Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for May 04, 2013

Husband, yes. Brother, basically a suicide.

BUT, great to have her back in the strip!

She’s a tad bitter.

One other comment…either Staton’s Notta isn’t that good a representation, or he’s honestly showing her age…I’d say the latter is true.

Good Morning, Margueritem! And a preemptive Good Morning to VistaBill! Enjoy both your comments.

Good morning, cpalmeresq and margueritem. And VistaBill I’m sure at some point. Notta does seem bitter!

Good morning to all of you!

“Both dead by your hands, Tracy.”Doesn’t seem like she’s reformed, does it?

But you know, if a cop in real life ended up killing half the criminals he encountered there’d be major problems, lets face it….

Good morning all!Notta’s memory is pretty selective. Yeah, Tracy shot at her husband, but so did Sam as I remember. And George shot at them first, so it’s not like his death was in cold blood.

She does have the same look as in the Space Coupe caper. Maybe a hint that she’ll be driving a Space Coupe once again?

It appears Notta’s going to be a player in this story. What role to play, though? Also, Purdy is “dead”? I had heard we would be seeing him. ???

Lizz looks a little nonplused in the third panel.

I think Staton has done a great job staying true to Gould’s visions of his characters. Notta Chin Chillar has always remained one of my all time favorite Tracy characters. I just can’t believe she is back in the strip after all these years. What a THRILL! This keeps getting better and better each day!

Good morning all…

Will we see Moon Maid again tomorrow?

I keep wondering what Notta’s role is going to be in this story, if any. Stealing a Space Coupe would seem right up her alley, but she’d probably want to get paid big money for that. In the meantime, what does she do for a living? Has she gone straight? And will we see Purdy after all?

Willy007, in response to yesterday’s last comment.<h1>Text</h1> =

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Of course.

If it’s flying the space coup that someone wants from Notta, maybe it’s not money she would want in return…

First, thanks to the several people who tried to help me with this text formatting problem. Also, thanks for the suggestion to remove the “test messages,” though I didn’t get them until this morning. (As a rule, I have shut down by 8 AM local, either to do other errands or to go to bed like all good little night workers) Apologies for leaving such a mess on the board.Ray Toler: Oh me, oh my, how the time goes by (John Hartford).

Your assessment about the Trib is probably correct; after all, you are there now, not I. I was there in 1968 and those events did take a toll on everybody in Chicago. I can attest that, at the time, the papers were fairly rigid – Tribune was Republican and Sun-Times was Democrat (the Daily News seemed more neutral than any of the other papers in town, I suppose why my family preferred it – the Trib was only for Dick Tracy and Smokey Stover). But 1968 did pretty much steal the thunder of both parties, which showed when I got my hands on local rags from small towns like Panama City, FL, and compared them with the Trib. And who knows? From the sounds of it, the effects of those years have lasted with the Trib to this day.

Though I still have to chuckle at the events of 1996, the year WFMT almost ended up being yet another TMS property! Oh, how the fur flied!

And to the many who exchanged notes from Dick Tracy biographies and other stuff: Funny being on the “back end” of yet another “generation gap,” for generation gap appears to be the only way to describe it.

Old fogies then didn’t like Moon Maid; the younger generation not yet speaking out. Today, the former younger generation is the old fogies who want her return.

One more possible spin on the whole subject:

“Urban crime” may have been Tracy’s “bread and butter,” but it also can be rather dreary. I remember the Locher drawing posted by someone a couple months ago, with Tracy in the dirt with rats in the corner of each panel. Well, detective work is dirty work, no surprise here, but the dreariness of it, with no relief, that may have weighed on at least some of us.

That was even hinted at in Tracy’s speech at Freedom Lake after the death of Sweatbox. Tracy’s there to get the job done, but as many posters noted that day, the job will never really be done.

What a way for “everyone” to be “right” about the Moon Maid subject: Four decades ago, most of the old fogies didn’t want Moon Maid; now we are the “old fogies” who want her back!

“Oh me, oh my, how the time does fly!”

I just caught up on a week’s worth of strips… no real opinion on what’s happening, other than things look bad for Sparkle and Jr’s marriage at this point

Is it my eyes or is her hair pale green?

I turned on the TV this morning to one of the news programs and they were interviewing Jim Lee of DC about his upcoming Superman Unchained comic.

He was discussing how, with iconic characters such as Superman [and as it relates to this board, Dick Tracy] the mythos must constantly be revisited and revised in order to keep the character relevant to a modern audience and to the trends of the times [ a very similar discussion to the one that has been going on here for the last couple of days.]

BTW, according to Jim Lee today is National Free Comic Book Day. So everybody hit the Comic Book stores.

Did anyone notice she has a beard. Or is it a soul patch?

Can’t take the green hair anymore. This is more what it should look like..

I don’t see the criticism of the drawing of Notta in panel 2. Joe and Shelly are more delicate draftsmen and less stylistic than Gould but the profiles look the same to me.

Notta last appeared in the strip around the time of the birth of Honeymoon. Consequently, it has been about 11 or 12 years according to Tracytime. I estimate her current age to be early to mid 40s. I think Joe has aged her accordingly.

She must really love those earrings, necklace and bracelets to still be wearing them after all these years.

There has been much said by critics or historians of Dick Tracy concerning Gould downplaying Moon Maid after Apollo discovered that there was no life on the Moon. Consequently, how could there be a Moon Valley when we know in reality that the Moon is barren?

Gould always considered the Moon inhabitants as another race of humans who evolved a bit differently than the humans on Earth. Honeymoon is evidence of the fact that human and moon DNA are compatible. He also endowed the Moon race with certain racial characteristics. Moon people were generally smaller in stature, they had horns, they had a distinctive appearance to their eyes and eyebrows, the women tended to be shapely, the men tended to be muscular, although some had dark hair the platinum color seemed to be predominant.

This would all indicate that the Moon race and the Earth races have a common evolutionary ancestor.

Gould never explained how the Moon people got to the Moon but we know that once they did get there they didn’t have the resources (titanium in particular) needed by their technology to leave. However, that did not prevent their technology from being able to create and sustain a bubble of oxygen in Moon Valley for their survival on an otherwise barren airless Moon (small scale teraforming). Gould never said or implied that the Moon race originated on the Moon but they had obviously been there long enough to evolve their strange powers but were still close enough to Earth humans to be genetically compatible. This indicates that the Moon race somehow came to the Moon from the Earth in ancient times and had advanced technology even in those days.

Even though the Apollo missions proved that the Moon was lifeless, in a science fiction sense that fact is meaningless if we assume the Moon people came there in ancient times and teraformed their own environment separate from the rest of the Moon.

…..Junior’s marriage in trouble? Well, obviously on legal grounds it isn’t, as his earlier one would have had to be annuled in order for him to marry again. If he prefers having Moon Maid back though, and he’s smart, he plays the “I wanted my daughter to have a mother” card with his current wife. And to be honest, he DID marry her on the presumption Moon M. was dead…….since she’s not, the current Ms. Junior should graciously give him the option of going back to her, the mother of Honeymoon.This is if Moon Maid is NOT a clone………otherwise, it’s simply a physical lookalike without the history or memories…….oh, and I stand by my statement a cop couldn’t kill criminals over and over again in separate incidents totaling double figures without a major uproar…..and I live in California where a lot of them DO seem to be real “quick-draws”….so I’m not naive.

So how many people has this guy killed?

Another version with improved coloring. The friend of mine who does these ought to apply for a job at gocomics. He’s sick of the green hair, too.

ok, i was wrong yesterday.. .tracy and lizz made pretty darn good time getting to the bearded lady’s house. i am impressed… lights and sirens maybe? lol

on a somewhat related note…. HAPPY FREE COMIC BOOK DAY!!! make sure you ALL get to your local comic shop and pick up your free comics today, help support the industry!!!

Some of you have shown us panels from the original story featuring “Notta”, and she had two very wide mood swings where Tracy was concerned. Today, we see her throwing a fit and wielding a knife at the very thought of Tracy. But there was a panel showing her and her husband in a calmer mood, talking about how Tracy stood for goodness and right, and how, after talking to him, they felt better. I’m guessing that was when they were on the farm and Tracy had promised to try to rescue them if they worked with him on the capture of “Piggy” And now, in the current story, she is quite cold toward him again.

Ken, yes, Notta’s feelings about Tracy fluctuated wildly during her original story. The scene where she’s wielding the knife came early, when Tracy and Diet were chasing her and her husband in a separate Space Coupe. The Chin Chillars were out of food and water, and she pulled out the knife in frustration. The other scene you mentioned occurred months later at Piggy’s farm. After escaping Tracy, Notta and George sought refuge with Piggy, but he turned them into slaves. Meanwhile, Sam and Tracy tracked down the stolen Space Coupe to Piggy’s farm and were spying it out when Notta and George flagged them down. Tracy offered to rescue them if they would assist the police in taking down Piggy. The Chin Chillars happily agreed, and in the aftermath, Notta and George had this conversation:To explain a little further about Notta’s change of heart, you need to understand what happened to her after she and George took refuge with Piggy. She began playing a dangerous game with Piggy by flirting with him in private. Piggy took the bait and quickly turned Notta into his private plaything, giving her the nickname “house mother”:However, as Piggy became more obsessed with Notta, he grew more and more determined to get rid of her beard. She refused to comply, so Piggy eventually ordered his men to shave it off:The botched shave and resulting humiliation for Notta sent George over the edge. He vowed to kill Piggy someday, and eventually he followed through. Unfortunately for George, Tracy and Sam showed up just as he was ready to kill Piggy, and after a wild shootout, George was killed, leaving Notta a widow. She was sent to prison and has now been released.

It occurred to me that Tracy and Lizz’s visit with Notta is a follow up to this strip — from way back on October 9. Not sure if anyone had remembered this.