Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for December 27, 2016

How’d that group get past TSA?

If ever I see people like that on the same plane I am, I’m gonna quit drinking!

So reminiscent of the time The Green Hornet & Kato came to Gotham City.

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Good morning DT fans far and wide!

Looks like Neil Wick was correct.

I’ll be curious if this is the actually Perrenel Flammel, a decedent, or someone else entirely.

For that matter, if this is Perrenell Flammel, where is her husband?

Looks like they did indeed swap out the Spirit’s far-from-PC sidekick Ebony White for his latter-day assistant, Sammy.

Is that Dondi at the front of the group ?

Good morning Vista Bill and stowaways on Flight 1397 !

Here’s the wikipedia article on Ebony White, for anyone who’s at all interested …

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebony_White

Is “Flammel” an almost-anagram for “La Femme” …?

I recall seeing Flammel with two “mm” instead of one.

@Ken in Ohio I left a couple of comments for you late last night.

How is Ebony White " far-from-PC sidekick"?

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There was certainly criticism of how he looked in the comic and how he talked. He was “sent away to school” and rarely appeared in the last 40 issues after Sammy began to appear.

Good after Christmas fellow DT Fans! Ebony White would have been totally unacceptable today, and it ended up embarrassing even back then. In any case the kid-sidekick trope was initiated by Chet Gould with Dick Tracy and Junior.

Woouldn’t Sammy have grown up as Junior did?

I discussed the matter with Mike Curtis this weekend (I customarily spend Christmas with the Curtises).

My contention that an “acceptable” updating of Ebony would, undoubtedly, result in him resembling Huey from “The Boondocks”, thus being rendered unrecognizable, drew a wry nod from Mike… ;-)

You can have too much of a good thing.

What’s in the pipe…. already lit as he is departing from a plane?

It is spelled “Flamel”

In Will Eisner’s comics, The Spirit always wore a pair of dark glasses over his mask whenever he travelled.

I got to meet Will Eisner at a comic book convention some years ago. I got his autograph, and we had a very nice chat. He was a very down to earth gentleman.

Will Eisner once did a strip similar to THE SPIRIT titled JOHN LAW, about a square-jawed fedora-wearing police detective who, like someone else we know, rocked a jaunty eye-patch.

The strip didn’t sell, so Eisner re-tooled the JOHN LAW stories into SPIRIT tales, adapting the dialogue and re-drawing the hero’s face.

The character of Sand Serif, one of Eisner’s many classic femme fatals, first appeared in one of these stories, and I want to think that Sammy did too. Or perhaps Sammy was the revised version of John Law’s sidekick when Eisner converted the stories. I’ll have to look it up.

Eisner made a number of attempts during the post-War era to either reduce Ebony’s more stereotypical traits or to replace him outright; (most embarrassingly, with a little Eskimo boy named Blubber), but he never completely got rid of him

People seem to be converging at Tracy’s city. Is there a convention in town?

I had forgotten that the Spirit had a second kid that helped him, not just Ebony. That’s Sammy.

BTW, Eisner regretted the portrayal of Ebony himself. He tried to make him a bit more acceptable by making him a kid (he was originally an adult acting like that), but the character isn’t “non-PC,” he’s insulting to a very large group of Americans.

I absolutely love Will Eisner’s (and his disciples) covers and splash pages—some of them were epic.

At least he didn’t name Sammy “Ivory Black.”

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By the way, there are some issues of Eisner’s Spirit comic up at Comic Book Plus. They are from the 50s, which is the strip’s weakest period, but there are some good stories in there, including some classic reprints. I’ve been a fan of Eisner and his work since I set eyes on Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes in sixth grade, and found out after some years of buying any Spirit material I could find that my Mom had subscribed to the Chicago Tribune when she lived in DC during WW2, just to get the Spirit sections, which she saved. Most of the ones I have were written by Feiffer, with art by Cole and Fine and others, and they all have Lady Luck and Mr. Mystic (the latter drawn by Bob Powell) as backups.

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In the 70s, Mom subscribed to Kitchen Sink’s Spirit, and even dropped in on Denis Kitchen on one road trip out East. I met him at the Dallas Fantasy Festival in ’84 (along with half of my idols in the industry: Kurtzman, Crumb, Shelton, Rodriguez, Jaxon, Gilbert Hernandez, Wolfman, and others), and he politely said he remembered Mom.

Dear Joe, Wow! Two of the greatest comic strip detectives meet one another. Good show. Can Fearless Fosdick be far behind? Best, Nick

Love these cross overs!

Now it’s going to be interesting! The spirit and company? Whoo :)

@Gweedo – It’s legal here !!! – Murray said, about 21 hours agoThe grass is very Green in Kantucky,@JenWell there is one female human species who is all ‘worked up’ over a comic female. [smiles]

Exceptionally well done, Team-tracy.

Good for you !!!! (Yuuuge Smiley) :)

[giggles] fantasies come and go, but reality sits on your lap, keeping you grounded.

@Night-Gaunt49 GoComics PRO Member said, about 23 hours agoMy apologies if I’m posting dups. I cannot tell if it’s on my end, or Gocomics..A glitch in the posting system here. Just delete the doubles above the last one. should do it.

Fixed! Thank you! :)

@brownceb said, about 18 hours agoOne of the greatest comic strip artists, Milton Caniff, had some of the most beautiful female fatalesever drawn in Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. Who could ever forget Dragon Lady?

Oh very very true! This article is a good point. http://popcultureaddict.com/malecall/

Is it just me or does Commissioner Dolan look a lot like E.J. Cobb?

Wonderful!

Hmm…The plane lettering in the background looks three-dimensional i.e. Spirit-like LOL

(It also looks like it might be part of Pan-Am! Maybe it survived in the Tracyverse!)

Where’s Ebony?

This is similar to the “red carpet” moment where you see the cast before the show actually starts…

We need a crossover with Mickey Mouse next…..let’s push the envelope, lol

On a serious note, it would be fun to have Go Go Gomez and Joe Jitsui visit for a story……or would the PC zealots find a way to ruin that for us, too?

Ms. Flammel (usually spelled Flamel in French but sometimes in English Flammel; e.g., by Isaac Newton), Perenelle (or Perrenelle, Petronelle, Pernelle), the real historical wife (who died in 1397) of Nicolas Flamel (c. 1330-1418), a Parisian scribe, is first described as having alchemical powers, like her husband, in a book published in Paris in 1612 and in an English translation in London in 1624.

So, I ask, who is this “Ms. Flammel,” with the left eye-patch, getting off a private jet and being met by a liveried driver in Tracyville? Is she (our comic character) an undying alchemical adept? Or is she an alleged descendant (the real 14th century Nicolas and Perenelle were childless; she had had two prior husbands but no children from them are mentioned, either)? Or is this some flim-flam(el) scheme?

Meanwhile, at Tracyville’s commercial airport, Sammy, Commissioner Dolan, and the Spirit disembark. Why they are in town we do not yet know….

This seems quite off-topic, but I feel like I have to acknowledge here the passing of both George Michael (singer) and Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) in the last two days. They were both iconic characters in the time I was growing up. I never had the opportunity to meet either one of them and now I certainly never will.

The closest I came was to meet Debbie Reynolds (Carrie’s mom) and she was definitely one of the nicest celebrities I ever had the privilege to meet. She was chatting with each person as she signed autographs at the video dealers’ show. Someone had to point out to her that the line of people waiting for autographs looped around behind her desk and extended far down the aisle of the show floor and was getting longer and longer as she chatted. Carrie also seemed quite friendly and down to earth in any interviews I have seen.

As long as we’re listing people of note who’ve recently passed, don’t forget actor George S. Irving, who memorably voiced The Heat Miser in the Rankin/Bass Animagic Special “The Year Without A Santa Clause.”