Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for February 01, 2013

Good morning fellow DT fans…

Beam her up, Scotty!

(Good morning, VB!)

I’m guessing those bones belong to a corpse which was hidden there, as opposed to the tomb’s resident of record.

Good morning, VistaBill, BillThompson, margueritem, and Flight Suit.Shouldn’t take long for Tracy to be all over this.

She will probably tell Mole what happened and he will pass it along to Tracy.

maybe it’s the murder victim referred to in the confession…

The thot plickens……..

Toad seems to be extremely well-dressed for someone supposedly living in poverty… when I was a kid, I would have loved to have clothes that nice, instead of the Sally-Ann specials! (Sally-Ann: Canadian slang for Salvation Army store)

In spite of the jesting in the Comments…Dem bones is notThe bones of Bones….………………………………………………………………Toad will report to Mr.Mole. Mole will inform Tracy. The MCU will investigate. The cold case will warm up. Meanwhile, how’s old Sweatbox doing on his stationary bike?

I don’t think Toad will be getting her baseball back anytime soon.

In panel 1 toad looks a little pigeon-toed. Many, many good ballplayers are as such. I am not, but when I drove a baseball real deep, got a sack on a quarterback, made a shot from downtown (we did not have a 3point line) or if I knocked down a more skilled opponent; I did strut pigeon-toed.

This story is getting creepy. And I love it.

SDM, what exactly is a “sight variation”, and how does that affect the context of the varigated sentence you meant to construct?

Speaking of finding graves — http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=gould&GSfn=chester&GSbyrel=all&GSdyrel=all&GSst=16&GScntry=4&GSob=n&GRid=1225&df=all&

Dick’s going to need some help on this one..

Darn it Toad, I’m a doctor, not a coroner!

Sight variations to it doesn’t change the fact it’s the same one from yesterday. Good thing it’s still not DL doing the strip or this place would be flooded with negative comments of laziness, incompetence, cheater, etc. ________________________________I put both panels into my graphics program and superimposed one on the other. It is NOT a paste up or modified version of the previous day’s panel and no matter how the panel is stretched or modified, the images do not line up.

Locher used to repeat panels SEVERAL TIMES with no variation. Super-impositions of Locher’s panels show them to be exact duplicates.

I do not hate Locher—far from it. I actually liked Locher’s early work on Tracy and I like his editorial cartoons. He also used the re-paste technique in his early days on the strip but more sparingly than in his later years. Near the end of his tenure, he repeated panels verbatim so often that it made the strip seem extremely slow and repetitive (like Alley Oop is now under the Benders).

I admire Locher for his long tenure on the strip and it can be said that after Killian died and Locher took over the writing is when the strip began to slide in quality both in story and artwork. Locher may have saved Dick Tracy for many years but at the end of his term, he was causing what he had saved to die a slow death.

I like Locher but still think that he stayed on the strip a few years longer than he should have but I don’t begrudge him for doing so. Retirement from something you love can be an extremely emotional experience. But like or hate Locher, objectively you cannot deny that the strip went downhill during his last couple of years.

What’s with all the bone cracks today?

….Okay, those werea bad choice of words.

SDM are you EVER gonna teach that pony a new trick?

You’re replying to Still Da Man!’s comment:Did you mean variegated sentence, old chum? LOL!!!^^Holy spelling book, Batman!!!!!

Ps everyone, I won’t even LOOK at oatmeal now!

Btw, my shabby childhood house was in the family for several years, it had once been owned by my Great Grands, then my Grandparents and finally my parents… 4 generations of the family lived in that old house… it’s still standing, but, it’s no longer in our family

Good (and truthful) summary of the Locher era — to add, if you go back and take a look at some of his earliest DT work with Max Allan Collins (after Rick Fletcher passed-away), most of that stuff was very well-executed (and, in many cases, very familiar to Chester Gould fans). I think what didn’t endear him to the folks who post on this board on a regular basis was he never really was a writer (he was pressed into service to write and illiustrate the strip after the death of Mike Kilian), but he chose to keep the strip going, which I am very grateful for (not a whole lot of early 20th century strips are still running). Add to that advanced age, deteriorating health, and drawing editorial cartoons on top of that, and I’m surprised DL was able to accomplish all that. I guess what I’m saying is he kept DT alive for at least a couple more generations to enjoy, and you can’t fault anyone for wanting to do that…

Wait a minute. I’ve seen “Back to the Future” several times, but I don’t recall that MJF was left handed.