Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for October 04, 2017

Good morning all!

Wonder if she and Honeymoon will become friends.

There’s a definite sense here that we’ve diverged into an alternate reality: It’s amazing enough that Mr. Bribery survived his demise, but that we was putting (… presumably?) Ugly Christine’s hitherto-unmentioned daughter through finishing school off-camera for all of these years feels a bit of a stretch.

Surely the “Smoking Cat” is next up on the revival list.

By the way …

This isn’t the thing I’d caught – or at least believed I’d caught – a “Heads-Up” about back in July …

… though if this ends up being another full week of shocking cutaways, that thing might turn up any minute now.

Crystal, just a typical American Girl

Called mean names by her Uncle but she won’t back down

They try to make her feel like a refugee

She smiles and tells them, “stop dragging my heart around”

The pain she hides makes her feel like it’s the end of the line

And all her joy is simply free falling.

While Bribery is a popular villain, like the Nitrates, am I alone in hoping that the lot of them are finally finished off at the end of their arcs? Wonderful as these villains are, that they keep coming back from – whatever it is they come back from – it’s just not Gouldian.

Though I wish they had brought back the ORIGINAL Moon Maid from the dead.

OH. MY. GOD.

Good to see our favourite villain again…I needed a good stomach churn.

I myself enjoy the return of the cast of regular villains! You can’t keep a good villain down and I’m sure that Gould later regretted killing off some of the more famous ones such as Flattop and The Brow.

The whole point of Gould’s Dick Tracy was that criminals do not succeed – they either are killed or sent off to prison for very, very long times. I believe that is why it was very, very rare for Gould to bring back an old villain, and when he did, it was certain the villain would not last through a second appearance. (Shoulders killed on camera with no ambiguity, Mumbles likewise.) In the early 70s he brought an old, feeble Mole out of prison, and subsequent writers have rehabilitated him. (It was also subsequent writers who dreamed up outlandish ways to bring Mumbles, BB Eyes and Bribery back from what had been obvious deaths.) Gould’s storytelling was very linear; his cast of regular characters were Tracy and his associates, but the stories just kept going from one thing to the next. When the powers that be instructed Collins and Fletcher to recycle as many old villains as possible (I recently read that’s what happened upon Gould’s retirement) they were breaking tradition in a big way. Whatever their reasons may have been, it is clear that they did not “get” Gould’s original vision for the strip.

Of course, Gould himself had changes in his vision for the strip over the years, but they usually flowed naturally and gradually out of the narrative itself. Until the “moon period.” I just read (for the first time) the story immediately preceding the introduction of Moon Maid. It started out as a very good Tracy story, with some excellent depictions of detective work, plus the famous introduction of heart transplant surgery several years before that ever happened in real life, and a Tracy-in-peril sequence. It felt like there were at least a few weeks left in the story, as there was a body missing and motives to be explored. There is a close-up of Tracy saying “I can hardly wait to search Olga’s laboratory and clinic.” But that never happened. Suddenly Gould wrapped it up with an out-of-the-blue, “where did that come from” ending. He actually has Tracy look directly at the readers and say “(This event) really saved us a lot of time.” The very next panel has Lizz reminding him to return a call from Diet Smith which we knew nothing about, and Bang, we’re in to the Moon Maid story. It’s as if Gould had this brewing in his mind, and he decided he just couldn’t wait! I was very interested to see that.

I think those are supposed to be her nostrils, but it looks like they’re her eyes, and she has no nose.

I like the fact that her uncle CALLS her “Ugly Crystal.”

Well, well, well. My favorite DT villian is back again.I guess the writers could not directly revive Ugly Christine (who fell to her death down a factory smokestack and burned up) but this is the “next best thing”. Ugly Christine “reborn” through her daughter (a daughter who was never mentioned during the original series in ‘65-’66) only with blonde instead of black hair.

Well! the cast is complete then. Bribery, Manny, and Ugly Christine.

I haven’t checked, but wasn’t UC a brunette in the original strips?

I’ve lost count of the arcs that were started, generated interest from the Peanut Gallery, and left hanging. At the risk of disagreeing with some of my colleagues here, I would rather see a story finished and then move on to the next one. But that’s my opinion.

I wonder if her Finishing School is anything like the ones Gail Carriger writes about. Where you learn to finish, as in kill.

Looking at Ugly Crystal, I have to wonder if perhaps her father is Beetle Bailey.

While I’m appreciative and look forward to my daily Tracy fix, the magpie in me would love to see a case solved by some shrewd, savvy detective skills honed by our hero rather than a convenient “I’m worried about my friend, who is going to meet/do such and such…” placing Tracy in the right place and time.

Ugly Christine was always a favorite of mine, I was happy to have seen her in pictures since new Team Tracy came on board. I am thrilled to see Ugly Crystal. Kudos to Joe and Mike for this.

Ugly Christine,now Ugly Crystal!…..What next?!

Great as it is to finally see some first-class villains in the strip after what seems like ages, couldn’t Joe & Mike wrap up the evident climax of the Public Domain/Sprockets storyline first? It’s like they suffer from ADD or something.

A Rant:

Dance with the one what brought you here!

Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy was about straight-forward police work, catching some fairly ordinary villains, as well as an ever-increasing Rogues Gallery of more bizarre villains (some connected with the WW II enemies of America, in a timely fashion). The need or desire for more intricate story-telling, involving numerous sub-plots, intertwined arcs, and “but meanwhile…” cutaways is perhaps a Zeitgeist thing, as is the fascination with resurrecting or reincarnating past foes or friends (as in cinema’s total dependence on “franchise” films and re-makes). Sometimes it is nice, and fun, to see a familiar face in new surroundings, as with the rehabilitated Mole. But I find the constant changes of direction more generally to be annoying rather than grabbing. It’s hard enough to follow and keep in mind a plot in daily three-panel sequences without loosing the thread to spend a week suddenly looking at something else, then returning to the former line of development….

Stop reading if you’ve heard this.“Why not Minot (North Dakota)?”“Freezin’s the reason.”

I was thinking about something earlier today but never wrote it here. My guess as to the location of today’s strip is Switzerland. We’ve been told that Mr. Bribery is somewhere in Europe, and the French-speaking part of Switzerland is the most famous place for finishing schools, or was. Diana, who later became the Princess of Wales when she married Prince Charles, attended one of the several Swiss finishing schools that existed at the time. I believe that there is only one still operating now.

“Uncle Butt-chin! See? See? How do you like it!?”