Any hopes of social acceptance for Boog hang on the slender thread of his mother’s ability to keep his school stuffed with snacks. Bake, Hoogie, bake! Bake like you’ve never baked before!
So the new Dick Tracy writer-artist team of Joe Stanton and Mike Curtis have been on the job for more than a year now, and I haven’t been discussing the strip here as often as I did in its previous iteration, mostly because the art is pretty good and the plots are no longer marked by incomprehensible dream-like lunacy punctuated by horrific violence. If I have one major criticism, it’s that so much of the plots seem to have been aimed at assembling all of the strip’s classic villains into one overarching criminal syndicate, which has gotten a bit tiresome to those of us not up on eighty years of Tracy lore. But over the past few week’s the assembled baddies have been caught up in an epic gunfight as Tracy and the cops bust in to make arrests, with a fair amount of carnage ensuing.
Which makes me wonder — what if the last 15 months have just been carefully putting all the pieces of the storied Dick Tracy rogues gallery in place just so they can all be killed in a crazed, botched police raid? And then the new team can say “Ha ha, this strip is ours now, we’re going to make up all sorts of new crazies?” Probably won’t happen, but it would amuse me. Plus I kind of want to see this Indonesian action film called The Raid about a police raid on a huge gang-controlled high-rise tower that goes horribly wrong but in practice I probably don’t have the stomach for that much movie violence so maybe this Dick Tracy is as close as I’m going to actually tolerate.
Not that we should just open the floodgates to baboons, or, worse, Australians. Luann and Quill finally advanced from endless flirting to light making out, and within minutes, the U.S. government moved to deport his entirely family, making sure that he keeps his filthy foreign paws off of virtuous American girls.
Oh, what’s that, Communist? You’re just a little too busy on this July 4th Freedom America day to admire the US flag? Dick Tracy would like to have some words with you. He’s in the middle of a bloody shootout with Mr. Crime’s gang, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have time to find an enormous American flag and salute it! Those explosions behind him aren’t fireworks; they’re actual gunfire. Dick Tracy won’t let mortal danger get in the way of his patriotism!
OK, while we have yet another example of B.C. predator vs. prey antics, with implied family dynamics among eusocial insects to boot, and I’m on the record as enjoying this sort of thing in the past, I’m afraid I cannot fully approve of today’s B.C. Mostly I feel puzzled by the role in the narrative of the tree-dwelling … bear … thing. Did the bear-thing put up the fake foreclosure signs in an attempt to con the bees out of their hive and acquire the delicious honey within? Are the foreclosure signs actually meant to not be fake, and the bear-thing is an agent of the bank that holds the mortgage note on the beehive? Is this some kind of opaque political allegory about the ongoing housing crisis? Does the bear-thing have a primitive axe? When did bears start learning how to use tools? Should we be scared of an army of tool-weilding bears, come to take what’s rightfully theirs, like beehives and our foreclosed homes and who knows what else?
One of the things I think is funny and interesting in B.C. is its mix of sentient predator and sentient prey animals, actually depicted preying on each other, as with the ants and anteaters. I find today’s strip particularly intriguing on this score. If you don’t really think about it much and accept the outside-the-anthill perspective the strip gives you, it’s a silly bit about an anteater getting his tongue tied in a knot, ho ho! But take a minute to imagine the scene inside: the gathering of innocent ants, going about their business within the larger colony, when suddenly an enormous, slimy tentacle bursts through the wall of their home, slithering to and fro. Who knows how many hundreds of unfortunates were snared by foul mucus that covers the monstrous thing and dragged back screaming into its snout, where they will be digested, alive, in agony? The carnage continues until one heroic young ant defeats the beast using the skills he’s learned in his scout group; the monster retreats in confusion, but the colony members look around their shattered home, weeping for their loved ones, wondering how they’ll be able to put their lives back together.
Any hopes of social acceptance for Boog hang on the slender thread of his mother’s ability to keep his school stuffed with snacks. Bake, Hoogie, bake! Bake like you’ve never baked before!