Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for September 23, 2009

Ack, ack, ack! I cannot believe this bleeep story has taken ten weeks to unfold, and that the unfolding has been all dialog, no action and not even very interesting art. Frowny Tracy is a new twist, but I’d be frowning too if my comic strip were this bad.

Ho hum, y a w n…….

How is Tracy supposed to hand over his gun without reaching for it? Telekinesis?

Smoking or smoldering them out ?

Soooo, you get released early if you return the money that you made out of illegal weapon dealings? Wow - all criminals must move to the DT country because as soon as you get caught you just return your earnings up to date and then continue with your business.

I don’t know why, but to my surprise the story line has actually gotten worse!

A former captain of industry wouldn’t use words like “squealed” and “copper,” and he can’t have picked up those terms in prison, because criminals don’t talk like that either.

Why is this clown helping to violate his 5th ammendment rights in front of a tentful of cops, a fed, and the entire Naperville SWAT Team? Chances are that Tracy is too dumb to “smoke him out” and they’d all go home for the evening. This guy might just be Tracy’s intellectual equal!

I’ve stayed out of the “Locher must go!” debates up to now, but seriously, something has to be done here. I can’t imagine a detective this bad getting to be a detective in the first place much less being allowed to keep his job.

At least the story’s moving forward. It might be going to Mount Stupidity from Contrived Plotville and back again, but at least it’s moving!

I can’t believe I’m about to spontaniously combust with joy because the plot’s going somewhere - probably to kindergarten - but still!

What would make this really exciting now would be for Dick Tracy to get critically wounded, then fight for his life by strangling visions in his dream… like his current writer for example

And Louise was killed because……?

Sydney,

Thanks for the valuable information you provided. Something I really enjoy about your posts is the fact that you usually add relevant numbers and references that help very accurately to understand the point.

I am not surprised about the the 86% rejection since the beginning of the Killian period (that I have not read) - but I had no idea it was such a BIG drop in readership.

As you say, “You CAN help a man who has made a wrong turn and wants better. You CAN’T help someone who is determined, stubornly, to continue doing the same NONSENSE and would rather go down in FLAMES (the whole world in wrong) as HE is right !” - and I agree absolutely!

However, I think the problem is that he is mostly an artist (probably feeling old and tired now) and you need a certain mind framework to plan and strucuture a story. Jim Brozman arrival has even worsened the situation, as I think the art is now embarassingly bad.

Thank you for the information about the “Killian years” - I really had no idea so, the disappearence of the classic grotesques was his idea… and probably the removal of the “chase sequence” started paving the way to the non-action of today’s strip?

… and the way mr. Pops is drawn is inconsistent with previous depictions! Mutant Skrull Clown!

So Tracy brought his gun with him when he went to the circus with his wife and daughter?

At this point I wish Sloppy the Clown would just shoot Tracy and end the strip forever.

Even after working with him, being involved in a court case with him… Ringo didn’t recognize Pops through the clown make-up. He didn’t recognize the voice either.

Amen, Ludwig.

RELEASED EARLY ? For agreeing to - RETURN MONEY ?? WHICH MONEY ?

MORE DISTORTION ! NONSENSE ! JUST LOCHER BUNKUM !

No money was ever stolen ! The crime was attempting to illegally ship hi-tech weaponry to South America (9-05-09) whicn the FBI intercepted.

Does Locher manufacture these distortions deliberately OR is the mind in “slippery” mode, plum forgetting the factual base he laid out two weeks ago ?

Whatever, it’s not burnishing his reputation as a competent writer.

you guys may not like this strip, but i find it cool.

“Return” the money, eh?

The money came from customers in South America who were buying the weapons. So he was released from prison… early… for refunding money to foreigners who bought…

(head explodes)

I was wondering where my son’s lemonade stand sign went until I just noticed it is the O’Connell Circus sign. Seriously, has anybody under, let’s say 100 years old ever went to a circus with a sign like that? The ending will be that Tracy removes his hand quickly only to be shot 42 times by a six shooter. As he lies dead, his hand opens to reveal not a gun, but a picture of Gould with RIP in bold letters on the bottom. Ala, Gran Torino.

Sad Sad Story. I’m sure Matthew loves it.

Roberto, Let me not leave the impression that Kilian and Locher never produced some good Dick Tracy work, or some top rate villains. For example they had No Face (‘93), Dab Stract (original version -‘95), Smirk (‘01), Snails (‘01) and Beau Tox ‘02). Add to that several passable creations. But 40% were so weak they smacked of “no real creative effort” (a sort of, “any old thing” will do”) and were never of a quality to be in Dick Tracy. In this respect, today’s Clown face is (in my cynical view), effectively Locher taking a “creative holiday”. Nice dodge if you can do it. “Time”, and the debilitating effect of TWO jobs !

Locher IS (was?) highly gifted in villan designs, WHEN he put his “mind and focus” to it. His real strength ! Problem is he had too many time consuming interests including his Political cartoons, where he made his professional mark. But these also served as distactions away from the full focus needed for Dick Tracy. TMS restrictions never made the job easier and some will make out, THAT was the whole problem. NOT so ! Collins had to work with similar reigns but was flexible enough to work well around them.

Chet Gould’s writing format was consistently - Early Crime, Chase and Capture ! Kilian never grasped that formula. His 12 week stories were (usually) – build a story platform for eight to nine weeks, have a crime, a one week chase then capture or death. The heart of Gould’s stories lay in a long CHASE sequences. movement, narrow escapes, changing visual scenery (often out in the country-side), gripping death traps. Kilian’s stories never had that visual variety or propelling physical action.

Locher who had the advantage of working with, and seeing how both Gould and Collins structured their stories, chose instead, to pattern his own writing style after the worst writer of the three - Mike Kilian. And we now see it all culminating in a peak of dullness in the current Circus story. And this one is special, it’s further embellished with Locher’s unique “package” of careless contradictions.

I’ll leave with a quote from Kilian on his initial thinking and approach – “We have deliberately inserted some ‘extremely serious themes’ into the program … hate crimes …. frightening car jacking …. but didn’t think we could approach the story as something cute and colorful. So the old style villains had to take a back seat on that one”

That was the passage that implied he was writing an Editorial, and not a comic strip for entertainment. His first two stories were all that, AND that’s when the “rot” set in.

There should be no comma after high tech. Isn’t ANYONE editing this thing?

von Drake, sorry to disagree with you but it’s standard practice in many police departments for officers and detectives to carry their weapons while off duty. As much bad as there is going on in the strip, this really isn’t a slip-up.

And just to show that in addition to crappy art and writing the strip is rife with conventional errors any editor two weeks out of junior high school should be catching: there should not be a comma between “high-tech” and “weapons” in panel one. You only need a comma if there’s more than one adjective modifying a noun.

By the way, where is Tess and Bonnie? Has any1 seen them?

Tracy sent them home. Remember?

So this entire circus (ringmaster, clown, and trapeze artist) is made up of people who aren’t really circus people? I wonder what crime the lion tamer was involved in before he ran away and joined the circus…

Why did the clown decide to come out of the closet at this point? Did Tracy really smoke him out somehow?

Concerning the money…

Pops the Clown couldn’t have returned the money if he wanted to. Most of the money would have gone to either the weapons manufacturers or to the “fences”, and the most that Pops could have returned would be what he made from the sales commission. (I say “fences”, because if the weapons were stolen, I doubt that Pops could have pulled that off by himself.)

As someone else has already pointed out, to whom would he return the money? If he returned it to the countries that bought the weapons, then these countries would now have both the weapons and their money. Not a bad deal for them at all.

Even if the weapons were stolen, this isn’t just an issue of simple thievery that can be resolved by returning the money. Selling weapons to foreign countries is a pretty big deal. It’s an especially big deal if the weapons are sold to countries with whom we’re at war. (Can you say, “Treason”.)

Apart from the money angle…

The timeline of this story doesn’t make any sense at all. Agent Ennen couldn’t have arrived until at least a day or two after the shooting. Does this mean that Tracy has been spending days and nights in the circus ring, without a break to eat, sleep, or to use the bathroom?

What happened to the audience. Did they all go home, or are they still there? If they’re still there, Pops is rather foolish to pull his six gun on our intrepid heroes. He might be able to finish them off, but there’s no way he’s be able to deal with the whole crowd.

Tent within a tent…

Maybe Pops just carries the inner tent around with him whenever he’s trying to sneak up on people.

Conclusion…

As we keep saying, this is an extremely poorly-written strip. Our only hope is for TMS to hire a new writing team. But, that probably won’t happen, since it sounds like Locher and Brozman are probably working for peanuts. A decent writing team probably wouldn’t want to work for that kind of money.

Is is my imagination, but it appears that the tent has become much smaller.

Donnie - Lets make a suggestion. There are many who post on this site that would write the story for FREE. I’m not sure what level of decent you want, but I think we could at least manage better than what we’ve been getting. I really want to like DT, I do. It could be so much fun. Instead it is nearly insulting to any reader with an intellectual age of 8 or better.

Good impression for the kids. Do a crime, become a felon, go to the Big House, and pay your way back out on the street. Not exactly good to teach the kiddies. However, if it all happened in Illinois, and Blago was the guv, well…….

Someone’s been in Illinois too long!

So also, if the FBI agent knew some of the circus people weren’t who they said they were, why wouldn’t she also say “Hey, the clown is the guy who swore vengeance on the ringmaster,” and just arrest him instead of coming in and joining the conversation for a few weeks till the clown pulled a gun?

The only entertainment value this comic seems to have is the opportunity to extrapolate on its many failings.

All this excitement ‘cause something’s finally happening is just like what happens when you watch a Grateful Dead show or a baseball game:

You sit there for what feels like a lifetime, bored to tears, and then finally Mickey Hart begins a drum solo or somebody hits a home run, and you’re in such a state of shock that SOMETHING’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING that you stand up and start cheering.

LOL, Flight Suit, I like baseball and the Grateful Dead, but the premise of your post is spot on.

Perhaps the tiger is Sam Catchem in disguise, waiting to turn the tables on the villain?