In the spirit of the season, I’ll be charitable & say today’s strip is poking satirical fun at the characters & the mystery genre & is intended as a tribute to Jim Abrahams, whom we recently lost.
Been thinking … if TCA is close to pulling the plug on original Tracy material, (it’s certainly giving off that vibe recently) maybe it’ll try it keep the strip running with reprints of stories from the Gould era (which has happened with other “legacy” strips). I just wonder how they’d format those strips, which were much larger in size (especially Sunday strips) for today’s readers, most of whom now get their content over their mobile devices with their smaller screens.
I see Joe Staton is credited as the regular artist, with Rick Burchett credited as “Guest Artist”. Does this mean TMS interrupted the current storyline with the clock with a rerun of a Mini Mystery that originally ran several years ago, when Joe was still with the script?
Why put in the time & effort coming up with new, original material when you can just lob stale, lazy pop culture references totally unrelated to the Tracy universe & then turn to that old narrative stand-by in the Mike Curtis era, adults suffering from arrested adolescence engaging in sadness-inducing cosplaying?
In Mary Worth this week, Mary is sick in bed with the flu, worried she won’t be able to make her annual Thanksgiving dinner for her neighbors, & that’s more suspenseful than this storyline.
Hmmm… father … son … real estate developers … political problems … all seems vaguely familiar but I just can’t place it…