Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for September 06, 2014

“Heh!”, Indeed!

Good morning fellow fans! Welcome to Maryland, Mike, Joe, Shelley, et al… good luck

It appears that the newspaper is being printed with "modern technology!

Scoop: “Mr Axel stocked up when the war started.”: Axel has been there for 5 years? That’s interesting, to say the least. I really wonder how long this seeming charade has really been going on, or are the residents so impressionable through Belinda that they believe they’ve been there much longer than they really have?

“Hole in Wall”: The wall with the hole seems to be authentic pre-1950s lath and plaster. I think it might be different to hire a contractor to do a lath and plaster wall in 2014. Nowadays, they only know how to do drywall. That increases the chances that the wall, at least, really does date from before 1944, not something just constructed for a new fake town.

Anyway, Tracy has found a good vantage point and an excuse to be on watch there. As long as he doesn’t tell Axel, he has an alibi for keeping an eye on the back room of the newspaper. It serves the same purpose as his trips to the theatre claiming to be for weaning Annie off of her puppy love for him.

Scoop: "Heh! Yes, Nazis in Simmons Corners.: Apparently, Scoop think that the very idea of Nazis in Simmons Corners is ludicrous (although he’s busy composing a story about Tracy identifying the plane as non-Nazi). What Scoops apparently doesn’t know is that his own boss, Axel, is seemingly a very Hitler-esque character bent on world domination. It seems just as bad as Nazis to me.

I’m not quite sure what Scoop is doing with the T-square (page layout?), but it seems a bit unusual. People usually hook the smaller side along the side of the drafting table and use the long edge to make horizontal lines. He’s using it vertically and he’d have to have a board on top of his table to hook the short edge over, but it looks like he just has it lined up along the top edge of his paper.

I do like the green visor. It gives it that old-timey copy editor feel.

Tracy still doesn’t have visible fingernails. Sorry of all of you who find that problematic. Did he ever have visible fingernails in the simplified Simmons Corners drawing style? I’ll have to look back and see.

For those who don’t know, Scoop Scanlon is another blast from the past. He broke up a ring of jewel thieves.

If the purpose of this is to spy on Axel meeting with his goons after hours, how does Tracy expect to get into the building late at night?

@Nightshade09:Thank you for your reply from yesterday. That was very interesting to me, about your job at the newspaper. Things sure have changed a lot, haven’t they?The small print shop that I worked at for 30 years had 2 Linotypes when I started in 1980, and they ran them well in to the ‘90s. They din’t have to melt lead every day, because it was a job shop, not a newspaper, but I remember the furnace in the basement, for sure, and the smell of hot lead when they did melting.

The reason that Scoop has the T-Square at the top of the page is that he is lining up a vertical column. He would move the T-Square to the side if he were lining up a horizontal column or wanting to draw a horizontal line.

Good morning DT fans. Good comments all. Good info. Thanks for sharing. Have a great weekend.

Noticing again today the wider lines, less detail here. Looking back Tracy in Simmon’s Corner looks a little more like Gould’s very early strips, and perhaps thats the effect Staton is going for here, works well in some strips, less well in others. Todays middle panel looks pretty clunky.

I thought the blank paper was in a roll. These are flat packages.

Like the Gould Hole in wall.

Good day to all and thanx for the info on newsprint in the past…Nazis in Simmons Corners?..

This soap opera really needs to closed down soon and get on with the new story.

I’m pretty sure Staton knows how a T-square works. He seems to be using a smaller one that’s aligned on the art board the paste-up is on. No need to have it line up on the drawing board when the art board will do.

Interesting about Nazi reference. This story has run longer than WWII

I don’t know where you get five years from Neil. The US didn’t get dragged in until very late in 1941. Did they have resource rationing before then? I think Tracy should be investigating Axel for hogging materials that should be contributing to the war effort. That would be fun, charging him with a fictitious crime in his own fictitious illusion. :-)

“Well, I’ll keep an eye open,” indeed! Tracy has found his spy-hole, if only the baddies will cooperate and meet within its line-of-sight!

I’m beginning to re-think that “The Guy in The Hat” is going to figure into this thing somehow. I don’t know anything about The Asp, but would this fall into his forte? Is he smart, or just a hired hand?

I don’t know anything about The Asp, but would this fall into his forte? Is he smart, or just a hired hand?

The Asp was always depicted as being mysterious, showing up in the nick of time, but even “Daddy” Warbucks couldn’t figure out how he did it. Annie: “Leapin’ lizards! That guy pops right out of the floor!” Daddy: “Well, it’s useless to try to account for Asp, but he’s usually Johnny on the spot.”Whether our current “guy in the hat” is the Asp or not remains to be seen, I guess.

IT’S OFFICIAL! DICK TRACY HAS WON ANOTHER HARVEY! YIPPIE!!

Congratulation to the Tracy Team…Harvey Dar..

I guess the start date of the war is debatable. Wikipedia has these statements in this regard:

The start of the war in Europe is generally held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland; Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or even the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931.Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred simultaneously and the two wars merged in 1941.

Congratulations, Team Tracy, on another well-deserved Harvey Award!