Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for November 07, 2015

OOPS!!!

That’s not a prop …

“Steve” and “Freddy” …

Anyone NOT familiar with Gene Colan’s art should look him up…An incredible and unique artist!

Good morning to everyone. It seems we have another Otis* on our hands. *(reference to the Gruesome story)

“All I did was portray honest, hard-working citizens as vicious, hardened criminals … I can’t for the life of me see why anyone should have a problem with that.”

.Good morning guys!

Uh oh…..looks like someone really did get hanged….that ain’t good.

Greeting to all readers and commenters.-———-I wonder who decided to drop in and hang around?-———-Have a pleasant day, my friends.

Why am I hearing this as background music for today’s strip …?

Is our dangling friend a former member of the “Midnight Mirror” cast …?

Unless the death has been faked, I’d rule Blackjack out as the culprit.

This looks more like a job for …

Uh …

… Somebody Else!

Good morning, DT fans!Maybe he’s a newbie just getting the ropes! Anyway, we are through hanging around and getting to the story!

I think everyone who’s been complaining about pacing needs to make a retraction.

I think that they would be looking for another actor to fill up a vacancy

In a long beach fun house used to hang a body that people thought was a mannequin until the arm fell off and bone was underneath. The human mind never says dead body until the proof slaps them in the face.

Freddy and Steve have made a significant discovery.Murder most foul would appear to have occurred within the little world of the film set. And so now the play-acting must be set aside and homicide detectives brought in. If on set, Adam Austin may finally meet the real Dick Tracy and Sam Catchem….

Calm aplomb, nonchalance . . . ?Like Sam’s ‘ash’ inadvertently falling on the carpet ?

Seems we’ve finally got a crime,,. an unexpected hanging on the set ?If not a prop (?), by tomorrow they’ll be here - Forensics … as you wonder if few here, breath a collective Sigh of Relief (?)

Guess, as this further unfolds, we’ll have a Mystery on our hands ?We may even have a First Here ?Will this be Dick Tracy’s First, “Who Done It” in the strip ?

Can’t seem to ‘easily’ recall any “overt” ones from the past … ?Perhaps Ken from O - can again ‘jog’ my mind ?

If so, seems to ‘beg’ the question, why didn’t Gould or even Collins - have them ?

Aaaaaaand, here we go…

Who might be walking on sunshine? Whose feet don’t touch the ground? Who’s known to be a swinger? Who’s dead in Tracytown? In our grief ’tis no relief that disbelief is…suspended. Leave it to the MCU, the killer shall be apprehended.

I hope this goes right on with the (apparent) corpse tomorrow, and they don’t just leave us hanging. #BadPunNoCookie

I think Abner Kadaver is about to make an appearance very soon!

Murder on the set!!!

It is called “hidden in plain sight”. The actors just think it is a prop of some kind.

Well, at least one of the actors thought that, but the other one realized that it was obviously not a prop. I have a feeling that it is not hidden at all, but put there on purpose as a warning that they must stop the production, lest more such mishaps occur. I don’t know who would want to stop the production or why, but it seems like a more concrete threat to me, assuming that the person who wrote the letters is responsible for the crime.

Blackjack is a reasonable guess, as he is a big Tracy fan. He would hate to see Tracy mocked and portrayed as a crime boss. Still, he has made it clear that civilians are off limits. As others have noted, murder is not his style. It seems highly unlikely that Blackjack is the culprit.

@Pequod: Thanks for posting the Blackjack comic. Be well my friend.

Uh – oh……………………………….

The villain here may not be someone we are familiar with—and to me, that would be refreshing.

I hope Mike does not fall into the trap that every new opposition to Tracy be some kind of a super-villain or a grotesque. Once in a while, it is good to see Tracy go after a “regular” thug. Certainly the author wants to create villains who seem to be more of a threat than Tracy can handle but normal criminals can also be serious threats as well.

I was going to post the same comment as Neil Wick concerning the issue of mysteries in The Dick Tracy Casebook. While mysteries can be appropriate in the strip, as a reader I always enjoy knowing both the crime and criminal and seeing how Tracy uses his investigative skills to discover what the audience already knows. After all, shouldn’t Tracy be the “American Sherlock Holmes?”

While I am a big fan of Mike’s writing, a constructive criticism I would offer is to get Tracy out from behind his desk barking instructions to Ms. Steffehawk through his intercom and let us see him doing actual on-scene observation and deduction as he solves the cases using the superior deductive skills that made him America’s greatest detective.

Gweedo – It’s legal here !!! – Murray wrote late yesterday:@Neil Wick… the 1990 Dick Tracy movie, which won an Oscar for Best Makeup.——————-Haven’t seen it and from people’s descriptions wont strain my neck to…

The movie has good points and bad points, but in my opinion, it’s certainly worth seeing. As a big Tracy fam at the time, of course, I went to see it at 12:01 a.m. on opening day. I’ve still got the t-shirt. They sold t-shirts rather than admission tickets for the midnight showing.

It not only won the Academy Award for best makeup, as I already mentioned, but also the awards for best set decoration and best original song. Visually, it was quite stunning. It was nominated (but didn’t win) for best cinematography, best costume design, best sound, and even best supporting actor! (Al Pacino as Big Boy Caprice).

Roger Ebert, whose movie reviews I have always enormously respected, and miss these day, concluded his very positive review of Dick Tracy with this sentence: “It is one of the most original and visionary fantasies I’ve seen on a screen.”

RE: The story in the Dick Tracy movie:It was pretty good, actually. They lifted some aspects directly from the strip, such as Tracy in a death trap where the crooks offer him a load of cash to be released, if he’ll promise to leave them alone, the old boiler type of furnace about ready to explode. The story also delved into the relationship between Tracy, his job, and Tess, and Tracy’s relationship to “the kid” who became Jr. The also used the bit from the strip where Tracy faced a frame-up. The only thing is, they crammed all of it together, whereas Gould put forth one or two ideas at a time over the years. But, for a movie made by a guy who admitted he was a big fan of the strip, it was well done and worth a look.

All those “bests” don’t seem to include story among them.

Yeah, it didn’t get any screenplay awards (or even nominations, for that matter), but you can’t have everything. I have a graphic design background, so the visual aspect of movies is extremely important to me. I can stay entranced by colours and designs for a long time. This movie started me collecting DVDs of movies based on comic books. Capturing a comic in a live-action movie is extremely difficult, but I haven’t really seen any that did it better than this movie.

That being said, the movie wasn’t a complete disaster in terms of plot. As Ken pointed out, I think they tried to cram too much stuff into one movie. There were tons of characters that didn’t last long at all. If you read that Ebert review I linked to, he didn’t have anything bad to say about the plot, really.

It was kind of interesting, when I was reading Ebert’s review today, to notice that he mentioned that Tracy never had much of a personality in the strip, leaving all the personality to the criminals, but the movie gave Tracy some personality. Mike Curtis has been adding more personality to Tracy in recent times, although the criminals still dominate the strip as always.