Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for July 07, 2013

We all need to remember that it was Chester Gould who came up with & continually developed the concept & lore of Dick Tracy. I mean it as a compliment to our Tracy team that today is very Gouldian! Love it!

Bardol, watch that first step, it’s a doozy! LOL

Mayhem on the rooftop of Diet Smith IndustriesTracy pursues Bardoll when from the Coupe he flees.Dashing in a cloud of smoke, a solution temporaryHe’s big, strong and malevolent, a foe dangerous and scary.Tracy is in hot pursuit of the man with a monstrous faceBardoll ducks just out of sight, removing a shoelace.Tracy ascends the ladder; Bardoll’s plan clearly defectiveLunging from his hiding place to garrote the Detective.Catchem draws his weapon, taking careful aimA skilled and lethal marksman, Sam’s cautious just the same.Bardoll brags he’ll airmail Tracy, launch him from the roofDick is trained in martial arts and shows his “pal” the proof.Sending him head over heels to asphalt down belowPoetic justice meted out: Bardoll reaps what he did sow.

Wow, Tracy just threw somebody off a roof! Aren’t there very tight limits on how much death this strip is allowed to portray?

Anyway, I can’t wait to find out what this whole scam with the Moon Coupe was really all about.

Good morning all…

Bardol might be headed for the Smith Industries pool. Flooom!

Unexpected climax to the story, but I enjoyed it very much. I hope this strip stays this good.

Is this where we’re supposed to say, the bigger they are, the harder they fall?Tracy’s hand-to-hand training pays off today, even if he’s sore of throat for a while.

Meanwhile, over at M&S, even the creator has yet to comment…

Somebody called it yesterday when they said Tracy might use martial arts…..

“Good idea . . . pal!”Mr. Bardoll, meet thy doom.

Great Job Team Tracy! As for Tracy throwing him off the roof…it was self defense in an attempted assassination attempt! Come on guys and gals lighten up! In the past Tracy has had to shoot attempted assassins. Don’t make a big deal of him defending himself from being choked to death. In Chester Gould’s day, there was much more violence. Again, great job Team Tracy! Keep up the fantastic work!

Well, guess we now know that a Bardoll can’t fly… Loved it that Tracy came out a bit worse for the wear instead of just hopping up as good as could be. Great job, Team Tracy.

Bardoll is OK. They used a stunt double.

I wasn’t going to comment; but I have to admit that the angles here are fantastic and very dramatic. Good work on the art Joe!

Sunday morning Tracy comic. Great way to start the day.

In Gould’s day he would not have shown you Bardoll getting thrown off a roof. He would have shown him hitting the ground below. How many times did he show the bullets going through beople’s heads, etc. This is tame compared to some of the stuff Gould did.

Did we just have a Mary Perkins crossover in today’s strip? Mike mentioned that there was one coming up. Check on the name in the Crimestopper picture.

Bardoll is playing his golden harp.

Don’t count Bardoll out just yet, in Gould’s day, several criminals seemed to be gone, but, made a miraculous escape… just to die in some stupid accident later! XD

Sam is too wimpy, when Pat Patton was Tracy’s partner, he would have taken the shot (Pat was a “crack shot”, almost never missed).

Dick Tracy was the most grizzly, violent strip at least until the 60s when I pretty much quit reading it. A domestic 007 kind of thing. Tracy in gruesome deadly situations, criminals coming to very graphic ends.

The person who died by falling into a smokestack (September 1966) was Ugly Christine, Mr. Bribery’s sister. She wasn’t thrown out of a helicopter. Tracy had taken her into custody, and she actually jumped out of his air car, a suicide. (Tracy and Lizz tried desperately to save her.)

Thanks, Willy. I’ll never forget those scenes. The death of Bardoll was tame compared to what happened to Ugly Christine and others back in the day.

Tracy has been studiously following the news out of Sanford, Florida as of late. Learned all about the “Stand Your Ground” law. So….. over you go, Bardoll!

cpalmeresq, that’s probably because he is too busy running a Tracy story of his own and has been for the past 2 weeks. Normally, someone posts something and he chimes in immediately with his LOL.

Finally…..Bardoll makes a good impression (or at least he will when he lands)

And with Bardoll dead or comatose, he can’t finger the bad doctors as his employers, allowing them to move on to plan B.

i GUESS it isnt murder when you can claim self defense..

Particularly great art and coloring today. :)

Crimestoppers note: Circa 1950s, the VFW (I think) would mail out tags with your license plate numbers to put on your key ring (requesting a donation) – if someone picked up such lost rings and put them in a mailbox, they would be mailed back to you. At the time, car doors, or even houses, were often left unlocked. Thanks(?) for the reminder of how things have changed.

Simply excellent!

a photo of her dropping straight into an industrial smokestack.

And then there was Hot Rize falling into the flour hopper; not exactly a pretty ending.

I don’t get it……….what was the purpose of all this.___________________________

Just because Tracy heaved Bardoll over the edge of the roof doesn’t mean that the story is over. We still have the mystery of Mysta and the pair ’o docs trying to scam Diet Smith.

Have we ever been given any indication that Tracy is trained in martial arts? We’ve seen Lizz and Honeymoon in the dojo. Is martial arts training a requirement for anyone in the police department, much as they have to qualify on the shooting range or pass a physical periodically? I can see Tracy in a gi but when I try to picture Sam he’s wearing his red bow tie and puffing up a storm on his cigarette :-)

Hey Tracy, better go to the ED and have a flexible laryngoscopy!

“Juliet: How art thou out of breath, when thou hast brethTo say to me, that thou art out of breath?The excuse that thou dost make in this delay,Is longer then the tale thou dost excuse.”

Still less violent than Superman ala MAN OF STEEL! In not so related literary recommends— just finished reading Darwyn Cooke’s graphic novel adaptation of PARKER. If you dug more of the hard-boiled, less lunar aspects of early 60’s Tracy…you might like it. Based on a series of novels by Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark).

Mayhem on the rooftop of Diet Smith Industries

Tracy pursues Bardoll when from the Coupe he flees.

Dashing in a cloud of smoke, a solution temporary

He’s big, strong and malevolent, a foe dangerous and scary.

Tracy is in hot pursuit of the man with a monstrous face

Bardoll ducks just out of sight, removing a shoelace.

Tracy ascends the ladder; Bardoll’s plan clearly defective

Lunging from his hiding place to garrote the Detective.

Catchem draws his weapon, taking careful aim

A skilled and lethal marksman, Sam’s cautious just the same.

Bardoll brags he’ll airmail Tracy, launch him from the roof

Dick is trained in martial arts and shows his “pal” the proof.

Sending him head over heels to asphalt down below

Poetic justice meted out: Bardoll reaps what he did sow.