Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for March 23, 2014

Shades of Al Capp!

Good morning everyone

See the kids out on the street with the funny papersAnnie, Sandy and Punjab caught up in brand new capers.Serials take their sweet time to share a rousing storyHeroes fighting criminals for justice not for glory.There’s a new one, freshly inked, open eyes wide to seeCrime fighter in a fedora: J. Straightedge Trustworthy.Once hooked you just can’t get enough; I’d sail the seven seasTo read the classic story of the fate of 88 Fleas.They say that he was one bad pooch, he could not be house-brokenThe Milk Bone caper his Waterloo, look to see that I ain’t jokin’.It was the bite that brought him down, he made his victim hollerNo getaway on this day, Trustworthy got his collar.One more pest, worse than the rest, of whom we must be ridThe author of J. Straightedge: Sparkle’s ex, Vera Alldid.

Thought this may finally be the Scottish gentleman & m’dearie story, then I saw the Vera Alldiid signature!

J. Straightedge Trustworthy is no Fearless Fosdick, I can you that.

Well, I was wrong about possibly revisiting the car under the ice today, but it appears that Vera Alldid is back! I thought he gave up drawing comics, but I wonder if he’s still connected with Abner Kadaver. I told you that Abner is still out there somewhere. Maybe we’ll be seeing him again.

Maybe we’ll never find out if the two in the car under theice survived?

It seems that Vera is mocking Tracy with this comic. Their last meeting was definitely less than amicable.

“Captured 88 Fleas,” referring to 88 Keys, if you ain’t guess that already he he

so, is sprocket & silver fish bait or will we see them again or not? there are at least 3 stories that need endings here.

I had heard Vera Alldid would return this year. He was in a bad way last time we saw him (I believe Sparkle decked him), and now he’s created a comic strip that spoofs Tracy?

LOL

Ah shoot, I thought we’d get more Mysta today. This is pretty amusing though I must say!

Vera’s getting a little payback for the way the Tracy family rejected him! Not that he didn’t deserve it.I’m glad Curtis and Staton have fun with this strip, just as Gould did.

I repeat, “And now for something completely different.”

And now Vera Alldid reappears—or at least his comic strip version of Dick Tracy.So many plates to keep spinning….

Great poem, PQ! Are you normally up at the stroke of midnight Central? Jus’ askin’!

Hee! Good Morning back at everyone and VB!

Vera is a man, in case someone does not know. Why Chester Gould introduced a man with a feminine name? Apparently for the sole purpose of making a pun, and a very lame one at that, IMHO.

Uh, and kids nowadays would be reading comics on iPads or tablets.

And be sure to notice the tribute to Little Orphan Annie in Panel Two. We’re still waiting for the Dick Tracy/Annie crossover story.

LOOSE ENDS ?

You might be forgiven for thinking it was a Black Friday just gone, (although not the 13th), given the staggering Lectures, Sermons and a likely ‘painful’ roll in the Cactus, our writer Mike Curtis had to endure that day ! ?

Some examples :- “… endings left to one’s imagination”- “… endings like a book with the last 10 pages missing”- “… Tracy, Sam not seen retrieving bodies”-" … Stories have too many loose ends – like Davey’s in the Mr. Crime tale" !-" … disconcerting to leave the Nitrates and not resolve the story"

On the plus side, the above was happily punctuated with the occasional admiring comment on the ArtS quality

Yet the day after, Saturday, as ‘realization dawned’, all seemed ’ forgotten ’ as interest and focus switched to what appeared to be an amazing Moon Maid transformation !

But woe is me, the Nitrates ‘clean up’ failed to come today - Sunday as speculated. Instead, an in-house style Fearless Fosdick by a returning goofy ‘caricature’ of former Sparkle husband – Vera Alldid

The days ‘kindest’ words, peeped out only at the end, in the final post . . .

-"Wow ! I love this strip !

I kind of wish there were not so many stories with loose endings. I’m the type of guy who likes a definite wrap up to a story. Now we have at several stories with no end in site, with two, (the m’dearie and the Tracy spoof) just beginning. Please Team Tracy, I don’t mind a good, long story that lasts for months at a time, but I think running several stories at once drains each story of the narrative it could have. Gould did start lead ins to another story toward the end of a story he was already telling, but, to the best of my knowledge, not several at once.

Gotta Love the Sunday Funnies. i feel like a kid on the street again…Love to Mysta and the girls..

Does Vera work solo on his Trustworthy strip, or might he have a team of helpers?

Thanks for the great Mysta montage yesterday, Willy007. The ramifications of the remarkable three days of Mysta are still sinking in. Now we pivot to the humorous, as J. Straightedge Trustworthy collars his suspect. Tracy as dog catcher? Methinks Vera Alldid (We’re All Dead) may have a bill come due on his disrespect. I love the nod to Annie. Joe wouldn’t have the time to draw two strips…would he?Reasonable people can disagree about the ending of the Nitrates’ story (which I see as rather satisfying with little ambiguity), but it raises the issue that has been broached here before. Might subsequent volumes of Calling Dick Tracy! take the form of an “expanded edition”? Let’s think of it as a “the nitty and the gritty” edition, in which we see the corpses of the Nitrates pulled from the water, along with other, slightly more graphic additional panels, which TMS may not deem appropriate for a daily newspaper with shrinking circulation. I’m hoping that we’ll also get a black and white toggle for the dailies, and supplements such as a full J. Straightedge Trustworthy tale. Just a thought.

Night-Gaunt49: Hey, I like your posts – especially on Prickly City! But your post about Texas constables, all I can say is “huh?” (Yeah, you might say, I didn’t get the drift).Straightedge Trustworthy: Why didn’t Team Tracy name him Fearless Fosdick? Or is there still a copyright on that one – same as the Popeye crossover earlier this year?.With no resolution to the Nitrates today, I suppose we have to revert to what was it Willy007 or Pequod77’s words yesterday, dead means dead! Time is moving on, and apparently, so has Richard!.Now to stir up the hornet’s nest:.I wonder whether Sparkle is going to run off with Vera Aldid, freeing up Junior to get back with Moon Maid!.(That ought to draw out tsull2121, for sure, for sure!).But all seriousness aside, the comic-within-a-comic that I’m waiting for is:.(drumroll, please).SAWDUST!.(just horsing around)

“Methinks Vera Alldid (We’re All Dead)…”*While I haven’t done the research on this, to my recollection the name was a Dutch/European father’s response when asked if he and the wife were going to have another child…as in No, vera all did. (we’re ’a all did) with “did” as in “done”.

With the depth of knowledge on this board I’m sure we’ll have an answer soon.

I was hoping for more Mysta!

Just recounted some strong sentiment from GoComics. Dissatisfaction over what was seen as careless in-completion in earlier stories (e.g. “Mike’s - the 10 last pages of the book MISSING”)

We all like our Dick Tracy gifts perfectly ‘wrapped up’. But presents don’t always come that way. it seems the Critics forgot a pile of similar ‘occurrences’ among the gems of creator Gould’s work ?

A little time to cast the ‘minds back’, they might’ve recalled the Shaky (1944/5) story, a bit of a ‘mirror image’ of the Nitrates tale - in many a way ! (?) See detail below !

Recall these :

1) Ribs Mocco (1931-33) Henchman of Big Boy, in 2 stories – including Ribs later hiring of Stooge Viller to do a smear on Tracy. Left to go free. A loose end there! Never brought to Justice in Gould’s time.2) Broadway Bates (1932) Out on bond (Aug. 1932) Bates with gang, on a train attempts to kill a vacationing Tracy. Outwitting them, Tracy leaves them ‘walking’ on the train tracks..Never seen again. No follow up. A loose end !(?) 3) Lee Ting (1938) Significant financier and overlord/boss of Stud Bronzen and Alien Chinese smuggling. Never apprehennded or brought to Justice. Another loose end ! 4) Scardol (1938) Stick-up man and Killer . In the end fell and was covered (not by Lake water) but ‘seemingly’ by tons of wet cement (?) Tracy wasn’t about to recover the body it was - " Call up the contractors – tell them to get a crew of men down here ! They’ll find a body under that pile." - Gosh. Another loose end !5) Prof. Emirc (1939) Inventor and Principle member of Srooge Viller’s gang that year. Party to 2 murders and assisted with attepted murder of Tracy, hanging him bound and gagged in a remote country-side well.At story end, there was no effort made to apprehend him. There was no follow up. He remains a free man. Another loose end ?

6) Shaky (1944/5) As noted, a ‘mirror image’ in ways of the Nitrates story . . .There’s a short car chase . . . It’s all happeninh in a Winter storm . . . both escape cars end up in the water . . . (Nitrates in mid Lake – Shakey’s at Wharf side)The car Shaky used is easily ‘visible’ and recovered by the police, as Shaky is trapped nearby. Tracy “assumes’” Shaky is dead, body washed away – by under currents. No further follow up effort made. Until its discovered by Breathless M some 4 months later !.

These all came easily to mind. I’m sure there are several more to be found – if we put some ‘thought’ to it.

Mike, Joe and Team are not “perfect”, and yes, we can all be a little *’picky*’ sometimes (I know I am ;-), but we got to be greatful they’ve returned Dick Tracy to a New Peak - no one ‘imagined’ - we’d ever see again !

As Ken in Ohio at the end -ever so carefully phrased it :" I enjoy your work; this is just expressing my opinion on how it might be a little better. Thanks for listening".

Guess we can all buy into that !

Time flies by like a month of Sunday Funnies. Happy Naw Ruz

Well, Fearless Fosdick ain’t around anymore. So……

looks like the guys have a case of writer’s block. Next up; Pogo

These guys are doing such a great job with this strip.

I thought Vera Alldid was dead. Bought the farm, got rubbed out, some thugs “disappeared” him, or something else. What’s up with this?

I pulled the strip off of the ilovecomix site. You can’t read it, as the scan is a little blurry. I assume Tracy is muttering his amazement at the folly of naming a boy Vera. The real gold is seeing Lizz and Sam cracking up. A light moment in between capturing criminals, sort of like Tracy and the kids today.

It probably doesn’t mean anything, but Vera Alldid used to have a distinctive style to his signature, with the “V” and the “A” almost touching, to form sort of an “X” – (see the image above that Stagger Lee posted) and the rest of the letters in small caps, not lower case styles, and a small flourish at the end of the second “A” in the word Vera.

Well, what I was referring to was not constables, per se; but as to where that thread came from in the first place!.After all the comments about Moon Maid and the Nitrates, Fearless Fosdick and Trustworthy, I saw “constables” and thought, “what the heck brought that up?”.Hence, “huh?”.Last, and certainly least: Trustworthy it is; Fearless Fosdick is out (though I would have loved that crossover)!.The question now is, now that Trustworthy has caught 88 Fleas,.(drumroll please).Will he take a bath?

At first, I thought maybe Sam had found one of Miles’ bones, but all we saw was the jacket and then a crowbar:

Those kids look like they plucked out of Bazooka Joe and his Gang!

Oh, in case you’re wondering if anyone appreciates it, I love puns. I enjoyed the joke about catching fleas and about the flea collar. (Although, apparently, it wasn’t actually the fleas that were arrested, but rather a dog going by the name “88 Fleas.” The dog does, at least, have the requisite fleas.)

Somehow this strip fills a huge gap that has always been missing in the funny pages

Two for two….well done.

“88 Fleas” deftly evokes Vera’s stints as dog-portrait artist (the Mr. Litter scheme referenced above by Pequod), and creator of minimalist comic-strips with flea-like dots as “characters” — “The Invisible Tribe” (see screenshot above submitted by Stagger Lee) and “Sawdust” (screenshot above also from Pequod).

Am I deluding myself, or were Alldid’s strips spoofing an actual comic strip that consisted of dirt-like dots and speech balloons? I’m recalling a single-panel feature, with the title “Flea Circus,” but Google isn’t turning up anything along those lines.

Does that ring any bells among the comics fans here? Is it just a false memory on my part?

Isn’t it a bit strange to have Little Orphan Annie mentioned as a comic strip now, only a few months after Oliver Warbucks made a cameo as a real person and personal friend of Dick Tracy?

Huh? Where’s sawdust?

See the kids out on the street with the funny papers

Annie, Sandy and Punjab caught up in brand new capers.

Serials take their sweet time to share a rousing story

Heroes fighting criminals for justice not for glory.

There’s a new one, freshly inked, open eyes wide to see

Crime fighter in a fedora: J. Straightedge Trustworthy.

Once hooked you just can’t get enough; I’d sail the seven seas

To read the classic story of the fate of 88 Fleas.

They say that he was one bad pooch, he could not be house-broken

The Milk Bone caper his Waterloo, look to see that I ain’t jokin’.

It was the bite that brought him down, he made his victim holler

No getaway on this day, Trustworthy got his collar.

One more pest, worse than the rest, of whom we must be rid

The author of J. Straightedge: Sparkle’s ex, Vera Alldid.