Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for December 14, 2010

Panel #2: Say that to Thick’s face! Speaking of faces, why does the sheriff wear a Ming the Merciless mustache?

Panel #3: What happened to the zipper over Mordred’s mouth? What’s with the chain that ends at the edge of his mask? But at least someone remembered to fasten his seat belt.

Something tells me this psycho is not going to stay fastened in for long! Good ole Dick is going to need some luck.

How long will they sit in Squaresville, stuck in a timewarp?

You’ve chained and strapped And put a mask over his curly hair Tracy are you contemplating Taking Dr. Mordred out somewhere The shadows of the late fall Tells me the clock is running down Oh Tracy Your nothing but a clown It’s Locher’s fault we’re treated to this repetitious bore If you listen closely You can even hear him snore It’s only too true that Tracy’s not the man he used to be Oh Tracy Your behaving so pathetically It’s hard to read this strip Without beginning to despise You get the feeling that Locher no longer even tries Oh Tracy How far you’ve fallen down.

Thank you all, for your very kind comments, You are far to kind.

Is this strip going into reruns already?

I’ll bet he has the “one touch can opener” under all that armor.

I think you’re right, Leaky.

Another good one WW.

Your words, wndrwrthg, make me see why Dr Mordred is so hated and despised.

It was HE who started that old crazy Asian war!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMAIsqvTh7g

I am going to guess, and I might be a wrong, but I bet you that something is going to happen to keep Tracy from getting to his destination… Maybe something like, 2 cars with flat tires… No, wait! 4 CARS WITH FLAT TIRES! 4 cars with flat tires blocking the road. How could I predict something so specific as that? Call it a wild hunch…

Mordred looks kind of down… Maybe he’s depressed that he is in this comic strip, wondering, perhaps, where it all went wrong.

Why would Locher redraw the whole scenario over again from different angles and slightly different dialogue? I mean seriously. What is he thinking?

I don’t know how the continuity screw-up happened, but even money says it involved the phrase “I dare you …”

mgreenhorn, I’m going to go beyond your hunch:

Tracy’s car will be stopped by 4 cars with flat tires, but rather than just drive around them, Tracy will suddenly find himself back when he was loading Mordred…and will start his journey again!

Don’t bank on there being 4 cars with flat tires the way storylines tend to change around here

I think every night, about midnight, the Sheriff changes uniforms so he can introduce himself to Thick when I get up in the morning. Meanwhile, Dr. Mordred is being subjected to punishment that goes way beyond his constitutional rights. Can you imagine sitting in the backseat with Thick doin’ his thing?

“I confess,” the doc yells. “Gimme the needle; QUICK! I can’t stand this anymore. I’m trapped in a DO-LOOP!”

Those of you predicting several cars with flat tires blocking the road are only partially right. Though that will be the case, it will not be the same number of cars as before. We’re in Locherville, remember? Last time it was four cars, this time it will be three. Or five. Or it’ll be a jack-knifed big rig.

I say again, bad guy alert !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Compare the “chains” in today’s strip (crossed over the left shoulder) to those in Sunday’s strip (parallel over left shoulder), and you realize… THEY AREN’T CHAINS AT ALL! They’re some kind of organic life-form–maybe snakes with a chain pattern in their scales–and they’re free to move all over Doctor Badguy. Maybe that’s why the strip seems to have done a restart this week–one of the snakes bit Macy on Friday, and now he’s going into hallucinations and flashbacks as the venom destroys (what’s left of) his brain. The remainder of this arc will be an extended acid trip, ending in the newsroom of the Flash on January 2…

The link Neonleon posted for Sunday previews yesterday works, but the link LudwigVonDrake posted for dailies doesn’t work for me.

-Cougar :{)

It’s astounding, time is fleeting Madness takes its toll But listen closely, not for very much longer I’ve got to keep control

I remember doing the Time Warp Drinking those moments when The blackness would hit me and the void would be calling Let’s do the time warp again… Let’s do the time warp again!

It’s just a jump to the left And then a step to the right With your hands on your hips You bring your knees in tight But it’s the pelvic thrust that really drives you insane, Let’s do the Time Warp again!

It’s so dreamy, oh fantasy free me So you can’t see me, no not at all In another dimension, with voyeuristic intention Well-secluded, I see all With a bit of a mind flip You’re there in the time slip And nothing can ever be the same You’re spaced out on sensation, like you’re under sedation Let’s do the Time Warp again!

Well I was walking down the street just a-having a think When a snake of a guy gave me an evil wink He shook me up, he took me by surprise He had a pickup truck and the devil’s eyes. He stared at me and I felt a change Time meant nothing, never would again Let’s do the Time Warp again!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ff0cOPSpVA

-Cougar :{)

“They say we’re young and we don’t know…”

thanks ww.

for that special someone on your holiday shopping list: http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=gimp+mask

This whole story has four flat tires.

I don’t remember any of the Village People wearing a turd on his hat

Dr. Mordred has a PhD in physics. This arc is what happened after he fed catnip to Schroedinger’s cat. Threw a monkey wrench into quantum mechanics, that one.

I thought he had a PhD in horribleness. No, that doesn’t work, does it?

“Cheer up, Mordred, give me a smile. What happened to the smile I used to know…”

Ooh! Ooh! CougerAllen; “He picked me up, he took me by surprise, He had chains and a gimp mask over his eyes.”

So here I thought maybe the pace was beginning to pick up but NO, they apparently ran last week’s strips a week early, since after being delayed in traffic Tracy is now back to picking up the prisoner.

What’s funny is that running strips out of sequence ought to make a difference in the story. But no…actually the comparison to Groundhog Day makes it more entertaining.

“Dr. Mordred” is really Billy Pilgrim, and he’s now dragging Thick in his wake. With luck Thick will escape the chronosynclastic infundibula during a pass through Dresden.

What if in a plot twist, it turned out that Dick had been put under hallucinatory drugs by Dr. Mordred, while the good Doc prepared to perform nefarious experiments on the clueless detective? And Dick was imagining all of this? Dick will wake up five weeks from now, after we have repeated this same story sequence just as many times, and the two stooges (that guy with the weird chin and his lady friend) will break into Mordred’s lair and save the day. And what if all these cops Dick keeps meeting up with turn out to be Mordred’s goons?

Also who cares to guess how Locher will incorporate some kind of Christmas pun or joke into the dialogue:

“Mordred’s heart is like a hardened lump of Christmas coal…”

(remember the “Halloween witch” comment in the last story arc… maybe his wife did look like a witch, yes, but why specifically a Halloween witch?)

Also is may be that the reason Mordred looks down in panel 3 is because of all the verbal abuse he is being put through. “Human debris”, “Psycho”, etc. etc. Even pyschotic serial killers have feelings!

BillThompson said: I don’t know how the continuity screw-up happened, but even money says it involved the phrase “I dare you …”

LOL

I think the only reason the Naperville police keep Dick around is to use him as bait. Dick lures the villain out of hiding and then the professionals move in.

Also this Dick sort of reminds me a certain Fearless Fosdick, except Fearless knows how to use a gun.

ouch ouch ouch

mgreenhorn, there’s only one thing wrong with your plot-twist theory: you can’t call it a “nefarious” experiment when Thick is the guinea pig. It’s more of a public-service experiment, or an act of humanity, because any experiment is bound to improve him. “Thick, this is your brain. This is a piledriver. This is your brain under a piledriver.”

Don’t you get it ? Last week , it was a decoy ! How many actors are impersonating Thick ? We will never know .

Simon, where are you? We need you to explain what is happening and why it is so exhilerating!

Rene_Simard, we aren’t seeing any Tracy decoys. That’s the genuine Thick. Not even the most versatile actor could capture his stupidity with such perfection.

Hey everyone - Chill Out a bit!!!!

Everything goes into re-runs in December because of Christmas.

But if this story (if you can call it one) is still going on when we reach “Groundhog Day”, then there will be real trouble.

Anyone have Bill Murray’s phone number???

i totally thought that that was the cop who stopped them because of the flat tires. i never would have noticed the continuity issues if it weren’t for the comments