Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for March 30, 2011

Good morning everyone…

I love the well drawn Diet Smith. I’m looking forward to the rest of the story. ‘Morning, VistaBill!

Wanna’ see Virgil Ohso and Chris Chendo again?

http://www.gocomics.com/dicktracy/2010/01/08/

“The negative effects of magnetism!” I love how old-fashioned that sounds!

This story is moving forward way too fast, however. Shouldn’t Dick and Diet stand around talking for at least three weeks?

;-)

VistaBill said, 13 minutes ago

Wanna’ see Virgil Ohso and Chris Chendo again?

http://www.gocomics.com/dicktracy/2010/01/08/

ACK! MY EYES!

R_Noonan63, the the Moon stories are all available through **Spec Productions.com- Home of the Dick Tracy Fan Club.

See them at their site, the first tale appeared in Blackthorne Weekly Comic Books # 97, # 98 and # - 99. Thereafter, the continuity appears in Missing Years Magazine # -1 (same sourcing) then #2 ETC.

CALL ANDY FEIGHERY in Manitou Springs :

(719) 685 - 9086 He’s a helpfull guy !

“I don’t want any snoopers.”

-Virgil Oso

margueritem said, “ACK! MY EYES!”

Sometimes we need to use shock therapy.

Actually, the big oil companies forced Diet to retire the space coupe and air cars. He also has the 100mpg carburetor in a box around there somewheres. ;)

Some of the Dick Tracy comics are posted here:

http://www.ilovecomixarchive.com/D/Dick-Tracy

including a lot of the Sixties lunar material.

rri0189, there should be an honorable mention of Harry Harrison’s “A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah.” It’s an alternate time-line in which the American colonists lost the Revolution. 1970 becomes a steampunk world, and one of the characters Harrison throws into this mix is a detective named Richard Tracy.

The wrist-radio was a step or two ahead of the technology of 1949, but it was a reasonable extrapolation. The transistor was invented in 1947 and there was speculation about how much it would shrink electronic gear. (Robert Heinlein went one better in “Space Cadet,” where Tom Corbett is annoyed by the 1949 version of a cell phone.)

I looked at Terry Pleger’s link to the Space Coup explanation. The material in the coupe’s hull sounds like a cermet, which makes the hull plausible. Cermets go back to WW II, but I don’t think they were being exploited in the early Sixties. I don’t see any way for a magnetic drive to interact with the earth’s magnetic field, though; it just isn’t that intense.

Radish, the scientists at Bell Labs got the idea by investigating the conduct of semiconductors. Well, that’s what they said. There’s evidence that they got the basic idea from a Canadian patent filed in the mid-Twenties. If you want to say that any aliens swiped the idea from a Canadian, I’m sure nobody in Canada will object.

Doggone it, I knew it! I just knew it! It had to happen!

What happened, you ask?

Well, this strip suddenly became so well done that our chronic complainers had to resurrect stuff from the Locher era to complain about. Further, wishing (apparently) that the new guys would resurrect certain features from the Locher years so we could carp on that, too.

I haven’t commented much here of late because, frankly, I’ve been enjoying the results we’re getting– even if I have seen this before on the tribute site. The chance to see them complete the flour arc— I really wanted to see the end of that one, though I fancy I could hazard a guess as to the next couple of panels in that arc. I can hardly wait.

Mike Staton - Thanks for your comments yesterday. That was very enlightening and interesting.

Diet Smith looks really good in this new version of DT and I’m really interested to hear Smith’s explanation for the ‘real’ reason he retired this amazing technology.

“WE NEED MORE CALGON!” “Ancient Magnetic secret, HUH?”

Two days in a row the coloring looks good.

Tom Corbett was mentioned in the “Frog Applause” comments, and here again in the “Dick Tracy” comments. This is spooky. Bill Thompson, my daughter just lent me some talking books of Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat series. Now I’m anxious to try that Transatlantic Tunnel book. He’s such a fun guy to read.

As Flyface would say The nation that controls maggotism controls the universe.

Mike

Mike – Love the story and art, and greatly appreciate your reading, and responding to our comments.

I used to save reading the comics for a break later in the day, but now I’m reading them with breakfast. (A great way to start the day!)

With returning villians, Diet Smith, Pat Patton – I can’t wait to read Dick Tracy each day.

Thanks!

Mike, Bravo and thank you! You and Joe are doing an amazing job. Keep up the great work. THANKS AGAIN!

Smith’s got some righteous eyebrows!

The art from the last week or so has looked different than the first couple of Staton/Curtis strips. Did a different inker work on those?

One question I have…

We all know Max Collins hated the SF stuff, to the point that one of the first things he did when he took over the strip was blow up Moon Maid, after which he spent the next 13 years pretending the whole “Space Period” never happened. We also know that Gould was obliged by the bounds of reality to retreat back to Earth once the Apollo program definitively invalidated his interpretation of the Moon, though he did keep the Space Coupe and Air Cars around for at least a few years after 1969. But whether under Gould or Collins – or for that matter Mike Killian – was there ever any sort of in-strip explanation as to why the Space Coupe et al stopped appearing? Diet’s line in the last panel suggests there was at least a passing reference to it at some point.

BillThompson: for what it’s worth, the fundamental technology of the cell phone (frequency reuse and handoff between antennas) was demonstrated by Bell Labs in the 1930s. It wasn’t practical till the ’70s, when semiconductors and integrated circuits made it possible to shrink the stuff down to something that would fit in a car and leave some space in the trunk.

As for the idea of a spacecraft driven by magnetism: Actually, a magnetic space drive has been proposed, and to a degree tested. The space shuttle deployed a ‘tether,” a cable several miles long, from its cargo bay on one flight in the ’90s. As this cable swept through the earth’s magnetic field, it generated a whole lot of electric power… enough to eventually create an arc that melted the cable and sent it off into space. According to the first and second laws of thermodynamics, this of course slowed the shuttle down. In theory, the tether system could be reversed–push current through the tether cable, producing a magnetic field that interacts with that of the earth, and you could increase your orbital velocity, perhaps by enough to get to the moon. Didn’t look anything like the space coupe, and wouldn’t be powerful enough to lift you off the ground, but could be useful for moving stuff between the earth and moon without consuming expensive rocket fuel.

Gould wasn’t as far into la-la land as some thought, it appears!

I’m so glad we have moved into a new era of discussion.

With all the recent concerns over radiation today, I believe years ago similiar concerns over excessive exposure to magnetic fields were raised. Seems to be a good enough reason to recall all Moon related technology and Smith is a wise and humanitarian industrialist. Not many of them around you know. LOL

Diet Smith’s eyebrows remind me of the real ones on Edward Teller, inventor of the hydrogen (thermonuclear) bomb. Could they have been separated at birth ?

The plot thickens….

@clevitekid, It just means that Diet Smith and Edward Teller (and Leonid Brezhnev) missed their true calling: they should have been oboists. That’s why they are/were all so grumpy.

The first magnetic flying machine that I know of appears in Book III of “Gulliver’s Travels” (1726, 1735).

+1 to MikeCurtis.

As to Diet’s eyebrows, I thought “Rorschach Test.”

Thanks, puddleglum1066. The tethers are a useful concept if you aren’t in a hurry to go anywhere in space (which would be the case for suppluies and equipment). I don’t know how efficient they would be, considering that you’d have to bring along your own power source. My point was that the earth’s magnetic field isn’t intense enough to allow the sort of acceleration you’d see in the space coupe. Those flying cars wouldn’t work, either, which is too bad. (Earth’s magnetic field is around a half gauss, depending on where you are. Maglev trains use magnets that run into the thousands of gauss, both in the cars and rails, and they only get a suspension of a few inches.)

But I’ve seen much more obscure efforts to give old SF stories credit for later discoveries. If someone uses a tether to power a space transport, Gould could take some credit with a clear conscience (and didn’t he put a golf course on the Moon, several years before Al Shepard bogied Cone Crater?)

Longtime lurker, first time commenter. The new team is doing a great strip. I liked the Gould strips from the 30’s through the 50’s, and really liked the book versions from the 1930’s and 1940’s like “Dick Tracy Meets The Night Crawler” (1945). (No, his foe was not a fishing worm!) Didn’t care much for Tracy strips of the Moon-Maid era. In many strips (not just this one) there seemed to be a plot shortage, so that it took a month for someone to fire a pistol Here’s to well-drawn strips with a plot arc that moves along.

According to legend, John Worrell Keely demonstrated a magnetic flying machine for the War Dept in 1896. Unfortunately they weren’t interested because they couldn’t see a use for it. Tesla worked on flying devices based on the Tesla coil.

BTW, 1947 was a busy year. Roswell, transistors, creation of the CIA…

Mike Curtis - My apologies for mixing your name all up. I do that kind of thing all the time, since I’m the world’s worse with names. Heck, I even forget my own name half the time.

APOI - Thanks for pointing out my error.

At the risk of being repetitive, black and white for daily strips please.

Dear Mr. Locher, We all know that you went way back with Chester Gould as his assistant and I am sure you did a wonderful job in helping him in his later years. When you first took over you did an exceptional job. However as you grew older you lost the touch and your work was bitterly criticized in this forum. I guess you finally knew when it was time to go and we respect your decision. I wish you well in your retirement and I also wish the best of luck to the new writers of DT.

heligmyer said, about 5 hours ago

Smith’s got some righteous eyebrows!

The art from the last week or so has looked different than the first couple of Staton/Curtis strips. Did a different inker work on those? ——————————————————————————- heligmyer, The inker has always been Shelley Pleger, what is slowly changing is Joe Staton’s art style as he defines the style of the characters. The “crossover” strips were actually created later than the current story strips, so the style is slightly different. Be patient as the new team adjusts to drawing Tracy and making it “their own”. It is hard to stay true to the original without slowly changing it to your own style. Shelley has spent many hours studying the different inking styles of the classic cartoonists in an effort to make the strip “feel” like a classic Gould strip. Joe is the one who has the hardest job. He is quite literally creating the look of Tracy and the team for the future. As you are aware, the new team is reading your comments, and they do take them into consideration for the future. Mike is the one writing the story, so he is looking to see what the viewership wants. He also has worked as a police officer, and has friends who are police officers. This gives him some insight to what the current issues the police, and thereby Tracy as well, are dealing with. We hope you continue to enjoy the strip. Keep the comments coming!

Does anyone else not like this art?

Has anyone checked the subscriber numbers lately? I hope they’re good as the strip is. I started reading Dick Tracy for the comments, but the carping was getting tiresome.

I’m back, after dropping it a while ago.

I too am interested in the strip again. I know Joe’s work way back to his DC days. Glad to see he’s interested in saving this classic. Wish Brenda had had an intersession.

the color today is not too bad. i sure didn’ like the Chief’s brown hat.

Diet smith looks greats.

As McDonald’s commercials say:

“I’m Loving It”

I want giant escargot with the Space Coupe!

marvee: as of a few minutes ago DT subscribership is 23,512.

I see Diet Smith finally lost weight.

@ Terry Plager,

Interesting that you would say the crossover strips were done later. What we’re seeing now is more like what I’ve come to expect as the “Joe Staton” style (the thinner, more angular face on Lizz, for example). I’ve seen Mr. Staton’s style evolve over the decades, and I’m looking forward to seeing him settle in here.

I can appreciate how hard it must be to take over someone else’s franchise and show respect to the style it used to have. I would say he’s risen admirably to the challenge. It doesn’t hurt that Staton is, IMO, a much better artist than Gould ever was.