Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for January 23, 2025

Roloc Bard?… Color Drab?

Desperate men with “seclusions” of grandeur.

Good morning™, everyone!

Drab colored character, that Roloc Bard. Congrats on the not-too-knowledgeable colorist for getting that right. This strip has a lot of history for people who work on it to acknowledge. I commend Eric for tying this into stories of the past in this strip, an impressive achievement for a guest writer.

Tracy seems to be holding on to the car to avoid slipping. He’s got to stop drinking on the job.

I don’t wear hats. (I still have a wonderful amount of natural hair!) Is it normal to keep your hat on while driving? I would think you would take it off. Just wondering.

Good morning™, Surprise Bomb Discoveries !

Dicky’s hot on the trail now !  That doc was a hippie before it became a thing. Nice lifelike rendering of Tracy strapping in.

If Tracy goes back that far he should be over 100 years old.

The one and only time you could have the opportunity to tell DT to belt up.

So a Xylon Bomb eh? Probably powerful enough to reduce that entire city block into a giant crater.

If the mayor and governor are supposed to be there, that means Junior is trying to execute an assassination plot for some insane reason.

Who’s gonna pop up next? Yoggi Yammi?

So the bomb is in the clock?

“Drab Color” Took me a while, I’m slow today!

Somebody needs to award neil with a lifetime supply of chapstick for all the tuchas smooching going on…it took 367 weeks of non movement, haphazard, disjointed, non interesting storytelling to get to this point…they mention pruneface three times and xylon TWICE, and suddenly this muck is Pulitzer prize worthy?

“My old enemy Pruneface,” who died in 1943. Which is when the strip was concerned with xylon – which Tracy references. Making Tracy, as billyk75 points out, well over a century old.

You’d think being impaled on a flag pole would be enough to kill anyone permanently, but no, he was reanimated in 1983. (With a nice joke in the strip, Pruney sees Tracy and exclaims, “You haven’t changed at all!”) Tracy still hasn’t changed.

And, once again Pruneface is killed.

If this strip were only referencing the reanimated Pruneface Tracy would not have heard of Xylon.

And you can’t retcon this to set it in a later period (Pruneface working for the Russians to get Xylon during the cold war) because the story began with the World War II backstory.

If I hadn’t already suspected this story hadn’t been well thought out before I would think it now… But I think my doubts began to arise in November.

This yawner is still struggling on I see .

MOVIE QUOTE

“Man, you coulda taken a fair share like the rest of us! But no,you hadda grab up the whole scene,Baby!!”

Dick Shawn—-IT’S A MAD,MAD,MAD,MAD WORLD—1963

Lee is “the new kid on the block” where Xylon is concerned, so it’s logical she’d ask the question.

A rather unflattering picture of Prof.Roloc Bard, who was NOT a “mad scientist”. You’d look like that,too,if you were held prisoner in a dank underground chamber for years.

He looked better after they got him cleaned up.

He “sprinkled” bombs? What does that mean? Does it mean he hid them? Does it mean he peed on them? I am not familiar with that word in this context.

Also, deleting the word, “yet,” from the final panel would make Dick sound more like the way a normal person talks. When normal people speak to each other, the conversation is more casual and colloquial and sounds less like something from Thor.

Er, Tracy, there could be more than one. Did you ever think of that? Whoever said it yesterday was correct. The writer writes dialogue for Tracy but it is not in Tracy’s vernacular nor method of phrasing.

Exactly how old is Tracy supposed to be, in universe? He remembers the war?

Click it or ticket!

A tempting treat for the kiddies (aka Pop Rocks), though at megaton level.

Roloc is ugly but she has dreamy eyes.

1- LEE: What’s a Grecian Urn, Dick? DT: I can’t play ancient jokes right now! I’m thinking!

2- LEE: Wow. Don’t strain your brain! What about? DT: Two things actually. One, I met this chick – real ugly but she had gorgeous eyes. Made my heart go boom! And two…

3- : …I wonder if the new Administration will eliminate seatbelts? Such a nuisance and a ‘uge intrusion into our lives by the nanny state! They even almost killed Sam once when he forgot to unbuckle and tried to run into the deli and nearly hung himself! PLUS…

I can never remember how they work. Is this right…?

Collins dropped the hint in 1983. EC followed up in 2024:

Https://I.postimg.Cc/sXLmPJnh/Xylon-Bomb.jpg

Eh, you better shadow Dr. Roloc’s eyes around as shown in the artwork of Chester Gould with more cheekbones!!

And about that 1983 story—-Tracy was more steamed at the FBI for holding out on him than he was at Wendy Wichel for exposing the secret