Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for October 05, 2010

Wow, such progress! And this is the third homeless guy we’ve seen with the same long hair, short beard and pinched face. Has D-cubed used his 3-D technology to populate the downtown district with images of himself? Has Diet Smith gone bananas and taken to cloning the same person? Perhaps Nipple Head’s comment and sardonic laughter are evidence that he is a participant in a vast and sinister conspiracy, and he laughs at the way Thick is being manipulated!

He wears a red suit and has a beard. Ho ha ha.

Wait, it must be a different person, because on 6 September Homeless Guy’s fiendishly mocking laugh went HA HA HA HO HO HA, while Nipple Head’s fiendishly mocking laugh goes HA HA HO.

Yesterday Thick looks at the $1,000 bill handed to him and the homeless man he’s been seeking just “disappears in the rain.”

Any missing time, Spacey? Better check for strange marks and rashes. I think you’ve been abducted by aliens. And when it came to probing you, two hours must’ve gone by because it was such a big job.

Aside to barticle35: I noticed your avatar. You don’t know anything about Thick’s missing time, do you? :-)

I maintain my belief that this strip is a sign of the Apocalypse. Yesterday Thick’s face displayed religious fervor as he asked “Have I found my man?” Today he notes that homeless guys just don’t go around handing out cash, as though he has just reasoned that someone else might hand out blessings. He is now on a search for The Man, and although he is met with mockery we may hope that he finds his Saviour because it will certainly take divine intervention to make sense of this effable twaddle!

Is Locher doing this on purpose, just to show his contempt for the character, the franchise, and its fans?

Flight Suit, I think Locher has run out of ideas and is just marking time until his TMS contract expires.

Or, perhaps, he sold his soul for the chance to take control of the Dick Tracy strip, and the Devil has appeared to collect on the bargain.

It stopped raining.

Oh, burn! Hey Tracy, that’s what you get for talking to a guy with a chess pawn on his head. HA HA HA HO HO HA! Check, and mate!

JCFremont, I think that Nipple Head’s actual laugh is only “HA HA.” As for the third syllable, Thick wants money from a tall man, which suggests the drifter is calling him a ho. “Ha ha, ho! How much you think a tall guy will pay a skank ho like you?”

I hope Thick takes a swing at him. I suspect that the guy is a 3-D image and Thick’s fist will go right through him. If I’m as wrong as usual, we’ll at least see some action.

I think he’s wearing the plunger we saw someone carrying the other day on his head, there’s a clue for ya Spacy.

@BillThompson: Several very astute observations and analyses on your part this morning!

Tracy, ever the vigilant dick He’s one who never misses a trick Working hard on a case Rain (maybe) blowing in his face Plays the bum in the gutter People regard him as a nutter Tracy is a such master of disguise But it only works if you close your eyes Helping a woman who’s in need Gets a buck for his deed All is going according to plan As he is sighted by the mystery man A thousand dollar bill he is given By what could this man be driven Stupefied by the sight of the money Tracy brain is acting funny The “culprit” disappears in the rain How can Tracy ever explain That he lost the man he sought And will his efforts come to naught Cruising on down the streets Questioning each bum he meets They laugh at him like a clown Tempting him to gun them down Will this case ever be solved Not as long as Tracy’s involved.

I faithfully read and sit quietly (if ya can’t say something nice, etc etc) but “That’s all I can stands, and I can’t stands no more!”

The Monday strip removed any and all doubt that our hero, once the embodiment of tough, fearless and intelligent law enforcement, has become something that doesn’t even rise to the level of a parody of the past exploits.

Why? He was too bug-eyed staring at the $1000 bill to notice his prime reason for being there slipped away.

Today’s strip makes the case you could rearrange the dailies in any order with no adverse effect. Does DT remember he got the grand? Does he remember and this is the best technique he can think of to find the guy who gave him the slip?

And yet here I am…reading on in hopes of…

HA HA HO?

So much for forward momentum.

scuttlebutt99, I can guess at various scenarios, but the Nappingville PD has done very little investigation and all of it sloppy. That leaves no proper clues for a mystery investigation. No proper ID on the corpse, no cause of death, no nothing. We don’t even know why the cops who found Butterfly McCorpse instantly associated him with D-cubed! Instead Thick follows unvoiced hunches.

Every scenario I can imagine has fatal flaws. Are the Three Street Stooges holographs? Then how can they hand out money and see people? Blah.

scuttlebut99, I think you have put your finger on what this ’story’ (if I can call it that), IS all about. There is no effort here to ENTERTAIN readers - ONLY confuse them each and every day.

I’ts dawned on me, (perhaps not yet on Locher) * —* “what’s the real ’mystery’ is, in the tale (?) And gosh (!) there you have just spotted it — ”WHAT THE HECK’S the CRIME” ??

And before this is all over Tracy will start ‘accusing’ people right and centre of their CRIME all products of his feverished mind with a wild scramble to invent supporting ‘evidence’

At the end Locher will put out his usual flash back panels, encased in - ’memory clouds’ to EXPLAIN everything he had concealed in the story, all to ‘wrong foot’ us - e.g. http://www.gocomics.com/dicktracy/2010/07/15/ and http://www.gocomics.com/dicktracy/2007/05/14/

with http://www.gocomics.com/dicktracy/2007/05/13/

It would have been so much simpler to have shared all the end of story information with readers DURING the story arc, thereby avoidIing weeks of misdirection, confusion, apathy and flaming resentment from his readers.

With a little ‘common sense’ he could have provided considerably more entertainment for his readers !

well there is a crime but macthick is not doing much of anything about it. someone murdered the guy in the swamp with the remnants and the butterfly tat.

Thanks for the links, Sydney Phillips.

I zipped through the summer ‘07 arc, the one ripped off from “Telefon.” Pity that Thick doesn’t have a tenth of Charles Bronson’s talent for versatile facial expressions.

My guess du jour keeps coming back to the notion of an activist conspiracy, which Thick knows about through a combination of hunches and withheld information. All of the activities we’ve seen are supposed to be clues toward the conspiracy. If I’ve guessed right please shoot me, because I could not bear the thought that I understand Locher’s imagination.

Exactly, billdi. Butterfly McCorpse is dead–murdered! And one thing’s for sure, somebody did it!

I don’t know what’s stupider: this comic strip, or the fact that I keep reading it in search of some vague hint of its former greatness.

Maybe they come back hoping itll get better. Or they come back to see just how much worse itll get. Myself, I keep hoping for better but my gosh this is nowhere near as good as the original Dick Tracy. This is downright horrible matter of fact. Only good thing is reading the comments here.

I read on here that Locher is biding his time until he no longer has to write the strip. Anyone know when that is and who takes over from there? Or will the strip just end? Be nice if theyd start a ‘Dick Tracy Classics’ and start over again from the beginning, show people Dick wasnt always this dense.

NVash, you can find some of the real Dick Tracy here:

http://www.ilovecomixarchive.com/

Comics are meant to be entertaining. It would be great if the present form of the strip had visually interesting artwork and told credible stories. Until then, there’s a different kind of entertainment in critiquing the strip. The running commentaries are a good way to vent frustration over what seems a deliberate effort to insult the readership.

Locher is showing a sense of irony.

Thanks BillThompson, Ill definitely check that out. I got some of the old Chester Gould books recently and loved them. He could really tell a story that would keep people coming back. This Dick, I dont know, maybe hes gone senile. He has been fighting crime since the 20s.