Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for December 11, 2021

Good morning™, everybody!

Blackjack used those exact words, “America’s Top Cop,” when he explained his infatuation with Dick Tracy back in 2012: https://www.gocomics.com/dicktracy/2012/03/24

Back then, his ultimate wish was to meet Dick Tracy in person. When he went to jail the last time, Tracy promised to take care of Blackjack’s extensive collection of Tracy memorabilia. I wonder what Blackjack thinks of Tracy now that his collection has been stolen.

The Gould Library (named after the founder of this strip, of course) is hosting an exhibit about Dick Tracy that is not unlike the Superman exhibit that the Cleveland Public Library put on after Mike Curtis donated his collection of about 17,000 Superman items. Here is the library’s page about that exhibit:

https://cpl.org/superman/

A few of the items and some commentary about some of the more unusual ones are here:

https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2016/06/superman_collection_arrives_wi.html

Good morning™, disagreeable diverted top cops !

Everybody’s on board except the guy who’s on a hot case. So mayor what’s her face is in league with Ace and by diverting Tracy from the investigation hopes to derail it ?

Now that we’ve seen that Mayor Armstrong’s message has nothing to do with the Second Ace of Spades (and is likely to tie in with the previously unrelated Blackjack subplot), it appears we’ve reached the start of a new story. When I’ve decided a new story’s started, I do a list of every Tracy story on GoComics. Unfortunately, soon after I started doing this GC imposed a stupid, asinine character limit of only 2000 characters which includes every letter, space, punctuation, & html, which means I have to do this over several posts. I’ll do my initial introduction in this post and start the list in the next one, because otherwise, I can’t even get past the second year.

My notes are fairly simple. Just my name for the story (usually the name of the main villain or villains, unless they just aren’t the emphasis) followed by the dates the story began and ended. If someone was the main villain for more than one story, I add a “II” and so on to emphasize this. If more than one villain from a past story are in the same story committing major crimes, I include them altogether. Finally, for the 4 cases of more than one villain with the same name (Chameleon, Mr. Crime, Shaky, the Ace of Spades) I add, “The Second” in front of their names.

Minit Mysteries Note: at the request of people who wanted to see these listed here, I’ve decided to make a separate post for them to keep the listing of Mike Curtis stories in as few posts as possible.

At the start of the GoComics archive, the writer was the late Mike Kilian. Personally, I like his work on Tracy and think he’s very underrated. At the very least, he knew how to tell a story in the daily strip format where every day, something happens that moves the story along, a quality his successor sorely lacked. I recommend anyone here who hasn’t read these stories to check them out.

TBC cuz GC decided to suck now

Naming the library after his creator. Brilliant.

About Moi?

They prepared an exhibition about Tracy, without ever consulting with him in the weeks/months of planning it takes to mount an exhibition? Is grandfather Tracy one of those duffers to doesn’t know now to check his email?

Why I’m still reading this strip

Dick, get ready for a retrospective, like it or not!

I’ve noticed that since Shelley took over that the woman are depicted in with their own individual style and identity, not just a simply drawn female character. Including input that only a woman would know, like the bra comment two days ago.

I do wonder if the Mayor has given any thought to this. Odds are that Tracy says no, she will lean on Chief Patton to twist his arm. Shows dumbness on the library’s part not to consult Tracy first.

I’d like to know the technology that displays whatever or whomever they happen to be discussing on the monitors. Is it Alexa? Google? The Meta?

….so anyway, D.T. hasn’t agreed to this….yet! Could it be he’s looking to see a ’lil dough-ray-me wafting in his bank accounts direction? Just sayin…….

Exhibitions from Tracy’s famous cases….terrific idea…I trust that these items will be insured and that security guards are going to be around. When media in airs the story, all the villains or their descendants Tracy ever encountered will be plotting to steal some of it.

Didn’t Madam Mayor’s timing bring on Miss Rose to do an feature on Tracy?

Is the guy in panel three based on Chester Gould? It looks somewhat like a young version of him but with grey hair:

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7064/1685/400/gouldphoto.jpg

Mayor Armstrong seems to a less flattering portrayal of the late Jane Byrne, the one term Mayor of Chicago

Agree with Ray and others, that the story appears to have run out of steam and, apparently, we’re going to have to sit through some more talking heads and nostalgia until Christmas.

Don’t know what it is, but it seems that about all comics I am following these days are just plain running out of gas.

The answer, my friend, is breaking in the wind…

I agree with those that have already been mentioned that Blackjack will be part of the story, and we will find out who stole his Tracy memorabilia.

1-DT: FINALLY! I’ve been going through Automated Attendant questions for two hours now! Our Internet is frozen on a picture of the Gould Library! What’s going on?!? Wait…are you really alive?

2-COMCAST HELP DESK PERSON: As alive as a person can be working 19 hour days in a godforsaken country making 75 cents an hour where most people have only a marginal command of the English language. May I have your name, last 4 digits of your social security number and account information and other data that you’ve provided 9 or 10 times already and for our sadistic pleasure never gets passed along…

3-… hee hee! He’s cussing up a storm!

MANAGER: String him along until he finally asks to speak to a manager and after telling him to hold, hang up!

COMCAST HELP DESK PERSON: I KNOW! I’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR YEARS! Oh. Excuse me sir. Yes, hang on. Transferring you now…

BOTH: HA HA HA!!!!

However this turns out, I do like the design of the poster – Tracy’s profile in silhouette against a blow-up of a fingerprint.

Looks like it will be an excuse for Team Tracy to show they can draw long-dead original Gould characters, primarily because they can’t think up any of their own.

Unlike some, I prefer to give a new story at least a little rope before I drop the trapdoor….

It should probably be “famous.” Infamous means having an exceedingly bad reputation; notorious.

December 7th was a day of infamy – infamous.

Mayor Armstrong’s attempt to be diplomatic and her greenlighting an exhibit called “America’s Top Cop” at the Gould Library may be running onto the rocks of Tracy’s recalcitrance. Since “everyone’s agreed” already, meaning everyone who counts, starting with Armstrong herself, if Tracy himself were to be a bit more diplomatic, he’d take a chill pill and go with the idea. The exhibit is going to happen anyway. And as the mayor noted, the timing is good, after the favorable publicity garnered by the big raid on the Apparatus gang that captured numerous small fry and maybe a few higher-ups….

And the art is good, with well balanced flow from panel to panel with the mayor’s flunky as a nice end-point (at first I thought hie might be a disguised nod to Mike, but in light of the extensive discussion above of who he might be, I’m tanking that thought).

Would they need Tracy’s permission to stage this exhibit? Wouldn’t the memorabilia be owned by the city, seeing as how he’s a municipal employee who collected it during the course of his official duties? & Tracy’s modesty seems a little forced, given that he recently gave an interview to Briar Rose (under false pretenses, to be sure) celebrating his anniversary. Just wondering.

Wait, is that Mary Worth?

I wish the Dick Tracy museum was still in Woodstock, Illinois.