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Archive: Dick Tracy

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Presumably in life he was a pharaoh or high priest and he’s used to having help from innumerable servants

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Six Chix, 3/19/20

I think the joke here is that the mummy is very bad at cooking because he … doesn’t have … eyes? Like, can mummies not see, in the classic horror-movie mummy canon? As near as I can tell, mummies’ traditional powers involve shuffling forward very slowly and moaning, so the fact that they can’t see anything makes them even less scary. Anyway, if I were doing this comic, I’d make the joke about how the mummy is covered with highly flammable linen cloth, preserved over the centuries by the bone-dry Egyptian desert, which would have hilarious results next to a stove’s heating elements, but I guess that’s why I’ve always been deemed “too edgy” for the newspaper funny pages.

Dick Tracy, 3/19/20

DICK TRACY UPDATE: Shaky (remember him?) had his big meetup with the Tracys and ended up getting shot in the shoulder, and now he’s laying low at some criminal safehouse for which he had the keys, except it also happens to be where crime-family-adjacent characters Ugly Crystal and her bio-dad (remember them?) are living. Anyway, this has all been funny because Shaky has been trying to “play it cool” despite slowly bleeding out from his bullet wound, and while it isn’t quite as theatrically awful a death as you would’ve seen in the Dick Locher years of this strip, watching his agony mount has been pretty impressively grim, I’ll say that.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 3/19/20

Wait, do all the characters in Mother Goose and Grimm live in the Land of Oz? It would explain all the talking animals, I’ll say that much.

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Soapy Saturday

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Dick Tracy, 3/7/20

Apologies for not keeping you up to date on this Shaky plotline, but long story short, Dick Tracy’s wife Tess is a PI now and she got some guy sent up the river and Shaky is blackmailing her because he says he has evidence that she falsely accused this dude. Tess knows this evidence is false, and has already talked to Dick about the whole situation, but nevertheless Shaky is extremely confident that he’s going to pull it off, even though he’s fairly obviously walking into a trap. This Shaky is a relative of the original, classic Shaky, so I guess the lesson here is to never trust failsons (or, in this case failcousinonceremoveds) just coasting on their family legacy to get the job done. Look at this dink! He can’t even do an animal metaphor right! Merging together two inscrutable animal metaphors doesn’t create one metaphor that makes sense, Shaky!

Mark Trail, 3/7/20

Aw, look at this mischievous little orphaned imp! I wonder what “trouble” he got up to that ended up with him being forced into doing nature stuff? Robbery? Assault? Con artistry? Hopefully Rusty can tell him what it’s like to have a dad: first you don’t have a dad, then you find some weirdo who lives out in a forest compound who vaguely feels like he should have a family but definitely doesn’t want to do sex stuff with his wife, then you live with him for a while, then you wait until a tree falls on him and you start calling him “dad” and he doesn’t actively stop you. Maybe Rusty can help you find a dad, Kevin! There’s plenty of big trees out here the two of you could drop on somebody!

Mary Worth, 3/7/20

While Dawn is out nerding it up with Jared, in Paris, Hugo is … spending time? With a woman? Like a whore? I mean, it looks like they’re in an “office” which means they’re “co-workers” and have to “spend time together” for their “jobs,” so I guess those sluts over in France just do things differently, but still: Hugo, you dog.

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He’s beating them all up with his, uh, shaking powers

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Dennis the Menace, 2/12/20

Just to show you what it’s like to be me, a guy with a head full of random trivia, I read “homeowner’s rates” and thought Alice was using the British term for property taxes, which made me wonder if the Mitchells had relocated to the UK so that Dennis could take on his actually much more menacing rival. But a little Googling shows that sometimes people say “homeowner’s rates” when they mean “what I pay for homeowner’s insurance,” which sounds very strange to my ear but feel free to sound off in the comments if this is part of your everyday speech and you think that I, personally, am an idiot. The important thing here is that Dennis would not have any possible impact on the Mitchells’ property taxes, but could very well be the source of their skyrocketing insurance premiums, because he breaks so much stuff.

Dick Tracy, 2/12/20

Good news, everyone! Mysta escaped from Mr. Robot’s clutches and defeated him using her Lunarian powers, so now we’ve got a new story, about the origins of a bad guy called “Shakey,” because he shakes. Few things in recent comics history have made me laugh more than today’s Dick Tracy, in which the narration box says little Shakey “quickly learned the Golden Rule” and depicts him beating the shit out of other kids and stealing their money. There’s not even an attempt to make some kind of pun or wordplay on “Golden Rule!” “Here’s your Golden Rule, kids: just absolutely terrorizing people with violence is a great way to make a lot of cash.”

Mark Trail, 2/12/20

Ah, yes, it’s an all-too-common story: a sad, isolated person — say, an newly disabled man who isn’t sure who he is anymore — gets big on Twitter and gets a chance to reinvent himself — say, as a guy whose leg was eaten by a yeti. How often do we have to hear this tale before we learn its lessons? Anyway, Minga and Pemba are watching all this from afar, probably wondering if anybody is going to be able to pay them, now that the guy who hired them is dead.