Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for November 19, 2010

Panel 3:

PANEL-PANNER’S CRIMESTOPPER

Show potential thieves you mean business.

Use a loaded gun as a cash paperweight.

“When it comes to money, there’s always a question mark.”

Especially US money compared to Chinese currency.

Bigger question mark: The equity in your house.

So they ripped the bill out of Spacy’s hand, ran it to the lab and have the results faster than Spacy could forget that he is supposed to be able to use his gun as a cop.

I hope Locher has his passport with him, because if he digs this hole any deeper he’ll come out in Red China.

Look at this:

http://www.gocomics.com/dicktracy/2010/09/20

That’s right. The counterfeit money came from the bank.

A bank is supposed to make certain that it has genuine currency. That includes forty-year-old notes that they obtained from collectors. If D’umbfounded got the money from a bank, then he had a reasonable expectation that it was genuine. That gives him a good defense if he’s charged with passing counterfeit money. As for a charge of counterfeiting, forget it! Not unless they catch D’ingdong with a printing press.

Oh, and they ran the thousand dollar bill through Ming the Merciless’ Atomo Death Ray? When did they do that? And if it’s so hard for these alleged professional cops to spot a fake banknote, they’d better not claim that D’booby should have known.

Well yea since $1,000 bills haven’t been in regular circulation since 1969.

Always a ? with money? Such as how can I get somemore?

Let’s follow Locher’s “logic” or realistic depiction of law and order.

From what has been said, it’s implied Thick could keep the money if it wasn’t evidence or counterfeit.

Anyway, wouldn’t a veteran law-enforcement officer like Thick know how important appearances are when you’re a public servant?

The real Dick Tracy is dead. This character is a clown clone.

Look at how that Walther is positioned atop the currency. How does it keep from falling off?

BillThompson said:

“Look at how that Walther is positioned atop the currency. How does it keep from falling off?”

Locher Logic.

Some time back I proposed the idea that 3D might be charged with counterfeiting, since 1K bills haven’t been issued in years. I meant this as a joke. I suspect Locher is reading these comments and actually using some of our ideas.

@barticle35: Your joke, Locher’s inspiration. And it still remains as a joke.

But…there was a whole digression about how 3D withdrew a bunch of $1000 bills. This writing is more at odds with itself than anything I’ve seen written by anyone older than three.

The crime lab’s alien device makes another appearance in panel one! But why does the bill it’s hovering over contain an image of a white fish on a black background?

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Testicle Chin looks so disappointed that the money is counterfeit. Did he sneak onto the crime scene and grab some “evidence” for himself? And what happened to the one side of his mouth?

You know, Im not at all concerned about the various plot holes here. Not the question of why did the bank have counterfeit money, no. Im wondering why Locher is dragging this out so much. I honestly cant believe he just wasted another day to tell everyone what they already knew. davidf42 called it 18 hours ago but was a day off. Since Locher wants to torture everyone, lets see how long he can drag this out. What other facts will he mess up? What other things will he repeat a million times to everyone? And with all this repetition how in the World does he keep messing things up?

This whole arc is just like “Twilight.” The story is slow and the characters are annoying, and you really wish a vampire would show up.

Hey, no way. That’s not a question mark. That’s a gun.

And why do I have the song “96 Tears” stuck in my head?

Woo-Hoo! I love when I guess blindly on something and I’m right!!!

Please let the rubbish about counterfeit money be the swan song to this arc. Please let Locher declare a victory and walk away from it. Please give us a panel tomorrow that foreshadows a different arc. It will be garbage but at least it won’t be this garbage.

barticle35, I don’t think Locher got the counterfeiting idea from your comment, any more than he got the homeless-are-undercover-cops idea from what I said on Columbus Day. I don’t think Locher would recognize an idea if it went skinnydipping in his inkwell.

THIS IS JUST SOOOOOO STUPID!!!

I’m through ranting now…

OK, so here’s the real story. Triple D withdrew real $1000 bills from the bank so he could pass the forged bills off and pretend that he was being a philanthropist, all the while stashing the real bills for his planned getaway with Locher at the end of the year to a Caribbean island.

That’s the exact same counterfeit bill examiner I have!

Boy, if that poor bullock ever finds out he was bandying hundreds of pounds of counterfeit money all over town in that bullock cart is he going to be mad!

-Cougar :{)

Congrats, Ludwig! That is, unless you have been using Sydney’s look-ahead glass! Tomorrow’s installment will go something like this:

Thick - “Sam, you’re a dodo. The Police Manual says right here ‘proper procedure for handling counterfeit money is to take it down to the bank and trade it in for twenties.’ THAT’S the way we seasoned professional cops do

Wait-wait-wait–they ran Macy’s ONE thousand-dollar bill through the Atomic Drill Press, and by Panel Three it’s become a stack of at least fifty?! Oh, no: they’ve created the self-reproducing Killer Zombie Cash! Next week the stack o’ bills sprouts legs, walks into the city and starts eating the brains of homeless people!!

Nah. Somehow that seems too… normal… for the Locherverse.

Rightwingmoron, if this arc resembles a TZ episode it’s “Shadow Play.” That’s the one where a prosecutor discovers that he’s really a character in a nightmare. The nightmare belongs to the man he’s condemned to death, and the dream takes the form of a rapid, incoherent trial and trip to death row.

This whole arc has that same weird vibe. Events happen with the logic of a nightmare. Certain events get passed over while others receive emphasis. There’s intense emotionality. Maybe the next surprise is to have Rod Serling pop up and tell Thick he’s arrested an innocent man.

Maybe Locher’s nightmare is caused by the subconscious realization that he’s a hack, and his real nightmare consists in having him churn out endless garbage while his readers offer intelligent, withering critiques of his efforts. Locher may be agonizing over every word written here, in which case I hope he wakes up with a record-setting hangover.

Finally, a crime in this stupid story arc.

If Locher is mercifully retiring at the end of the year, then he obviously can’t begin a new story, since it takes him half a year to tell a story that any decent comic artist could do in a couple of weeks.

All he can do is drag this one out by adding six weeks of contradictions to it.

hah i just got that 96 tears reference – good one.

i’m trying to figure out how and why a stack of money has mysteriously appeared with a gun on top. what does it all mean…oh wait never mind – this is indeed the Twilight Zone, but not one of the better episodes.

As predicted - by the fans (?) here…

There’s an idea: have the subscribers write the storylines! I much rather see an arc by Bill Thompson, Panel Panner, Sydney Phillips, Wndrwrthg and others. Then Simon P can praise you guys and get it right.

2 days ago, the bill was attached to Thick’s velcro fingers. How did it get to the lab and back so soon, but this story line take so long? Is there adrenaline in the lab we can shoot up this arc?

Rightwingmoron, don’t pollute my Iowa cornfields with Locher; they already have a higher grade of…umm…animal manure for fertilizer.

Bill Thompson, Weren’t all banks in trouble printing their own cash before they received their TARP bailout money? Hmmm….

When it comes to money there is always a ? mark.

Yes, how did wall street manage to lose all my money and then receive a bailout and now I am “HOMELESS” lol!!!

OK - the money is fake, but didn’t triple d withdraw money from the bank. Where is that money.

Surely, when his wife told Tracy that, wouldn’t you think that Tracy would have checked with the bank to see if triple D did actually did take out that much money.

He was caught with counterfeit money that he was giving away. How did the people who he gave money to manage deposit it into their bank accounts. The banks would have spotted it right away.

So they should have been looking for a Homeless person handing out fake money. earlier in the story. Also, in the first panel they show this huge machine checking the $1,000 bill. My gas station has a scanner that they use to verify real money and results take about 3 seconds.

Discovering that phony $1000 bill suddenly makes the police department’s purchase of a $1.5 million electron microscope all worthwhile!

It should have been obvious that the stack of money under the pistol paperweight is counterfeit without even having to run it under the electron microscope… Real money doesn’t have dollar signs on it!

(Yes, I realize that finding yet another flaw in this drivel pretty much amounts to blue on black, tears on a river, etc. Yeesh.)

MisngNOLA got it right. Just one problem - it makes sense. They need to look for the real money. Maybe Sue Doko has it. Early on, D-cubed was passing or receiving something from a hand that looked female. I think one of the boys who received a $1000 bill brought it in and the police kept it fro inspection. And the police may have picked up some of those bills that were flying around when D’Cube was fleeing. Locher can’t show everything little thing for us nit-pickers. That would make each story arc that much longer. IMO, its those federal agents who should be wrapping up this storyline.

Even better for summarizing would be wonder warthog. Where are you today??

tsouthworth, about the only thing many banks weren’t doing was printing their own Federal Reserve notes. Working from memory here, but banks stopped printing their own notes with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1912. Banks notes technically were not money; they were guarantees that a local bank held the actual gold or silver in its vaults, and were often used as the equivalent of cash. I will restrain myself from a further push of my history button.

marvee, you’re right about every nit-picking detail. But Locher should try to hit the high points. About the only thing to be said in his defense is that he’s limited by the large type font used in the dialog ballloons. But if he would cut out the repetition, he could manage it. Maybe this is where he brings in Sue Doko and the Feds–but he should have done that months ago. Actually he should have sat down before he began this arc and done an outline, instead of winging it.

Perhaps D-cubed will return and reveal that his “plan” was to spread despair by giving counterfeit money to good Samaritans. Or to destabilize the economy by putting a huge amount of large-denomination counterfeits in circulation.

Yeah, I’m still trying to make sense of this confusion. And those ideas have flaws in them–but that hasn’t stopped Locher yet.

Funny money being passed on the street By someone who wasn’t exactly discreet To hide his identity he became a homeless bum All the while giving thousand dollars bills to some Giving out money that long has been retired And making it counterfeit is something not to be desired One hundred million from the bank taken out in cash In thousand dollar bills that makes one hell of a stash This entire arc has been positively phantasmagorical Some even say that it might be allegorical But read into it whatever you will In the final analysis it’s nothing but swill.

Watch Sue Doko turn out to be a counterfeiter and she’ll have all of 3D’s millions. It would make sense in this strip - which is saying something.

The machine LOOKS impressive, but all that happens is a little yellow marker pops out at the bottom and draws a mark on the bill. Price tag to taxpayers? Twelve million.