Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for August 23, 2021

Good morning™, everyone!

I have a feeling that the “Time Drone” is going to be the main star of this story line. It’s small, but not totally invisible.

(The little red and green lights all around it have turned a dull grey today. The MC sure likes grey!)

This recalls to mind an old Asimov’s story, “The dead past”, where a device showed scenes from recent past

We are in Science Fiction territory definitely

How Diet is planning to make money with that?

Don’t tell me…somebody is going to hijack the time drome. Heaven forbid Tracy gets sent back in time with a different outcome.

Diet Smith has too much time on his hands.

Isn’t that what record companies call duping stations?

Close the research and development labs and send the staff on vacation to the Caribbean.

Can Tracy arrest Diet Smith for bothering him with this trivia?

Good old Diet Smith, one foot in the 21st Century, the other on a banana peel.

“…Happened Long Ago” – The element of time in a strip with a sliding timeline, and a compacted timeline!

It’s a cute little drone now, but Smith and Tracy don’t realize in time (see what I did there?) it’ll grow up and want to “EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!”

“Can I use it to watch Jack Benny?” – some little old lady

Good morning™, Amazing new devices !

Who will try to steal the little flying saucer with the gray nubs on it ?

I wonder what catastrophic event that “time drone” will trigger, forcing Diet Smith to put his toy permanently on ice….?

Presumably you can use it to solve cold case crimes, but good luck showing the results as evidence in a court of law….

Stolen from Michael Creighton’s Timelines. Great book, terrible movie.

Cheers.

Interesting!

I wonder if the drone records in 4K Ultra and 60 fps.

Diet, when you come up with a drone that reports stuff from the future, call me. Until then, just leave me alone.

Called it! On a quantum level, it may be possible to reassemble photons given enough energy, but past audio is a bit of a stretch. Perhaps the drone reads lips, also the drone would have to stay anchored in our present, or perhaps just outside of “time” as we understand it. Still, Smith’s equipment would have to generate a couple of Terrawatts of electricity focused to a single point to achieve this. Of course, it would also have to calculate the precise position of the entire solar system with particular attention on the Sun, the position and rotation of Earth would also have to be taken into account. It’s still science fiction… For now.

Ouuu… that’s interesting! Let’s see where this goes (.)

Time Drone, as opposed to Diet’s Voice Drone….

Looks more like an old Star Wars Stormtrooper’s Helmet.

Of all the things he could have watched, he watches Flattop disembarck from a train and ask directions. Talk about pandering to the audience.

Yeah, this’ll end well…

As long as it just brings images and sounds from the past and not dead bad guys (which would definitely mess up the timespace continuum).

A literary apparatus that allows the writer/artists to go back and dredge up the old, supposedly dead, bad guys (and gals?) from the strip’s long, long history… ;-)

AND Tracy remains clueless. “FLATTOP IS ALIVE!”

1-DT: Can I use your thing to kill Flattop again? I’d pay money to do that.

2-DOIT: Settle down, Tracy. Have a Calmgar (patent pending) …

3-…No, my VCR Device only records past events. Once I’ve made a few million of these, your head will suddenly be filled with memories of them buzzing around like they were flies on a big pile of …

DT: That will spell the end of civilization!!!

DOIT: Because playing with this will be a bigger time waster than Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat etc combined?

DT: Oh. No. I was thinking about the time we would all spend in front of a mirror making sure we look great 24/7. Could you limit the resolution and make it black and white instead of color?

DOIT: No.

I worry that Diet doesn’t realize that this “time drone” business is potentially disastrous. Sending a flying object — however small — into the past can wreak unexpected havoc with the present… as seen in the 1962 Lee & Ditko story. “Those Who Change.”

Diet has never heard of Photoshop…

Perhaps some ufos we see today are time drones from the future.

Deep fake VIDEOS are here NOW, so science fiction was needed to give a reason for a story line.

I get the feeling this is another invention Diet’s gonna regret.

From today’s Comics Curmudgeon:

One of my favorite sci-fi short stories is Isaac Asimov’s “The Dead Past,” about a near-future society where technology that can view the past has been invented but its nature is kept secret and its use is heavily restricted by the government, and a group of heroic historians and scientists manage to reinvent it and publish the plans worldwide, only to realize too late that a machine that can see 1,000 years into the past can also see 30 seconds into the past and they’ve just eliminated privacy for everyone, everywhere, forever. Dick is going to be thrilled to hear about this invention, in other words.

IMO DT will be using this as a short cut to finding out who the criminal is in the upcoming story.

HOLY CRAP!

So far, we only know that this device can go into the past and record past events. It does not appear to be able to change the past that we know of. But, Diet Smith’s goal when he started all of this was to resurrect his dead son, Brilliant. In order to do that, his invention would have to be able to change the past and prevent Big Frost from killing Brilliant.

“Like this convenient footage of Young Dick Tracy stealing a candy bar. I’m thinking ‘new extension on the lab’.”

Uh oh, this is just going to be a constant excuse for dredging up characters from the 40s and 50s when Gould was at his height. It will go a long way in preventing anything creative happening regarding characters or stories from these current “storytellers”..Sad

I posted these two comments to Neil this morning in yesterday’s comment thread, but they are relevant for general discussion on this topic of viewing the past. . .

. . .it might be hard to see inside (the Space Coupe that Diet sent to Jupiter)

Which brings up another interesting puzzle. This is supposed to be a devise that allows them to view the past. Well, whatever happened inside that space coupe happened in the past. So did everything else in the world right up to a nano-second ago. How will Smith direct his drone, both as to when and where?

. . .if you ask Tracy, he’ll tell you about how he was in the Navy during World War II.

When Gould retired in the late 70s, my Dad, a WWII vet, was in his mid to late 50s. So it was still reasonable at that time to consider the passage of time in the strip as being approximately equal to real time. However, writers going forward after Gould chose not to be too specific about Tracy’s past, I think. I had no access to the strip from around 1980 until I bought my first computer in 2011 and found this site, but I think they referred to Tracy being a Navy vet in general terms, without mentioning what era. This whole “view the past” thing is going to open up an extremely knotty problem for the writers.

We can hardly wait for the outcomes (as in results)!!

Given that we are clearly in the realm of science fiction here, I’m not going to speculate on the possibilities for this story arc using real scientific findings. I will say that being able to view the past could be helpful to Tracy in solving crimes.

Minority Report. Where is Tom Cruise?

Do Diet or Tracy have a particular time and place to send it? Has Time Drone brought back a Gould era Tracy/Flattop story?

Oooooooooo!! I. WANT. ONE!!

Just spitballing here, but wouldn’t it be a surprise if, after all the preemptive grumbles about bringing back Flattop, his only appearance turns out to be the demonstration we’ve just seen and the Time Drone story proceeds elsewhere?

Let’s go back and see the day Dick and Tess got married.They did it off camera on Christmas Eve and we readers got royally stiffed!!

I always thought Diet Smith was based on the original John D.Rockefeller(1839-1937).

He may have lived until 98,but he had such miserable stomach trouble that he once said he’dtrade all his millions so he could enjoy a meal like a normal person.

Also—Rockefeller is buried in the same Cleveland,Ohio cemetary as Elliott Ness.

In these Sunday pages, Diet Smith’s son Brilliant has invented closed-circuit TV surveillence and what would become the modern security camera. All of this was amazing science fiction in 1948 but became old-hat reality by 2021.

https://i.postimg.cc/G2V1VpmK/Dick-Tracy-480926-T-TILT.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/4dmgWcsn/Dick-Tracy-481003-F-TILT.jpg

1830: “I’ll do it… with the power of GRAVITY!”

1850: “I’ll do it… with the power of MAGNETISM!"

1870: “I’ll do it… with the power of STEAM”

1900: “I’ll do it… with the power of ELECTRICITY!”

1920: “I’ll do it… with the power of RADIUM!”

1950: “I’ll do it… with the power of PLUTONIUM!”

1960: “I’ll do it… with the power of TRANSISTORS!”

1970: “I’ll do it… with the power of COMPUTERS!”

1980: “I’ll do it… with the power of COLD FUSION!"

1990: “I’ll do it… with the power of CLONING!”

2021: “I’ll do it… with the power of DRONES!”

Diet Smith: I’ve developed this amazing technology that allows us to view images from the past!

Dick Tracy: Wow! What is it?

Diet Smith: It’s called “photography!”

Diet Pepsi has invented the Time Drone!

Er, don’t we already have sound & visual recordings from the past — newspapers, news photos, radio recordings, newsreels, TV news footage … not to mention all the photographs, home movies, slides, & pictures taken with modern day smartphones by ordinary people? Back to the drawing board, Diet.

Oooo-kay. A Time Drone, ehh? Diet, you got some ‘splainin’ to do!

For what insights into the past will the Time Drone actually be used? There is infinite variety and infinite complexity from which to choose!

I have a feeling, as of we’re going to concentrate on criminals and criminal activities from Tracy’s past. 90th Anniversary, ya know?

I look forward to hearing details about the Time Drone. Do we unleash it in our time, and it materializes back in time and take pictures then? Did anyone in the past ever notice a TD taking pictures? (Was this the origin of UFO stories?) Does it head for the target area, in our time, and then somehow use its powers to take pictures of the past in that area? SF fans, accustomed to explanations (however flimsy or far-fetched), want to know!

That ‘drone’ looks like a UFO.

hmmm…. I wonder?