Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for October 06, 2021

Ugly Christine was not a pretty sight. Hope Crystal doesn’t see how she ended

Time drone: finder of nasty truths. Some things are better forgotten

This story has gone on for six weeks and nothing’s happened.

Good morning™, everyone!

Hartzell Spence was the founding editor of Yank, the Army Weekly, published from June, 1942 until the end of December, 1945. He is perhaps best known for inventing the word “pinup” to describe the pictures of beautiful women that the magazine included, but he introduced the comic strip, Sad Sack, which continued in newspaper syndication after the war until 1958. There was also a summer radio show in the summer of 1946 and a movie in 1957 starring Jerry Lewis, with Peter Lorre among the supporting cast.

Yank also included cartoons of Bil Keane, who we all know from Family Circus, and G.I. Joe by Dave Breger.

I still don’t think that Crystal’s hair is supposed to be brown, but at least she has a wish list for what she would do with the Time Drone if she had access to it.

You can really feel for Crystal. Not knowing one’s parent must be hard and I can imagine she would want to know, regardless of what her mother was like.

I don’t pretend to know what the solution is (although I do have some suggestions, the boys know how to contact me if they’re interested) but this merry-go-round of insignificant people doing insignificant things for insignificant reasons is threatening to turn our beloved strip insignificant and that’s a gosh darn shame!

Ugly Christine was a favorite character of mine. I would love to see her again, if only flashbacks in time.

Good morning™, wistful longing youngsters !

A big sobfest if she saw her mom before she went to the darkside.

Before we get all sentimental, let’s not forget who Crystal’s uncle is (Mr. Bribery) and she has deadly skills with a sling shot that she learned in a Swiss “finishing school.”

Still Slow moving? Maybe Crime is taking a holiday? Can’t wait to see Blackjack convince Doubleup to join the Tracy Train (Tracy Train) and overthrow the Apparatus

Glad to see the girls today!

Always good to see Honeymoon and Crystal. As with Lizz wishing she could see her murdered sister again, Crystal would like to see the mother she never knew. I suspect she is blissfully unaware that her mother’s grisly death was photographed and splashed on page one of the paper.

Ugly Christine fell to her death on September 26, 1966. Tracy tried to save her, but she said, “I’ll never go to jail, copper. Drop me.” When she finally dropped from Tracy’s Air Car, Lizz tried to save her to no avail. Ugly Christine fell into the smoking chimney, her death caught by a photographer from The Daily who was in a nearby helicopter. The front page exclusive read, “The Most Frightening Picture Ever Made!” As Lizz and Tracy struggled to save the suicidal Christine, Sam was securing Bribery’s case of shrunken heads. All that was left of Ugly Christine was a pair of melted handcuffs.

Meanwhile… Diet Smith is still busy taking pictures of Ike taking the oath of office and Kennedy signing the Peace Corps into existence and other things we already have photographs of to ‘prove to the world’ the time drone exists.

Who is Deb Fina? The school loves her so much, they put up a banner for her.

Who is Crystal’s guardian these days?

cue the ominous music

I hope Chrystal doesn’t learn that her mom once killed a man by driving her spiked high-heel shoe into his skull! She also tried to shoot Liz and missed by an inch, popping Liz’s earring.

1-BLONDIE: Hey Greenie. Your hair’s brown again!

GREENIE: Yeah. I stopped swimming at the overly chlorinated pool at the SIAM or whatever it was called.

2-BLONDIE: How’d you do on the Spelling Test?

GREENIE: Flunked it. Know what I’d do if I had that Time Drone thing?

BLONDIE: Whoa. What brought that up??? Anyway, I guess you’d use it to find out if it was your mom’s or your dad’s genes that made you so … looking the way you do.

3-GREENIE: Huh? No dummy. I’d use it to get the answer to that Spelling Test of course!

BLONDIE: Sure. Call me “dummy” Flunk Out! GREENIE: FLUNK OUT! Well at least I don’t have horns! BLONDIE: Yeah, lucky for you. It would probably be hard to get your hairnet over them when you’re the school lunch lady in a few years! GREENIE: B*TCH! BLONDIE: WHO*E!

It appears this strip is turning into a forum for Neil to clue us in on some history. But I must admit, today’s entry was really informative, pointing out something we hadn’t already read. Terrible story line though, totally devoid of anything remotely resembling action. Throw it against the wall, maybe someday something interesting will stick.

I’m surprised that Tsull wasn’t on yesterday for the 90th. Guess he was still busy welcoming people to Wal-Mart.

…..I STILL like yer guitar…..Hey: can you do Fripp’s solo from Lark’s Tongues In Aspic Pt.4? Just wonderin’……..

Some kids are better off not meeting their birth parents,and Crystal is definitely one of them.

Have patience,there’s bound to be an explosion sooner or later.

By the way,how long WAS Tunney down in 1927??

To Honeymoon and Crystal….your teacher is going to assign you to write an essay about the Time Drone.

Dick Tracy, the comic strip gets an additional subtitle “Finder of Bygone Relatives and other assorted persons”.

The Apparatus and Ace of Spades go through all this trouble to steal the time drone only to find out they do not have enough micro chips to operate it.

Be careful what you wish for, Crystal; you just might get it.

While we’re on the subject of THAT family,I want to point out something I noticed duringthe original 1965-66 Bribery arc,,

Bribery was so used to giving orders from behind a big desk that whenever he’d take apersonal hand in things he’d end up botching it because he wasn’t used to being “in the field”.

Remember the failed Honeymoon kidnap;and how quickly the Space Coupe hijack with“The Twins” went South.

She probably can’t see the chalk board (white board?) or text books through those bangs.

MOVIE QUOTE:

“People of our class do not go around shooting people”

Of course not.We only bore them to death".

Errol Flynn—FOOTSTEPS IN THE DARK—-1941

No more blue hair for UC?

Finally agree with you on a thought.

Crystal must be the last person in the universe under the age of 30 who still “reads a newspaper”. If Joe & Mike are going to feature younger people in the strip, they should at least have them speak & act like actual young people in the 2020s. Would it kill them to have Crystal say she read about it on social media?

Some of the thoughts expressed here about potential uses for a Time Drone remind me of a comment made by a friend many years ago. He said that more people (scientists; historians) would take Past Life Memories via hypnosis seriously if one of the subjects came out of it remembering how to read Linear B. (Or any other previously unknown but verifiable thing.) In that sense, the Apparatus seems to have better ideas as to how to prove that the Time Drone works than Smith does!

I guess I’m the first to notice that Honeymoon, in panel 2, has further physically matured. She’s on the verge of becoming a woman. I wonder how long it’ll take her to get to 18, about 20 years? ;-)

Crystal would like to meet the Mom she never knew. Eminently understandable, but probably a Bad Idea in the case of Ugly Christine. —And how the mighty have have fallen, from a posh Swiss Finishing School to a “C” in algebra in a Tracyville public school.

Everyone in Tracyville seems to have the Time Drone on their minds. We get it.

Now, could we have some malefaction? We’ve got a loaded roster of baddies just twiddling their thumbs….

I’m thinking all these twists and turns have to do with Tracy’s 80th birthday…..

“But I’m pretty much sure she’s Cher. Yep, definitely Cher!”