majoretting have dug up are sure activating some latent rage at her emotionally abusive mother, whom she now lives with, so that should be fun for all concerned. Also, she broke her ankle!

Blondie, 9/30/21

Just to prove that I’m an emotionally mature and magnanimous person, I want to show you this Blondie, which has an absolutely solid, well-written joke that made me laugh. It does happen sometimes, in the legacy comics! Is it a little unnerving to notice that Herb also has the same weird baggy wrinkle neck as Dagwood? Yes! But I’m trying to ignore it, trying not to visualizing the neck-flesh quavering like jelly, and just focus on the unusually good punchline.

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Dick Tracy, 9/25/21

Oh, huh, I guess the guy in the Ace of Spades outfit isn’t actually the first guy to wear the Ace of Spades outfit, and that apparently the reason the Ace of Spades outfit involves a mask is that the original guy had a huge “A” in the middle of his forehead. This is profoundly uninteresting to me, it turns out, but I guess we’re going to watch Dick try to puzzle all these questions out when he could just USE DIET SMITH’S TIME-DRONE TO ZOOM IN ON THE EXACT MOMENT OF THE MURDER AND SOLVE IT WITHOUT ANY EFFORT, god, Dick, do I have to think of everything for you????

Mary Worth, 9/25/21

“[adorable French accent] Oh ho ho! This Weelbur, he seems to think that he can threaten me with ‘arm! Fortunately, eet is very obvious that I would defeat him in either a battle of physical prowess or a contest of weets! The game is afoot, mon frère! ‘Bring eet on,’ as you say in this county!”

Beetle Bailey, 9/25/21

Years ago, when I first started this blog, one of my running bits was that Beetle and Sarge were lovers in a tempestuous, sometimes violent relationship, but I dropped that because it got old after a while. And really, when you think about it, friendships can be just as intense as romantic relationships, right? A guy saying “my mother never shoved a fist in my face” while the guy who just shoved his fist in his face watches him walk away with crossed arms is just as grim even if they aren’t sleeping each other, in my opinion.

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Gil Thorp, 9/9/21

Big news, everybody! Usually football dominates the Gil Thorp fall storyline, just like it dominates the American sports fan’s mind, but this year we’re going to acknowledge that there are other sports happening in the fall as well, sports like volleyball and gymnastics, and that girls play them too! So far the main point of this plot seems to be “if you play two sports the same semester, you don’t have much time for a social life,” but the last time we did a gymnastics plot in this strip, it ended with racists getting beat up so I’m willing to see where this goes.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/9/21

Speaking of being willing to see where something goes: A mysterious figure from Jordan’s possibly retconned past has showed up, tempting him with a big payday to go on one last mission. Good news, though: Jordan’s not going to do it. No hard feelings, says Griff, as he leaves the strip forever! Whew, that was almost interesting there for a minute.

Dick Tracy, 9/9/21

OK, fine, I’ll stop ranting about time travel stuff in Dick Tracy and talk about something else. Like, in today’s strip, isn’t it kind of weird that we appear to have skipped over exactly one sentence of dialogue between panels one and two, and it’s a sentence that Dick himself needlessly summarizes? I guess it’s structured this way so that the dialogue alternates between Dick and Chief Patton. Or, maybe Diet’s time-viewing experiments have started interfering with the very nature of reality, causing temporal discontinuities in everyday l[I am felled by a single sniper’s bullet to the head]