What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Is Marty Moon Going To Get Killed? December 2018 – March 2019

I’m happy to help you catch up on Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. If it’s later than June 2019 when you read this there’s probably a more up-to-date plot recap at this link. That might help you more.

Also my mathematics blog looks at comic strips regularly. Like, it did so earlier today. You might like them. I help the blog out with some of this looking.

And a warning before I get started. The antagonist in the major storyline of the past three months is presented with multiple personalities. If you aren’t comfortable with mental health problems used for comic-strip villainy this way, you are right. Skip the plot recap below the ‘Continue reading’ link, and we’ll catch back up in June.

Dick Tracy.

30 December 2018 – 23 March 2019

I last checked in Dick Tracy during a Minit Mystery. Donnie Pitchford wrote the sequence. He, among other things, draws the Lum and Abner comic strip. The mystery began the 30th of December, and ran each day through the 13th of January. It was not your classic Ellery Queen-style bit of piling up suspects and stories and finding who said something erroneous. It was more a very compressed story of a mad bomber sending poison gas bombs, and Tracy finding them by … well, detective work.

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Comic Strips I Just Don’t Have Enough Time In My Life To Spend Any Of It Reading

I know this is going to be my most controversial list ever but I must report what is true.

1. Mallard Fillmore.
2. Those Sunday Pearls Before Swine strips where it’s 40 panels of endless word balloons to set up the characters in the last panel telling the cartoonist he should get a real job instead of writing puns.
3. Any strip trying to do the “Who’s On First” routine with band names that hasn’t noticed the whole premise crashes when you remember they’re The Who, and for that matter The Guess Who.
4. Any strip doing its own version of I Am The Very Model Of The Modern Major-General. Also any non-comic-strip doing its own version of I Am The Very Model Of The Modern Major-General. We have all that we need for what we’ve been doing.
5. Zack Hill.
6. Any strip that’s zinging Modern Art and how it’s all these non-representational paintings and display fixtures that look like clutter.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped four points in trading that just went to reinforce everyone arguing that everyone and everything is doomed and will never be any good again which, remember, was set off by people noticing this is the highest the Another Blog, Meanwhile index has ever been. It’s enough to make you wonder if there’s any gratitude in the world anymore or has it always been like this? Don’t answer, those who remember whether it’s been like this.

160

Unintended Results: Books About Movie Musicals Edition

Stimulus:

Just Imagine was a million-dollar musical comedy set in the far future of 1980, with futuristic gadgets, a trip to Mars, and a Sleeper-like shlub waking from a fifty-year coma. Unfortunately, and not infrequent in 1930, the good ideas were mitigated by workaday routine, a wan score, and not quite enough wit. It starred a Swedish-dialect comic called El Brendel. Remember the name and tremble.

Footnote in the book Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter, Richard Barrios.

Response:

Seeing Just Imagine is the most important thing I can do this week and I must know everything there is to know about the work of Swedish-dialect comic El Brendel.