Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for March 13, 2022

Some say that imitation is strong flattery sincere

This mug may look like Tonsils yet there’s naught but thin veneer

Upon a long-dead singer now in Vitamin’s employ

Who has the gestures and the voice that few claimed to enjoy.

He caught the eye of one hot gal, the star known as Dot View

She tried to make a man of him but what did Tonsils do?

Got bushwhacked by grim gangsters who nearly took his life

Something snapped in Tonsils. Killed a good man. Harmed his wife.

Mr. Crime was truly slime. He blackmailed the young singer

“Kill Dick Tracy or you’re dead!” How’s that for a harsh zinger?

He took a shot. Killed Tracy, not. Again the tide did turn

The crime boss he was none too pleased. So soon did Tonsils learn

How it does feel to be a meal of a fish with teeth like knives

A hungry barracuda known to swim, eat, and end lives.

Good morning™, music fans!

I’m not sure what Vitamin Flintheart sees in a celebrity impersonator who impersonates Tonsils, a Dick Tracy character from 1952. Tonsils’ career started when his manager “discovered” his energy and good looks, and “convinced” at gunpoint a night club owner and a radio station to let him perform.

Tonsils couldn’t sing the tune or remember the words of the song that was written for him, so I don’t know if he ever really deserved the “legendary” status that Vitamin ascribes to him, even after lots of practice singing that song. One person described Tonsils’ performance as “so bad it was good.”

Max Allan Collins has written that Tonsils’ signature song, “The Rainbow Turned Muddy When You Turned Me Down” may be an imitation of “The Little White Cloud That Cried” by Johnnie Ray and The Four Lads:

https://youtu.be/ON4KBqk3kak

It appears that the backup band is called “The Barracudas.”

Good grief. We’re missing Wichita already!

Yeti! Come back Yeti!!

Hmmmm……..

Good morning™, Let down stories !

Soory (§) if I come across as jaded and avengerish but the characters referenced are mostly, or all, done at a time when I was out of touch with the strip. That, and Mark’s story seemed to start off with more of a bang. I am waiting for my interest to build as I adjust back to the writings from “regular army”.

.

(§) For Neil.

Shelley is maintaining the looks of Vitamin and Coffee.

“And now for something completely different.”

(And welcome back, Mike!) With the fate of Yeti left undetermined for now, and with today’s strip focusing on Vitamin, Coffee, and the impersonator of a very memorable character from a classic Gould story, it appears we’ve reached the start of a new story. When I’ve decided a new story’s started, I do a list of every Tracy story on GoComics. Unfortunately, soon after I started doing this GC imposed a stupid, asinine character limit of only 2000 characters which includes every letter, space, punctuation, & html, which means I have to do this over several posts. I’ll do my initial introduction in this post and start the list in the next one, because otherwise, I can’t even get past the second year.

My notes are fairly simple. Just my name for the story (usually the name of the main villain or villains, unless they just aren’t the emphasis) followed by the dates the story began and ended. If someone was the main villain for more than one story, I add a “II” and so on to emphasize this. If more than one villain from a past story are in the same story committing major crimes, I include them altogether. Finally, for the 4 cases of more than one villain with the same name (Chameleon, Mr. Crime, Shaky, the Ace of Spades) I add, “The Second” in front of their names.

Minit Mysteries Note: at the request of people who wanted to see these listed here, I’ve decided to make a separate post for them to keep the listing of Mike Curtis stories in as few posts as possible.

At the start of the GoComics archive, the writer was the late Mike Kilian. Personally, I like his work on Tracy and think he’s very underrated. At the very least, he knew how to tell a story in the daily strip format where every day, something happens that moves the story along, a quality his successor sorely lacked. I recommend anyone here who hasn’t read these stories to check them out.

TBC cuz GC decided to suck now

At least Mark got to the point. Mike’s back and from the look of things, we’re in for another six month haul. This story will still be going by the time that Elvis movie comes out in June.

Vitamin is back!

Vitamin Flintheart…just like “Poltergeist”…he’s back! This singer…does he have dice in his hands…oh I know he is being billed as….the Octopus. Or he is reviving a 60’s dance craze known as “the jerk”.

My first thought was “Here we go again with another re-hash!” But, I know I must give this time to see where it is going. And Shelley’s take on Tonsils’ moving arms, combined with Shane’s colors, is very good.

If the back up band is really named “the Barracudas” then we have very strong irony here, considering the demise of the original Tonsils.

Tonsils? Oh good lord (giggles)

I’m not sure how you can stop the other story where it was yesterday and have Tracy and Sam part of this one. They’re in the middle of staking out sewers.

As the “Yeti” story arc was ending (?)… I had a feeling that a Vitamin story would be following…

Good observation by Vitamin. If he were alive he’d be a living legend….instead of a dead legend

Well, it sure ain’t Mumbles…

According to the Dick Tracy wiki this is the song Tonsils is destroying:

https://youtu.be/ON4KBqk3kak

“Don’t look at me!!

Well, Seems Mike’s gonna give us an interesting storyline – whatever it may be – for his return, but it seems the last storyline just ended too abruptly. (Even if it wasn’t really my “cup of tea”.)

Vitamin again? It’s a bitter, past expiration date, pill to swallow

1-COFFEE LATTE: Putcher pants on Old Timer! You gotta see this act I got lined up for your Ed Sullivan Show Tribute!

2-VITAMIN DEFICIENCY: How exciting! Frank Sinatra? Dean Martin? Not Sammy Davis Jr. I hope – you know he’s…

3-COFFEE LATTE: Dead? They’re all dead you old fossil. No I got something bigger than them!

4-VITAMIN DEFICIENCY: Ummm. That person in the wife-beater sure reminds me of Sammy Davis Jr for some reason…

COFFEE LATTE: Will you forget about Sammy already??? I got you the singing sensation, the genetically engineered offspring of Astro Boy and Archie…

5-ASTRO ANDREWS!!!

VITAMIN DEFICIENCY: MY GAWD MAN! He looks like he’s hopped up on those bennie pills!

COFFEE LATTE: Yeah well, you should know that we’ll be handing those out to anyone who comes to your lame show so that we don’t have to hire people to wake up the audience when the curtain rings down.

VITAMIN: Harumpf. Fine. So long as they can be charged to the Producer.

COFFEE: That’s you. VITAMIN: I wondered to whom I owed my appreciation for another opportunity to tread the boards! Thank you, me!

COFFEE: Yeah. Let’s get you back to your nap, shall we? Sigh. Another nail in the coffin of my career…

Yeti still lives…Tracy and Sam trudge forward…Guest writer leaves…enter VitaminFlintheart…Is that all there is, sings Peggy Lee!

@Bob Oscar..Okay you’ve made your Go Comics point ad infinitum, move on

Ah, yes. A Jimmy Olsen impersonator.

Who or what is the guy in the last panel? Or who or what is he supposed to be?

Archie?

What’s wrong with that poor man’s arms?

When I first read the Tonsils continuity, in a reprint book printed by Harvey Comics, I thought Gould was riffing on Frank Sinatra, who was said to have ties to Organized Crime, since Tonsils’ “manager” was a hood with grandiose ideas. However, it has been clarified since that it was probably this Johnnie Ray guy, whom I had never heard of.

The links posted by some of our fellow commenters took me to a live video of Johnnie Ray, and I can definitely see where Gould got the idea for the ridiculous hand movements, although, of course, he exaggerated them considerably for Tonsils.

For some reason the coloring of this isn’t what it should be. Shelley thinks one of the color channels didn’t get processed correctly. Here is a link to a Facebook posting showing the way this Sunday should look.

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=5627500670599914&set=gm.4897466866987060

We will see if GoComics will change it. They should have the correct file.

Happy 101st birthday to the legendary Al Jaffee!

Ready for the next adventure!

Hmm…the Cudas…must be a garage band looking to make their big break at Vitamin’s theater. Maybe there will a record executive in the audience on opening night just waiting to sign them up.

Jimmy olsen on loan from superman?

Welcome back, Mike! (And, again, thanks to Mark for a well-done job.)

I have no problem with an “establishing” sequence to set up the new story. I do not, however, care much for or about the “Tonsils” imitator. Maybe he will turn out to be just cannon fodder for the villain of the piece (would it be rude of me to say “hopefully”?). Vitamin and Coffee are regular members of the supporting cast of the Tracy epic, so they have their part to play here in setting up whatever context is necessary for the coming criminal activity….

Wherever Dot View is now,I’ll bet she’s still beautiful.

It took 60 years for justice to be done.Second graders could have figured out in advance what would happen to Panda.Still fun to watch,though.

Oh,the pool water turned bloody when it gulped him down…….