Archive: Dick Tracy

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Mary Worth, 11/7/18

Oh, actually, I guess this week isn’t going to be about the special care you need to take when adopting a traumatized dog. Nope, it’s just an elaborate metaphor, where Greta the bow-tie wearing dog is a stand-in for the bow-tie wearing Saul, who was shutting out the good along with the bad mere hours ago. Probably Greta will come around just as quickly, with help from a little roast chicken skin! Did Mary consider just luring Saul out of his apartment and/or emotional shell with some roast chicken skin? Might’ve saved everyone a lot of time.

Dick Tracy, 11/7/18

Remember when Dick Tracy was about truly horrific and violent deaths? Well, it’s about people faxing documents to other people now. Funny how things work out in this world!

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Dick Tracy, 11/5/18

There’s a lot that seems amiss to the history here, in the Neo-Chicago Parallel Universe. “Miller” is a very common Jewish surname, and talk of escaping the “poverty of the ghetto” seems to point further in that direction. But then we have talk of the “local Russian community,” which definitely isn’t the same thing as the local Jewish community, though I guess it could’ve been a term used for a neighborhood of Russian Jews in particular. I remember my grandmother, the child of Polish Jewish immigrants, telling me in fairly snooty terms about how uncouth some of her soon-to-be in-laws, who were Russian Jews, were, so there were definitely divisions within those communities, though while we’re at it Russian Jews would’ve for the most part come from a small shtetl in the countryside; it was Jews from elsewhere in Eastern Europe who lived in ghettos in big cities. Anyway, I guess I’m dancing around the real problem here, which is that panel two seems to imply that the Millers made the grueling overland trip from Russia to America over the frozen Bering Strait.

Six Chix, 11/5/18

Fun fact: Under British law, there’s two uses of the title “princess”: One is if you’re a daughter or a granddaughter of the sovereign, or a granddaughter of the heir to the throne, in which case the correct form of address is “Princess Charlotte of Cambridge”; the other is if you’re married to a prince, in which case the correct form of address is “Diana, Princess of Wales” or the like. Kate Middleton is considered a princess but takes her husband’s title so her formal address is “Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge,” and the only reason I know all this is that the people who edit Wikipedia pages about royalty fuckin’ love correcting people on this point with a special passion, especially when it comes to Princess Diana Diana, Princess of Wales, who they transparently despise. It’s also worth noting that Queen Elizabeth’s husband was born a prince of Greece but renounced his foreign royal titles upon getting engaged, and then wasn’t granted by special dispensation the right to be called “Prince Philip” until Elizabeth had been Queen for five years. I’m not sure what my point is here except that this comic strip is wrong even beyond the fact that any comic strip taken up entirely by pinkish diagrams of internal organs can be rightfully called “wrong.”

Mary Worth, 11/5/18

I’m actually kind of glad that this Mary Worth is going to face the fact that emotionally traumatized animals can be really rewarding to rescue but aren’t just plug-and-play instant perfect pets and need special care to really bring into their own. Anyway, that sure looks like a nice rug Saul has in his living room! It would be a shame if somebody anxiety-peed all over it, repeatedly.

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Dick Tracy, 10/29/18

I did a small amount of Googling to try to figure out what “the old ‘neighborhood bank’ plan” was and came up empty, but I assume it was the sort of thing that wasn’t uncommon in the early 20th century, where local, unregulated financial institutions flourished and you could never be entirely sure if you were dealing with a grey-market bank or a ponzi scheme. But today’s Dick Tracy makes it clear how you could ensure your money was safe: just get your lawyer involved and then these undeground, gangster-run pseudo-banks would have to hold onto your money for decades and hand it over to your duly appointed heirs, decades later!

Crankshaft, 10/29/18

You know, when I was a kid riding a yellow bus to school, we had both a driver and a “bus aide” whose job was to keep us from killing each other so the driver could focus on not killing us in a terrible accident. Is that even a thing anymore? Was it ever a thing in most places? Anyway, Crankshaft has never had any assistance on his bus, and he makes do by just literally not giving a shit about what the kids do, not even bothering to look at them or spend any time thinking about them, really.

Pluggers, 10/29/18

Pluggers seems like they’re doing OK at first, but when you talk to them for more than a few minutes, the extent of their cognitive decline becomes obvious.

Crock, 10/29/18

Ha ha! It’s funny because the lady cactus doesn’t want to fuck!