Archive: Dick Tracy

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Gil Thorp, 8/5/19

“Here’s what I’m thinking, Mr. Ballard. Why don’t you stop thinking of your job as determining the best and fairest set of rules for your school district and then making sure everyone follows those rules regardless of their status, and instead realizing what it really is: a means to grease the skids for people with enough power and influence to make life unpleasant for you if you don’t let them do what they want? Don’t worry, you won’t have to actually let anyone else bend the rules like this in the future, unless they also have a friend who’s a bored high-powered lawyer. Just do this one thing this one time and all your problems go away, probably!”

Hi and Lois, 8/5/19

Ha ha, it’s funny because Trixie views her place in the Flagston household as perpetually contingent, and worries she could be thrown in the trash at any time! Her parents do just ignore her for hours out of the day while she crawls around the house unsupervised, which might have something to do with it.

Dick Tracy, 8/5/19

Theater people??? Doing drugs???? UNHEARD OF

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Marvin, 7/31/19

I guess i’s a step forward that today’s Marvin absolutely infuriated me for entirely non-poop related reasons. No, I’m just furious about how badly this punchline is botched! There are actually two perfectly good ways this basic joke could be done:

JOKE STRUCTURE #1 (kinda basic, but still very effective)

PANEL ONE:
BERNIE: Remember that old TV show Cheers, where everybody at the bar knows your name?
ROY: Yeah

PANEL TWO:
BERNIE: Well, it’s like that when I go to the medical building

PANEL THREE:
THERE IS NO PANEL THREE BECAUSE THE FIRST TWO PANELS ACTUALLY CONVEY EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW! THE MEDICAL BUILDING IS WHERE EVERYONE KNOWS BERNIE’S NAME, BECAUSE HE’S OLD AND SICK A LOT! JOKE OVER!

JOKE STRUCTURE #2 (maybe a little daring for a comic strip, but I think it would work)

PANEL ONE:
BERNIE: Remember that old TV show Cheers, where everybody at the bar knows your name?
ROY: Yeah

PANEL TWO:
BERNIE: Well, it’s like that when I go to the medical building

PANEL THREE:
BERNIE: Everyone there is a drunk!

But no, instead, we just get a third panel that doesn’t add any more twists to the punchline, but rather just explains what the punchline was. It doesn’t work! It doesn’t work at all! I almost wish Marvin had shit his pants, to distract us!

Dick Tracy, 7/31/19

Don’t worry yourself, Vitamin: I’m sure that the theater, which you literally own, felt absolutely free to make a decision as to whether to cast you in the role you so transparently and desperately want based entirely on artistic criteria. If you don’t believe me, believe the adoring, much younger woman you knocked up!

Six Chix, 7/31/19

I’ve been staring at this for a long time and trying to figure out why all the action is a circle in the middle of the panel surrounded by blackness. I guess it’s supposed to be like we’re looking at the scene through a camera, with the implication being “Sure, we live in a society where in order to afford the most basic necessities we might need to leverage our ability to inspire pity on social media, but at least we’re also under continuous surveillance”?

Dennis the Menace, 7/31/19

I accept that Dennis’s menacing levels have waxed and waned over the years, but I have to draw the line at this sort of wide-eyed sub-Family Circus-ism delivered while cradling a teddy bear. The only way this is at all appropriate if it’s part of a larger plan to send Joey spiraling down a dark path experimenting with hallucinogens too young and too often.

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/26/19

Well, I guess, uh, Jessica’s Big Hollywood Experiment is over, now that she has … not produced her long-ago promised documentary about her father, John Darling (seriously, this never came out, right?) and she and Cindy solved the Big Butter Brinkel Mystery (with that classic trope, “the talking chimpanzee was the real killer all along“). Just as her husband before her turned down the chance to work as a storyboarder on the next big-budget Starbucks Jones movie so he could toil away at a comics startup based in a dying cancer cluster of a town in northeast Ohio, she has now turned down the chance to be a assistant cinematographer on the next big-budget Starbucks Jones movie, so that she can do … something, I guess … in a dying cancer cluster of a town in northeast Ohio. Her logic is that she didn’t want to suffer what her father, John Darling, suffered from being in “the biz,” and despite the fact that local newscasting is in no way the same “biz” as cinematography or narrative filmmaking, you can see why she’d be worried about going down that road, since her father turned out to be a huge asshole who was murdered in an aggressively wacky manner. Was learning about Butter Brinkel’s murderous what made her realize she was in too deep? Was she worried that she, too, would be killed by Zanzibar or his successors because she knows too much? Is she laying low in Westview to stay safe from the Monkey Mob?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/26/19

Obviously I know Hootin’ Holler is behind the times, but it’s wild that they’re just now getting into Vine.

Dick Tracy, 7/26/19

“That’s pop culture for you! It sure is a shared language and set of experiences we can use as a shorthand to communicate with one another! Ha ha!”