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Dick Tracy, 4/27/19

Usually a week-sized chunk is the smallest unity of plot for a continuity strip, but Dick Tracy wrapped up its gym teacher murderer plot around about Thursday, so why not use the remainder of the week to keep us up to date on the Vitamin Flintheart/Kandikane May-December romance, which is definitely a storyline that we all care about? A couple days is all we can spare on the miracle of life, though, because a Minit Mystery awaits! (I will not be covering the Minit Mystery, because zzzzzzzzz.)

Mark Trail, 4/27/19

Congrats to Mark: based on his pensive facial expression the final panel here, it looks like he’s finally learned how to have thoughts without verbalizing them. I’m curious as to whether those thoughts are along the lines of “This is an old man’s folly, I hope Doc isn’t too embarrassed when it doesn’t pan out” or if they’re more like “I don’t trust JJ at all! I bet I’m going to have to punch him soon!”

Pluggers, 4/27/19

Once pluggers hit a certain age, they stop even pretending that they have any interest in reading.

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Dick Tracy, 4/22/19

A quirk of the newspaper industry is that, traditionally, many people have subscribed only to the Sunday paper, which was much larger than the other days’ editions, and, conversely, some people subscribed to every day but Sunday. You can see the effect of this in how the continuity strips deal with Sundays. Most structure things so that Sunday sums up the previous week’s action, accommodating both Sunday-only and no-Sunday audiences while boring the rest of us. The Phantom famously has an entirely separate storyline that runs on Sundays; Gil Thorp doesn’t bother running on Sundays at all.

Then there’s Dick Tracy, which treats Sunday as just another day of the week, man. This is hilarious to me this week because I’m imagining how anyone who didn’t see yesterday’s shootout would parse this conversation, which sounds to me a lot like Dick and Joe acknowledging, without coming right out and saying, that Tracy killed an unarmed man and then planted a gun on him.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/22/19

I immediately and 100% believe that not only did Rex tell Sarah that ice cream trucks are “music trucks,” but that he also told her that they were the only legal way to listen to music of any sort. It’s great, how the music trucks will drive from neighborhood to neighborhood, bringing their songs with them! The rest of the time we get to enjoy a little peace and quiet around here.

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Dick Tracy, 4/21/19

Were you hoping we were going to find out what made “The Professor” tick? Did you think that there must be an interesting story behind an apparently successful sports columnist whose sense of professional pride led him to kill a series of gym teachers? Were you intrigued to learn more about the whole psychological deal that led him to obsess over his nickname? Well, too bad, because Dick pretty much figured out who he was right away and then gunned him down in an alley. I guess “The Professor” should’ve gotten his Ph.D. in marksmanship, so he could have at least winged Dick on the way out, or maybe in English, so that he didn’t embarrass himself by wildly misusing the word “ironic” as he expired.

Pluggers, 4/21/19

Wait, is this the first instance in history of pluggers being depicted as snobs? There are of course no channels on which programming is introduced by random drunk dudes wearing sweaty tank tops, but if there were, they would be immensely popular, and rightfully so.

Gasoline Alley, 4/21/19

Today’s Gasoline Alley is a cruel bait and switch because it allowed us to believe right up to the final panel that Rufus, one of the most irritating characters in an irritating strip, was dead.