Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for October 06, 2020

Foreshadowing …

… hopefully. ✨

Groan! :P

Good morning™, happy hangers-on!

Well, Sam thinks it’s hilarious! Tomorrow, breaktime is over, back to work!

Who knew Sam went in for gallows humor.

In the spirit of Forrest Gump and “Momma always said if you ain’t got got nothing good to say about something, then you shouldn’t say anything at all,” I’d just like to add

Vera Alldid has nothing to worry about.

No wonder that Sam’s favourite word game is “Hangman”.

Boy, that’s lame….

Good morning™, halfwits !

Sam’s funny bone titillates easily.

Flashback! Once upon a time, in the 1960s, two comic strips that I looked forward to were not being published regularly. They might be there on Monday and Thursday, but absent the rest of the week. You never knew.

They appeared in Dick Tracy.

One was called Sawdust and the characters were all talking grains of sawdust. (This one originated as a strip within another strip called The Gravies which was sometimes signed “Chet” …for you -know-who.) Supposedly the artwork was done by a team of four artists, all of them drawing the little dots of saw dust.

(:.•. !)

When The Gravies was cancelled, the Sawdust gimmick moved over to Dick Tracy.

The other meta-strip was The Invisible Tribe in which there was essentially no artwork, just speech balloons, because the characters were all, well, invisible.

The info above is all from memory. I need to poke around on the webs to refresh myself on the details.

Dear God! I thought, once Tracy and the kids left Sven, we’d get back to the story. But THIS? I’m about ready to quit reading the strip. This story has more padding than a mattress!

Sam humors very easily. Probably gets a laugh out of watching paint drying too.

Good grief! Another detour in the path of this story!

So, now it’s “Happy Hangman” to help us mark time while waiting for the Happy Halloween ending!

Did we forget that someone died to get this story started?

Yeh, it’s fun until it happens to you…..

Again, Chester Gould was relentless in juxtaposing violent crime with ridiculous comedy.

I’m thinking of Miss Egghead (the villain with a fringe of hair around her bald head so that it looked like an egg in a nest) murdering a victim by hitting his head with a sculpted metal rooster. It drove one of the rooster’s hard claws through his skull to lodge in his brain!

Gruesome and hilarious! In the Sunday funnies!

An old Dilbert strip, when Dilbert met the “Grim Reaper” and Dilbert asked the Reaper “Why are you smiling?” to which the Reaper replied, “Unlike you I LIKE my job”!

Not laughing.

whatr next, the return of “Sawdust” and “Invisible Tribe”?

Sam’s just killin’ time till the Boss gets back!!! Or hangin’ on to laughs in the comic section!!!

It looks like the rope actually is around the happy hangman’s neck.

Reading DT here on GoComics is fine and all, but this makes me nostalgic for the golden age of noose papers.

Good old Sam

Unfortunately for this comic strip, it actually needs another joke tomorrow.

Does the name Quowit have something to do with letters often used in playing Hangman?

annie, svengoolie, now this. it gets any more padding you can use it as a cell to lock up the villain at the end.

The rope IS around his neck.

I’m guessing this somehow will tie in to the story?

Ok – Today’s effort should end all sniping at the writing we get on Dick Tracy as we see that had Mike gone to the comical side of things, IT WOULD’VE BEEN A HELLUVA LOT WORSE!

You know, it’s single strips like yesterday and today that make people just throw up their arms, walk away and stop reading…throw in:

the nonsensical appearances by svengoolie (that doesnt move anything forward in the story)

the two day appearance by brenda starr (that was, im guessing, SUPPOSED to be a ‘big thing’)

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the tired old appearances of annie (who’s strip DIED for a reason dammit!)

the one off of kadaver (which will probably be revealed right before christmas knowing how these people pace their stories)

the fact that theyve IGNORED the ‘villain’ of the story for over a week now

and the odd appearance of the two remaining sisters

Annie, Brenda, Svengoolie, whatever the hell this is today, a vampire wannabe, a mysterious death, sisters’ with an inheritance, and a two panel “cameo” by Abner Kadaver… did mike forget to take his A.D.D. pills?

1-BABE: I didn’t know you could read, Sam. SAM: A little. Just listen…

2-BLONDE GUY: Hey Quowit. Brother Tucker wants to talk to you about the Prosperity Gospel and how it can make you rich.

3-QUOWIT: Lemme stop you there. I’m doing pretty good as it is…

4-…You’d be amazed at how much a former pool boy at Liberty University can make just by keeping his mouth shut! Hey! I guess you’d know all about a “vow of silence”, wouldn’t you Brother Tucker, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Uh oh. The influence of the “new and rebooted” Alley Oop is creeping in. Soon this comments section will disappear and move to a Belgian or Lichtenstienian newspaper.

Snark while you can my friends, snark while you can, by gar, by gar…

Is this just something stuck in for no purpose or is Mike featuring a new strip and artist from somewhere?

If the latter, I don’t see how it helps anyone to stick their strip into a situation bound to draw complaints.

Seriously, is there any plot here? How do we go from a woman being drained of blood about a month ago to…whatever the last couple of weeks have been? It’s like they have a month’s worth of plot (and that may be generous) that they’re trying to pad out to two just so they can have a “spooky” Halloween story. This strip is incredibly frustrating and painful to read.

We were hoping they’d advance the story and instead they leave us hanging.

From today’s Comics Curmudgeon:

We temporarily step away from Dick tracking down deadly vampire cosplayers to bring you Sam laughing uproariously at a new comic in the Neo-Chicago Tribune! See, it’s funny because this guy kills people for the government, but nobody gets to kill him. This strip’s gonna be hit around the precinct!

Well, it’s better than Alley Oop, at least.

People who are into Renaissance fairs might have run into a comedy act “Smee and Blog, the Singing Executioners”. Their slogan is “you’ll die laughing”.

This strip is getting perilously close to jumping the shark.

Sam=Too Easily amused!

huh?

Okay. This is really just a waste of a day’’s strip. Is this gag so witty? No. Is the comic-within-a-comic so interesting? No. Advances to Artificial Vampire plot: zero. One barely remembers what this story started out to be about.

I am normally not so negative, but this is so blatantly spinning one’s wheels that there can be no excuses made….

Two words: British humor.

BOOOOOOOO!!!!! CORNY TO THE MAX!!!

wonder how much they paid for an endorsement like that?

As I recall SAWDUST was written by the guy Moon Maid was seeing before Jr. Tracy. THE INVISIBLE TRIBE was written by a young boy who Tracy befriended after he had to Shoot the boys Father during a crime. The Boys nickname was PEANUT BUTTER and his strip was signed w/ a Peanut and the word butter.