Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for August 08, 2009

Are we actually getting somewhere? Why oh why can’t he just tell a straight forward story with out all the pointless dawdling?

Well, there is a certain new energy here. But I’m still waiting for Dick Tracy to turn back into a good comic strip. Fingers crossed.

What was Ringo supposed to say to the police? Did the Voice name a time, or a place, or who the victim was supposed to be?

Or give a motive?

Bring me pinheads, or bring me death.

“One of us! One of us! Gobble gobble!”

mr.bribery want’s a motive —

I want to see Tracy’s adversary. Locher wants to keep us guessing. A technique that gets awfully boring when by August 29 – three weeks from now, Tracy’s in the same “spot” saying the same sort of thing and there is NO villain and NO motive.

Already to date we’ve had FIVE panels of Louise Trapeze falling and a FEW on the ground..

This is not building suspense, we’ve moved way beyond that, this is provacation and a classic example of an Author’s over-indulgence in “twanging” the same starting note on his Ukulele and avoiding playing a tune everyone is waiting to hear

No one can dance, and like Tracy they must just “stand” still like the idiot in the Ring.

It’s how NOT to write a story.

Progress is so painfully plodding no publisher will ever bother to reprint this drivel..

How come Louise’s limbs change position everyday?

Lewreader: I think that second panel is a flashback to her falling. She’s not lying on the ground there. I don’t remember much about the original Tracy, but this strip does have a lot of flashbacks. Trouble is, it’s often hard to tell the flashbacks from the continuing story when time stands still.

Yesterday OldHipster asked :

“Sam Catchem ? Crapola, where’s JUNIOR ? We need to set this straight about JUNIOR,”

Well “Hipster” for you to “ask”, suggests you haven’t read the strip often in the past 18 years (?) I could try to answer many ways but let’s try this.

The “likness” you may remember as JUNIOR doesn’t exist in the strip anymore. The name is still there but the character wears a “mask” that’s a dead ringer of John Locher, the plumpy, deceased son of Artist/Author Dick Locher. Some not happy with that may opine that a little nepotism may have slipped in there.

Since that time, you may have noticed that “sexy” Lizz is no longer sexy. Good looking in the face, yes ! But a bit prudish in manner (Juliet Jones model) and recently promoted to Chief Liz. This has given rise to shorter cropped hair and a more “butchy” flat chested appearance. Patton was changed significantly too back in the lar eighties/ early nineties but was retired in early 2007,

Sam remained largely unchanged but has rarely been seen over the past 3 years

Tracy they can’t change too much, but notice, he now has Groucho Marx’s THICK eyebrows, and as Grok noted today an increasing tendency to depict him with “large” open eyes. Tracy no longer has a female “side-kick” in the field.

We live in a World of “change”, but thank God Locher hasn’t been vested with the power to “enhance” the National Anthem.Who knows what people would be marching to (?). Seems we have a man here who thinks that “TRADITION” isn’t worth a row of pins

In the wake of his several “design changes” , he must have thought HIS were better than Gould’s ? (And we had a new one yesterday) newspaper “circulation” of the strip fell in 12 years by a massive 83% from 300 papers to only FIFTY !

Does it appear that he’s on the “Right Track” ? Read on and decide. Let us know what you “think”. and WHY !.

Reading this board gives you a sense of many readers apprehensions.

..she looks like a Gumpy doll being posed…

Good stuff today Sydney. Thanks.

Are we getting somewhere, Margueritem? We might be … maybe Tracy is interrogating witnesses and picturing Louise Trapeze in his head, still falling … or maybe not. Maybe she is still falling and as she falls he is picturing himself interrogating witnesses in his head.

Or maybe it’s all in his head and nothing is real at all…. The one thing we can be sure of is he can’t really be interrogating witnesses and she is really still falling. At least one of those things must be happening only in his imagination.

Panel 3 is probably all in his imagination, since hands can’t twist like that – but maybe he really is talking to the clown and only imagining the twisted hand. It’s hard to be sure of anything; it’s all so avant-garde and high-brow.

-Cougar :{)

Mr. Pops is indicating how large your brain must be to believe his story.

Panel 2: Intresting flashback.

I don’t remember exactly what was on the circus stage, but I suspect that there wasn’t a igloo. No there seems to be some kind of cottage and someone is standing on the roof!

Hatching dosen’t work here at all.

“The Circus isn’t all laghs, eh Ringo?”

This one’s making me cry.

I knew that picture of Louise falling would keep coming up over and over again. Since she’s already hit the ground, why not use that picture since it’s current? Or is that Louise’s twin sister falling?

I miss Max Collins, who wrote the strip from 1977-93. He was a real honest-to-God mystery writer (and award-winning novelist) and the strip was pretty good while he was at the helm.

Today, I mainly follow the strip when it comes up at the Comics Curmudgeon. The last time I took the time to read a big chunk of a storyline was during that art-gallery fiasco where Locher drew about five panels of people looking at paintings and saying “Ew!”–and then just reshuffled them over and over again for about three weeks.

I can’t be the only person who sees a trapeze artists murdered at a circus and immediately thinks of the origin of the first Robin, can I? Extortionist tries to shake down circus owner, circus owner tells him to get lost, extortionist kills the trapeze artists? All we need is a kid standing on the sidelines sobbing “Dead–th-they’re DEAD!” and Tracy (in the Batman role) promising to help him get the men who did the deed.

Why not use original art in every panel? Maybe with the extra practice, they’d actually start getting good at it.

Hearing that this strip has gone from 300 papers to 50 makes sense (and I imagine it was way more than 300 in years past). That goes some distance to explain why it’s so bad…I heard Collins was fired and replaced with someone who cost less, and when that writer died Locher took over…in spite of his obvious shortcomings in that field, it saved money. Brozman has a little background in indie comics (none of which I’ve seen) but it seems like he was brought in through a personal connection to Locher more than anything.

Sadly, without a MAJOR and publicized relaunch I don’t see much future for this strip…newspapers sure aren’t a growing industry, and I can’t see any paper picking up this strip as it is. If they brought in a creative team that understood comics and understood Dick Tracy’s appeal, they could generate some enthusiasm…King Features did just this with Prince Valiant. But if it’s going to continue being mediocre, more papers are going to drop it until it’s just not profitable on any level (and with 50 papers it can’t be that profitable anyway).

Hey, Ludwig! Mr. Pops is answering someone’s question about small hands.

jumbobrain, I look forward to ‘Prince Valiant’ each Sunday. The illustrations are still wonderfull, the stories are interesting, and they actually advance each week!

Our local paper dropped Prince Valiant last year, also dropped One Big Happy, Cathy, and Mary Worth as well as Apt 3G. Comments have been interesting and put downs.

Valiant is a great comic. It has powerful art and a believable story. Nice to see it done right.