Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for October 04, 2019

It appears that the years have not been kind to her.

Good morning™, déjà viewers!

I guess she needs money for cigarettes and beer. (Yes, the cigarette depiction problem is still there and I don’t suppose it’s ever going away. I wish it wasn’t so distracting.)

Ug…reminds me of a meth user. Thank god I never got into that poison.

The greatest mystery that our hero Dick Tracy has to solve is that why is everyone smoking by lighting the filter side of a cigarette?!

Dick Tracy… Brought to you by Big Tobacco!

Just out of idle interest, why does it appear that everyone lights the filter end of their cancerstick?

Good morning™, loser ex moms !

If this is a ghetto scene it is done too politely. She should be depicted as living in a scummy semi dilapidated trailer.

The fridge looks ancient.

Things I learn from Dick Tracy:

1) Bad guys smoke.

2) They smoke plastic instead of tobacco.

Cigs, can beer, tattoo — got the visual “Bad’un” cliche trifecta going on here. White tank undershirt (is it still called a “wifebeater” if a woman’s wearing it?) and the obligatory scowl are bonus cliches.

Any port in a storm

Hmmm…..unless everyone smokes filters in the Tracyverse, aren’t we seeing a familial oddball connection in action here?

Initially, I thought Frisk and Howell both smoking from the filter end meant they were somehow related. That seems unlikely now, but its got to mean something. For one thing, there is a whole lot of smoking going on here between these four characters. Far more than for it to just be random.

1- BEERLEXA DEVICE: Phone madam. Shall I tell them you’re hung over again? JACKIE: SHADDUP BEERLEXA. I got it.

2-JACKIE: I’ll pay ya next week.

DAN: Wait Jackie. This is Dan. Ya got any menthols…

3-…Rosey has a bad headache from a couple nails in her head [Editor’s Note: see yesterday’s strip] and she’s too proud to ask you for help.

JACKIE: Yeah. She always held it against me that I got the family skinny genes. Fine. I could let you hold a few packs for a while but I think you’d be better off if you just finished pounding those nails in. How’d they get there anyway?

DAN: I suspect she thought they’d give her the same powers as those moon maiden gals. Or make her look as cute as them at least.

JACKIE: Fat chance! HA! That one works in two ways. Get it?

DAN: Yeah…sure…funny. I’ll be over later to get those menthols…

Surely, the GoComics colorist has to have seen at least one cigarette butt while walking across a store parking lot somewhere, in which case he or she would know that it is the white end that still smolders, not the brown end. This has to be deliberate. It reminds me of Chester Gould’s policy of showing us a new villain. He would often spend the first couple of weeks emphasizing the specific quirks of the new character. Only here it’s several people. The only connection they have, as far as we know, is this baby selling racket.

Except that the colorist here doesn’t confer with the original artist (Joe) or the writer (Mike). How can a professional colorist be that uninformed about the world around them? At least it probably means that he oe she doesn’t smoke, which is a good thing.

We are like detectives ourselves here; is this a clue, a red herring or a meaningless oddity?

Stereotypical portrayal of Frisk’s mother.

Why are all the cigs lit at the filter end?

She has Betty Davis eyes!

They gotta be vaping, or maybe this is a device to keep readers interested in this snail ish story

Looks like everybody’s smoking their cigarettes filter-first.

Some variation of “crust-first?”

Cigarettes smoked backwards, phone appears to be face-down… why isn’t the beer can upside-down?

One can see the family resemblance between Frieda Frisk and her mother, though mom looks rather the worse for wear. And she is easily way too ready to do Clair Howell’s dirty work….

You know you’re a bad ass hombre you smoke from the filters up.

again smoking the wrong end?

The cigarette-tipped filters remind me of a beaut I saw in the early days of color daily strips — usually a larger newspaper with a staffer or two dedicated to the comics page would have its own staffer handle the coloring. In this case (I think it was in the Plain Dealer of Cleveland, which to be fair in those days had a rep for being very friendly to cartoons, arts and the local arts scene) the joke was that “Nancy” was trying to select her clothes for the day, from a closet full of identical outfits (she wore the same blouse, sweater vest and skirt every day and the strip was known for its sometimes self-referential visual surrealism before Gilchrist turned it into just another undifferentiated kiddie strip). The local colorist, not knowing any of this, colored each of the outfits differently, and there went the gag.

Mike Curtis: You used to read the comments here. For Pete’s sake, can you clarify this? Is this just some dumb screw-up, or is it part of the story? or will you be giving something away if you answer this? Thanks.

HAPPY 88th BIRTHDAY DICK!

She didn’t learn her lesson after her first tribal tattoo?