I can only guess that way back when, B.O. struck a deal with the Lord of Darkness to ensure that his firstborn child would be incredibly beautiful, and now his Lordship has decided to claim his half of the bargain.
Here’s a MAJOR Dick Tracy blooper from gocomics, if you go back to ANY of the DT strips on this site it says by Joe Staton and Mike Curtis. While we should put Locher in the past and move on. He does deserve ALL credit for his version or maybe I just don’t like seeing Mike and Joe’s name on Locher’s #@!$, it could go either way…
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It’s probably just a technical limitation of Gocomics.com, due it being comparatively rare for a newspaper comic strip to change its creative team. In any case the older strips do carry the names of Locher (and where applicable, Mike Kilian or Jim Brozman), so it’s not totally misleading.
I can only guess that when Locher’s talking about high-speed excitement, he’s referring to Max Collins’s era, and the better moments of Mike Kilian’s era. Saying “Thanks for nine years of high speed excitement, fourteen years of moderately fast stuff, and five years of rambling insanity” (not sure where the other four years are coming from - I guess he’s including his time as Chester Gould’s assistant?) wouldn’t really have fit very well in a word bubble.
Having said that, Locher does deserve some props for sticking with the strip for so long even in the face of Parkinson’s Disease, the death of his son John, and the death of Mike Kilian, who he had been friends with for some time before they worked together on Tracy. It’s just a shame that he didn’t bow out, as he should have done, when Kilian died; that way we’d have been saved the last five years of crud, and Locher’s successor(s) would have been in a much better position.
I can only guess that way back when, B.O. struck a deal with the Lord of Darkness to ensure that his firstborn child would be incredibly beautiful, and now his Lordship has decided to claim his half of the bargain.