Always thought Dick Tracy was just crime and detective stories with weird gangsters

Chester Gould went insane just before Apollo. Transistors finally made wrist radios feasible and he thought he was a genius at technological forecasting.
So there were magnetic spaceships and aircars and atomic lasers and certain limited areas of the moon had an atmosphere and harbored an advanced civilization.
Tracy Jr. married Moon Maid and they had a kid. As soon as Gould retired the new writers had Moon Maid killed by a bomb meant for Tracy and all that nonsense was forgotten as soon as possible.

The current team (who rescued the strip from a long doldrum) has re-introduced a lot of the old stuff and we get guest shots by other characters owned by the Syndicate. For example, in today's strip Annie is talking with Honeymoon (Moon Maid's aforementioned daughter. Note the antennae.) and Brenda Starr is due this coming summer.

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>they blew her up

Well that's a fucking waste.

Here's where the Space Coupe was brought back. It was mothballed because its magnetic drive was "bad for the environment". As if that would deter Trump from building a fleet for his Space Force.

Moon Maid is also back, sort of. An Earth girl with her incredible figure (but an ugly face) had plastic surgery to turn her into a duplicate of the original and, through gene-splicing by a criminal scientist, acquired Lunar electric powers. The process, however, erased all memories of her past life and she calls herself Mysta Chimera.

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Here's Moon Maid, version 2.

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Here's Hotshot Charlie, Sidekick of Terry -- the one who hung around with The Pirates.
I think the blonde in the background is Burma.
I know the dark-haired poster is The Dragon Lady.

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Wow

And she had a daughter (bottom row)

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Last one.
We don't see the guy in shadow clearly (for reasons of copyright), but I'm sure we can all guess who that is.

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Actually the Moon period was done because Chester was pissed off at what he saw as the various Supreme Court proclamations that seriously curbed police abilities to fight crime/gave guaranteed rights to the accused that curtail the ability of the police to use violence and force and manipulation to extort confessions/get evidence.

Chester basically said "Fuck It" and relocated the entire strip to the moon as a result of him not being able to deal with the changes in society and turned Dick Tracy into a hardcore Sci-Fi strip. It lasted several years and longtime fans HATED the period with a passion and Chester moved shit back to Earth by the end of the 60s once the syndication company threatened to just rerun old Dick Tracy strips if he didn't fix shit.

For decades, the Moon Period was embargoed from reprints and as mentioned, one of the very first things Max Collins did when he finally took over the strip in the early 80s was kill off Moon Maiden (who made the move to Earth and had her alien origins downplayed by that point). People who wrote various books on the history of the strip always bashed the living hell out of the Moon Period, so it became a meme of sorts that was passed down through the decades with Dick Tracy fans calling the moon period the "dark ages"; even though they had never been reprinted EVER and most fans not even being born when they ran.

It wasn't until the last couple of years, when the definitive case files finally got to the moon period, that the Moon era strips were seen for the very first time since they were originally printed. And ironically, response from people who had never seen the strips and/or only vaguely know of them from their reputation as a franchise killer? LOVE them. Which in turn has created a Bendis-level schism in the Dick Tracy fandom over those who still hate the strips and those who loved them and who are currently trying to villify the haters of them as "toxic fandom"

>black sclera
yesss

You've convinced me with this post...I need to find the complete run of classic Dick Tracey and see what it's all about

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>one of the very first things Max Collins did when he finally took over the strip in the early 80s was kill off Moon Maiden
He's always been a cunt. He co-created Ms. Tree so he gets a pass but all he had to do was move her out of the story.

He also pissed all over Vera Alldid, Collins did some good Tracy stuff but his fanboyism was pretty toxic at times for the strip

Why are some writers like that?
>I DON'T LIKE THING
>instead of ignoring it, just shit all over it and kill characters off, not a second thought to the fact that MAYBE the things you hate are loved by others who would probably rather see those things just written out with the possibility of coming back some time in the future than seeing your autistic ragefest against whatever you consider "not muh"

I can believe the part about Gould being angry police could no longer simply beat confessions out of suspects. He was a Conservative in the Harold Gray tradition.

But I wouldn't call the period "hardcore" SF. Flash Gordon and John Carter were more "realistic".

And the Moon Period strips have never been difficult to read on-line. They were, after all, in the newspapers and aficionados scanned and posted them.

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I’ve actually got that comic where she dies. This book was my introduction to Dick Tracy. The Collins Casefiles vol 1

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Easy enough. As I just said, they're all available for reading and downloading.
Look for ilovecomixarchive
If I try to post the actual URL, Yea Forums thinks it's spam.
The site also has runs of other classic strips.

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Thanks

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Here’s where they completely and absolutely say there is to be no more contact between the moon and Earth, completely ending all references to that era of Tracy comics

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DC cameos are pretty common and usually end badly for the guest.

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The term "mean spirited " gets tossed around a lot, but considering what you just said about Collins attitude, this is fucking mean spirited.
Her fucking daughter is right there

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They eventually (modern era) return to the Moon and find the Lunarians are all gone. This was before they learned the "Moon Maid" who'd been spotted was Mysta Chimera.
Incidentally, Junior Tracy had re-married in the meantime and, as I recall, his new wife wasn't thrilled by "Moon Maid's" reappearance..

We eventually learn the Lunarians had moved elsewhere and are alive in some undisclosed place. A few _may_ be on Earth. Obviously, the current writer couldn't keep up the pretense that there were habitable places on the Moon. It's been too well mapped by now.

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I used to think bdsrndb was but it actuslly

come again

I think the more interesting aspect of that isn't that the strip went in such an odd direction but that it did so with the original creator still on board.

Usually that sort of thing happens to a legacy strip after new people come on board and try to revive a stagnant property. More often than not, the readers wholly reject that change and the strip moves right back to where it was; like Snuffy Smith moving to the big city or Little Orphan Annie shifting other to fantasy-horror in the early '80s.

Dick Tracy went through the process but during the creator's own run on the comic which is much less common.

Though I do wonder if Moon Maid would have been phased out even more quickly if the television pilot produced by the producer of the Batman series was picked up.

jesus fucking christ. Thats not modern?

Shes insane looking lol

It is a nice nostalgic adaptation to make sense of it all.

bumping a based thread

>And she had a daughter (bottom row)

After the Ugly Crystal story, I would be 0% surprised if they decided to make Honeymoon a lesbian.

Moon Maid was odd but considerably less so than Hemlock Holmes.

youtube.com/watch?v=igMx2-WmOiw

Dick Tracy has had a much more complicated story and development than I expected.

wtf I almost want to read Dick Tracy now

That UPA series was pretty much just that short but with different detectives; Tracy would take an assignment, give it to an assistant, and show up at the end.

Holmes was the weirdest one of the four; two of the others were racial stereotypes and the fourth was basically just a fat cop who talked to a beatnik.

There was also a live action show in the early '50s, the Filmation series mentioned earlier from the early '70s, a failed pilot in the late '60s with a hilariously awful intro song, serials throughout the '30s, and four films from RKO in the '40s.

The best known of the latter was Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome which starred Boris Karloff as Gruesome. The latter was eventually put into the comics by the current team in a story where the character winds up getting cast in Arsenic and Old Lace as the homicidal cousin who looks like Boris Karloff.

Warren Beatty still holds the rights to any live action version of the character and even did an in-character interview as Tracy on TCM to help hang onto them.

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All much more complicated than the straight-forward detective stories (with strange criminals) that I expected from reading a few of the newspaper strips.

>straight-forward detective stories (with strange criminals)

Even those can get pretty wi;d, especially these days.

Like these two for instance.

Abner Kadaver is a former TV horror host that was forced into retirement because management replaced him with a much younger fan of his. Since then, he's become a contract killer who used a bunch of different methods including a Haunted House full of lethal gimmicks and may well be unkillable himself.

Rikki Mortis is his Goth henchwoman/girlfriend who helped perform some of those contract killings using a hearse themed monster truck that would smash cars.

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I love that concept. I should try and read it myself.

Kadaver's first appearance is here:

gocomics.com/dicktracy/2011/10/30

So they lived in a "Grand Canyon" on the dark side of the Moon.
Even when the comic came out it was scientifically implausible, but it's fun to think about.
I mean that side of the moon is less uniform.
They'd be in a radio silent zone.

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Me too...except without the "almost"
I know what I'm doing today

>I'd also heard for years that Lee & Buscema's Silver Surfer was nothing but incomprehensible space opera autism. Surprise! It takes place almost entirely on Earth, has a lot of horror elements (Mephisto, Frankenstein, ghosts) and seems to have been Stan's attempt at creating an underground comix/social commentary type of thing, with lots of proto-Hard Travelling Heroes ''relevant'' stories.

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Interesting thread thanks for your input

I don't know if "sense" is the right word.
But I follow and enjoy it under the current team.
Staton and Curtis saved it from cancellation or eternal reruns -- like Annie.

Locher ran it into the ground. His last sequence, before leaving, had Tracy wrestling with someone on the roof of a building and it went on for weeks.

Diet Smith drops his cigar in amazement. Picks it up and resumes smoking. Cancer never worries him. The Space Coupe can withstand atmospheric re-entry because it's made of Titanium and Asbestos.

Moon Maid's father made a comeback. He doesn't worry about cancer either.

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Well unless I knew quite a lot about dick Tracy, I wouldn't have thought the moon maid actually appeared that commonly, even in animation form.

NICE

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Alldid deserves a lot better than the legacy forced upon him by Collins and co. His scenes with Sparkle were one of the rare times Gould managed to make a strong emotional pang in Tracy, something he had failed to do for almost 40 years, it was genuinely touching. And the Collins just ups and changes it all because he shipped Junior with Honeymoon and refused anything against this OTP.

Feels like Staton and Curtis did a better job with this property.

not really, their stories are typically dreadful fan pandering, mostly relying on old characters to witch they make very bizarre retcons too, and the few they do create are so quickly forgotten and poorly planned out that they never leave a mark. It's clear that they're fanboys and care for the property, but they really just don't know how to write. I could go into it but I cba.

Collins, for all his negative traits could at least write, and a good portion of his original villains did manage to stand out, like Art Dekko and the punks.

The highlight of the Stanton era was the bribery arc, but even then, Bribery almost felt like i was reading Deadpool at times. The best oc the duo have created is absolutely Ugly Crystal, who they already seem to have forgotten about.

I should add that while Collins just shafted Alldid, the above strip is S and C, and all his appearances just feel as mean spirited as Moon Maid's car bombing, as if it comes from a place of personal pettiness rather than authorial class.

>Ugly Crystal
you mean Ramona Flowers in a schoolgirl costume?

If they ever do a crossover with Batman I hope Staton draws him like he always does with Earth-Two/Golden Age Batman, since his look would fit right in with the world of Tracy more.

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Yo what? When was she introduced?

dicktracy.fandom.com/wiki/Ugly_Crystal

>Ugly Crystal
>is actually cute

So was her ma >.>

Thats a sexy alien OP

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I'm actually surprised and impressed with Yea Forums for having actual Dick Tracy discussion

I'd like to hear Dick Tracy talk about his moon maid with Dick Grayson and his star wife. Starfire has always been a bit more Dejah Thoris then MoonMaid's 40's housewife.

With Annie coming back into the picture, I expect Crystal to return as well since that arc'll be Honeymoon centric. Not a whole lot of that lately.

We'll never know.
Gould had difficulty drawing "normal" people.

Batman got an off-screen mention in

If any costumed heroes ever guest-starred I'd love to see E-man and Nova. They'd fit right in since Honeymoon also has electromagnetic powers. Heck, I'd even be happy to see PI Michael Mauser collaborate on a case with Tracy. Staton owns the copyrights.

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I remember a strip with the character Kandikane Lane also barefoot on her bed posted in Yea Forums, but I can't find it now.

>Batman got an off-screen mention in

Yeah I know, I think there was also another reference somewhere, too. And a Joker and Harley reference in another strip. I just think that Staton should draw Batman like he does with Earth-Two Batman because the Batman of the 40's has a world that could easily fit in with Dick Tracy.

And she married Vitamin Flintheart -- who must be quadruple her age.
Guess those vitamins which he was always popping really worked!

That's a lot like those stereotypes about 60s-70s cartoons except an actual one. And slightly less hippie.

Ugh!
That is the WORST 'animation' I've seen since FF and Thor cartoons where they just had panels of Jack Kirby's artwork with the dialog balloons replaced by voice-overs.
Even Clutch Cargo must have had a better budget.
People on Yea Forums who complain about CalArts have no idea how lucky they are to have missed 'the old days'.

Dick Tracy's pretty much the only piece of modern media I can think of where everyone smokes and it's not aimed specifically at an adult demographic

Simon Stagg actually appeared in a strip, and was killed off by Ghost Pepper

Had no idea. Captain Marvel and TMNT are other examples of comics surprisingly out there I recall right now.

That barely covers it. There's Terry and The Pirates, Doc Savage, The Shadow, Alley Oop, The Phantom, Snuffy Smith, Funky Winkerbean, Harold Teen... not to mention special guest appearances from George Takei, Jerry "The King" Lawler, Svengoolie, Scott Shaw, Boris Karloff's daughter and the guys who make the Daily Jumble

>Warren Beatty still holds the rights to any live action version of the character and even did an in-character interview as Tracy on TCM to help hang onto them.

This ended up complicating a lot of stuff, for a long time they wanted to do a Dick Tracy comic book but Beatty having the rights might've stonewalled it. I think it wasn't until recent years when they were able to do a comic at IDW.

Yeah, Gasoline Alley characters also had an appearance, I think.

Also a reference to Buckaroo Banzai, and even a human-version of a character from Usagi Yojimbo.

Kinda depressing when you realize it was done by UPA of all studios. It'd be like a garbage flash show done by Cartoon Saloon.

Yeah, right-hand column of

I think Sam Catchem quit.

Cartoon Saloon did start off with Skunk Fu and it got derided as a Kung-fu Panda ripoff.

Every decade in toondom has a dark period

That was done when UPA was really good though and not right at the outset when their quality was still uneven.

Nova was an important part of my puberty.

also god damn is Stiletta Jones hot

>Funky Winkerbean
"Hey Detective Tracy, looks like you just got cancer"

dude you kidding, her whole gimmick in Bribery's outfit was showing some serious leg while her bro robbed em blind

>Moon Unit One
Did Frank Zappa name his daughter after Moon Maid's daughter from a Dick Tracy comic?

I can't argue with that. The Spirit once did a series about comic strip artists having petty fights with each other where Gould had murdered Al Capp over Fearless Fosdick. Eisner drew it but I believe Jules Feiffer wrote it.

Also I'm not totally familiar with Vera (that's a unisex name now?) but I can't stop thinking he's a dig at Rob Liefeld in this incarnation.

No that was from a more recent series of strips.
See in the background the DVD store.

>Hit man ends up an actor
They should make a show about that premise

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And then everyone got cancer the end

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nice to see Joe Staton still working

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As a kid I was always told the TMNT comics were super gritty and serious and just about street level gang wars.

Six issues in they go to space.

This was the full run from the Tracy comic.

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And over in the Funky Winkerbean strip..

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>Golden Age Comic Books
>There's a Dick Tracy comic in there

I forgot, how long did they say Dick Tracy was crimebusting?

it always is.

>that ending for Mrs. Flattop
no fucking fair

sliding time scale

I like how the strip implies Blaze Rize's day job is a professional dominatrix while remaining a family friendly comic strip. They never show her wearing anything other than a pinstripe suit, she never directly mentions domming, steadfastly avoids discussing anything resembling sex, but it's clear as day.
This is literally the most explicit they get. Also damn she's cute.

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Sliding time scale would mean those comics wouldn't exist. It sounds like he's literally been around since the 30's but he and his friends and such don't seem to age up too much.

How the hell did she win that auction? Did they disallow that opening bid by Chester for some reason?

>Even a lot of the ones that were gory like 'Foul Play' saved it for the last page usually. Wertham was a crybaby pussy.
You gotta build suspense. Most horror stories start slow and save the shocker for the end.

Not everything needs to be a zero-effort slasher.

Phone bidding, and I guess she probably had a lot of money because she and Funky run Montoni's (and probably figured John and Crazy will pay her back from selling many of the comics).

Of course, Chester is supposedly incredibly rich so I don't know how she outbid him.

moon maid moon maid can't you see

It should be noted that the Dick Tracy franchise was on it's deathbed when Collins took over and on the verge of being put to death/turned into a reprint strip.

He basically saved it and a lot of the shit he did was necessary in so far as he had to burn the village to save it. He basically saved the strip so it would survive long enough for the Warren Beatty movie being made, as far as keeping it alive.

What fantasy-horror shit did Little Orphan Annie do? I know they had magical characters in the 1930s but I haven't read the 80s strips

One problem with reading Dick Tracy is that a lot of the casefiles are OOP and go for insane bucks (case in point, the volume with Pruneface goes for $100+ due to the fact that it's the uncesored version with all of the gore intact that got cut from all previous reprint books).

Also, there are grey market reprints of various qualities (I bought two such books, a while back that collect the entire Blank saga; partly because they were cheaper than the Casefile volume along with a colorized comic reprint featuring an other infamously censored storyline, the Ms Pruneface Saga)

There was an extended story in '83-'84 where Daddy Warbucks hired a tutor for her.

It was Satan.

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Is there a way online to read Little Orphan Annie, especially the 80s and 90s Leonard Starr era stuff?

I'm not really sure; as a story used to be available on a fan site. GoComics only goes back to 2001.

>infamously censored storyline, the Ms Pruneface Saga
OK now I gotta know why it was censored

Do you remember what the fan site was, maybe it's on archive.org

After poking around a bit on Google, I found it for you.

stuartliss.com/loahp/19831127.html

IIRC Pruneface's wife has a nasty leg spike trap that is pretty gruesome plus some of her kills are super nasty.

wow

That also reminds me of the Brow's death; impaled on an American flag pole. It was so gruesome that every collection of the Brow storyline until the Case Files hardcovers skipped the strips that showed the Brow escaping/getting impaled on said flag pole and end with his arrest

She was pretty inventive.

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What are the best Dick Tracy stories one should read if you are a casual?

I remember when they referenced this back in the 90's.

Best classic Tracy stories:

1. The Blank

2. Pruneface

3. Ms Pruneface

4. The two OG Flattop stories (Flattop was so popular that Chester Gould's editor pulled an audible and forced him to keep Flattop alive; the second Flattop story has the bonus bit of macabre comedy where a kid helps Flattop and promptly dies a horrible death using something he bought with money Flattop paid him to help him out).

5. The Brow, who in the comic strip is a spy and who gets treated as a master manipulator that gets arguably one of the most horrific deaths of the entire strips history

Is there a reason why Beatty is being a prick and holding the movie rights hostage?

IIRC the film was a vanity project for Beatty, who was wanting a franchise for himself to underwrite his more artsy/non-commercial films. Beatty bought the film rights from the strip's owners and took it to Disney and had sequel ideas but the film itself underperformed and Disney (who had the distribution rights) wanted nothing to do with it anymore.

The owners of the comic strip, after a decade of waiting for Beatty to get his sequel off the ground, decided to ask Disney to get the film rights back. They assumed Disney bought them from Beatty as part of the deal to make the movie, but he had wisely kept ownership of them and Beatty refused to even approach another studio to make the sequel as far as him being Disney or no one at all.

This pissed Beatty off and ultimately, Beatty won a summary judgement to a lawsuit from the strip owners, after doing a TV special in character as Dick Tracy that served only to help him keep the rights. Warner Brothers (who owned TCM, which aired it, did it as a favor to Beatty but Beatty's excuse for never following through on taking a sequel to someone not Disney, was that the lawsuit "made it impossible for him to get a deal due to the rights ownership appearing to be muddied". But at this point, he's hording the rights purely for spite and malice.

Wasn't there a period where The Spirit was having adventures in space? How was that received?

I remember Max Collins used to put all the crazy ideas the syndicate wouldn't let him use in Dick Tracy into his creator-owned book, Ms.Tree. Like Little Jesus, a mobster who looked just like Jesus (he ended up crucified in a back alley).

Man, Lucy Lawless would have made a perfect Ms. Tree.

Then backtracked from those space days specifically to get back to the roots of the comic because it was just capitalising on the fads of the era.

Is this "Saw?"

Am I the only one who loves when long running comics go this far off the deep end? To boot, the moon maid is a QT, with a design so complex and out of these world she truly just remains ingrained in your memory. No other characters look like her. Also, good Dick Tracy animated Yea Forumsntent when? That 60s cartoon reeks, and the Archie shorts are the closest we ever really came to a conventional Tracy show.
>Tartokovsky Tracy show when?

I know Moon Maid was divisive among the D.T. fanbase but she didn't deserve to die like that. I've a feeling a future writer will try to retcon her death as a fuck you to Collins.
I vaguely remember a storyline in the '80s where Annie was being soulraped and had a magic rabbit thing.

CARLOS!

Can someone fill me in on what old Sunday strips are still running? I'd love to catch some, but this topic never gets brought up on here despite how pertinent it is to the topic of the board.

Not well.
The Spirit had been going downhill since Eisner quit drawing it and devoted his time to other projects.
Wally Wood drew the Moon sequence and the art was brilliant, but newspaper editors complained it wasn't what they'd contracted for.

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>you'll never see a collaborative effort between Wally Wood and Jack Cole
Really burns my ass

And then Jim Shooter in his Michael Eisner phase decided Marvel had to put Ms. Tree out of commission by making Dakota North Investigations.
Lead. Balloon.

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>where Annie was being soulraped
When did Claremont write LOO

comicskingdom.com/ and gocomics.com/comics/a-to-z
are the major syndicates.
Just scroll through their offerings.

Wood did an amazing job of copying Eisner's style here and I don't just mean "shading by outlining a depression then diagonal hatching" (which Wm. Messner-Loebs used in Journey).

Thanks for the help user
>alley oop is still going
Already my day has been brightened up by this

>alley oop is still going
Life is good

CALLED IT

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Garfield Minus Garfield is in there?
Are all these actual syndicated newspaper strips? I thought it was just a meme.

At the MCU there's always this funny looking screen on a pole with a picture of some villain on it but no one ever mentions the thing. I get that it's an illustrative device metatextually but does it have a name? Is it one of Diet Smith's gizmos?

This thing

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Nothing in modern comics is even close to new. Everything - and I mean EVERYTHING - was done by the time Marvel relaunched the X-Men and in all honesty much of what marvel had since the 60s was repackaged golden age heroes.

>Even when the comic came out it was scientifically implausible
So was a man flying or a child shouting a word and turning into a superhero. Or a man that fell into acid and could stretch afterward.

The Benders had run it into the ground. A new team seems to have taken over within the past year and it looks better. I can't swear to the plotting since I don't follow it, but the art is certainly improved.

For the real deal though, try LOAC Essentials Volume 4: Alley Oop 1939 on Amazon. Bud Plant also had 3 volumes of Hamlin's work., one of which is shown here.

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Those are TV screens. No obvious reason for the funny shape.

Comics were so much simpler back then

>Sammy
aka caucasian Ebony

There's this one-pager where a woke black journalist is interviewing Ebony about him being a racist stereotype. Denny comes by at which point Ebony interrupts to discuss how he trailed a drug dealer, disarmed him, has him tied up in the corner and Ebony's filled out a report Denny can take to Dolan with the perp. Then he turns back to the reporter and replies "What were we talking about, again?"

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It's real. There are even printed-on-dead-trees collections.

Next best thing is Wood over Kirby.
I'm not a fan of Kirby's art but Wood made it all look plausible.

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And comics are recycled myth, legends, and tall tales. Read Ecclesiastes, bud

It's barely recognizable as Kirby. Too bad we'll never see the pencils. No offense to Wood here btw.

I've seen Kirby's pencils, though I can't locate any at the moment. But this gives you an idea who was responsible for what.

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That looks great!
A good inker is worth it!

That sub plot about Sam's wife was so weird. All the emotional beats were well-written, but it was resolved after a fortnight

Blaze Rize and Doubleup had the best relationship. He initially just wanted Blaze to indulge his weird cosplay fetish, she went "fuck no" and yet they eventually bonded over a job neither of them really wanted to the point where they weren't exactly BFFs, but they were on each other's wavelength. I honestly found the scene in the interrogation room when Doubleup pretended not to know who Blaze was to be rather sweet, in a messed-up way.

Also, my interpretation is that Blaze is just kinky in bed as opposed to a professional domme. Hell, she was in a relationship with Notta Fellar, ffs.

>Oneechan

oh shit they know.

This. It stinks, but sometimes you have to cut off an arm so that the body may live. Of course, Staton and Curtis have no reattached the arm using dark sorcery, and yet it still works.
The fact that there still hasn't been any modern reprints of Ms Tree pisses me off to no end.

Those faces are considerably more realistic and less stylized; I had assumed Kirby always drew craggy, compressed heads rather than it being him developing a style. It puts the crap Romita Jr.'s doing in context but doesn't make me respect it any more.
The more I see Doubleup the more based he gets.
>just kinky in bed
It's not interesting to you that she's mentioned a day job more than once but we never find out what it is?

It's weird: they bring her in as this queen bee femme fatale, set up a murder plot against Trey which morphs quickly into kidnapping him to raise him as a replacement for her family, and then in a storyline where she has a perfect working relationship with the Nitrates suddenly the sister kills her in the most unambiguous nonrecoverable way because all this time she's had morals.
Did the Syndicate object so strongly to the baby murder/kidnapping that they actually mandated Stiletta be killed off? Does that happen these days?

>Hell, she was in a relationship with Notta Fellar, ffs.
That whole arc was interesting af. I understand that they couldn't just say "here's a lesbian couple" in a newspaper strip as old as Dick Tracy without boomers losing their shit, but the way they danced around it was actually very well done. That, and having the stone-cold balls to show a homosexual relationship where one of them is clearly abusing the other mentally AND physically? THEN they admit that the abuser had some fucked-up shit happen to them, but that doesn't excuse their abuse in any way?

The way it ended was really fucking depressing (Purdy Fellar's recovery was kinda cheesy, imo) but it was probably the happiest ending Blaze could get.

As with pretty much any writer in Yea Forums media, Mike Curtis has shit for health insurance and a brain aneurysm has left him broke. This sucks.
gofundme com/f/aneurysm-and-me

>It's not interesting to you that she's mentioned a day job more than once but we never find out what it is?
Guess that just flew over my head... I wonder how a lesbian domme would fare irl? I can't imagine there's as big a market compared to the "step on me" male demographic.
>sister killed, murderer never brought to justice
>tries (and fails) to escape a life of crime
>falls head over heels for an abuser who imbroils her in a weird revenge plot that involves filming her lover fuck a mentally ill man
>only escapes her abuser by being arrested for her previous crimes, most of which were done under duress
Blaze is made for suffering.

>arrested for her previous crimes
AFAIK never committed murder or accessory to it and was mostly a driver/babysitter. How much time do you think she actually did. But yeah, she looked like the type to get out of trouble when it came calling.

Well, they had the Sweatbox story arc changed pretty late in the game; it was supposed to be hinted at that Sweatbox would fit right at home in Yea Forums, if you catch my drift.

I'm just pissed that Lady Flattop was killed off right before the Midnite Mirror arc; she would've been the perfect fit for The Hangman, but instead they had to throw The Brow's Son under the bus for the dumbest reason. I mean, there's also no way Tracy and his friends shouldn't have sued Adam Austin for defamation of character.

Hell, the only reason they were able to explore an abusive LGBT relationship was BECAUSE they didn't say anything outright. There's something to be said about working around restrictions creatively.

it can't be defamation if it's an alternate universe where everything's topsy-turvy and literally everyone's OOC. I saw the Sweatbox potential hinted at but there wasn't enough time remaining for him to fiddle with Toad and the crypt skeletons were adults.

At the very least, you'd get the Anti-Defamation League raising hell - Prunceface and The Brow were NAZIS, and Midnite Mirror has them as the good guys?

Inkers are sometimes derided as "tracers" but that's not so. A good inker can save a poor job and a bad inker ruin a good one. ISN'T the original pencils. They're probably rough and craggy.

Look at the way Murphy Anderson and Sid Greene affected Carmine Infantino's pencils. Infantino had a great sense of design but when he inked himself it was like scribbles and a great deal of black to hide details. Anderson said he was always 'cleaning up' bad anatomy.

I came across this while hunting "Sky Masters" earlier. youtube.com/watch?v=RZs836b449M
Claims (and convincingly demonstrates) how Vince Colletta 'ruined' Kirby, simply erasing people and details it was too much work to ink.
A good inker brings out the best in the original pencils. I still have trouble believing Mike Royer inked both Kirby and Russ Manning. Two more dissimilar syles you couldn't name.

Examples clipped from that video about Colletta
Simplified architecture

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Omitting characters and filling in patterns with black

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Kirby never looked at the finished comics so this went on for years.

Most of the foundational myths of the Bible were plagiarized from Sumerian myth.

Some of those changes could have come from editor revisions. Like the red circle looks more like they were increasing the negative space to better represent fear. Using solid black also can show a better contrast with what's in front of it. Like you can tell his face pops better with that solid black background compared to the more busy background.

you can excuse simplification of designs because of the poor quality of printing back in the days. It's unfair to compare digital pics there. Print both at real quality level and compare the results.

>go to paheal
>not even a tag
Artists need to get on this shit STAT.

>The fact that there still hasn't been any modern reprints of Ms Tree pisses me off to no end.

They’re literally reprinting them right now under Titan Comics. Second volume comes out this summer.

>check Amazon
>it's mostly the DC Quarterlies and Specials, instead of starting from the beginning with the Eclipse stuff
Hmmmm... well, half a loaf is better than no bread. Still, the DC run was pretty dependent on continuity from the Eclipse/Aardvark-Vanaheim/Renegade run, and Ms Tree reads better in order of publication imo.

And no one else cared because Colletta met deadlines.

It was Collins’ own decision to do it this way, because this stuff was never collected before, unlike the early work (albeit that was already like 35 years ago) and he wants what he thinks is the best stuff to come out first to make a positive first impression on people who aren’t fifty year old og fans, which makes sense financially as well, since the early comics are rougher and not as well produced as the later ones at DC.

well written my ass, we never even see her

Silver Age had ALL comics being about aliens

Fair enough. He holds the rights, so he can call the shots.

Not strictly true, but that does tie into my earlier complaint - the whole thing was brought up and resolved in about a month overall, and that was because it was interspersed with other story arcs.

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As somebody who's had a relative die from cancer, and has friends who've had multiple family members die from it, I can get behind what The Mole is saying.

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As you can see, Marge Catchem did indeed appear in this story arc...

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... right in time for it to receive an entirely pat conclusion.

Some of you may have noticed a gap in the dates. That's because I had to leave out some strips that were leading up to the Dick Tracy/The Spirit crossover. No, I don't know why it was resolved so quickly, but I suspect the syndicate got cold feet.

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why doesnt he speak like peter lorre anymore

>11/24/2016

Tracy/Funky crossover was in 2015

Holy fuck

He reformed.

Because they introduced a character called Dr. Einstein who looks exactly like Lorre to coincide with Gruesome getting plastic surgery that made him look like Boris Karloff to everyone (except Karloff's daughter who he ran into at a convention).

I STILL don't know if I like Joe Staton or not....

His style can be a little too cartoony, and he's deteriorated quite a bit during some Dick Tracy arcs, but overall I think he's neat. Then again, I spent quite a bit of my youth reading back issues of E-Man

I found out only recently that Blondie (real name Blondie Boopadoop has some really fucked up roots. I just figured it was always about her idiot husband Dagwood, his sandwiches & fighting with his boss.

Turns out the strip WAS all about her, as Blondie Boopadoop, a well natured but scatterbrained flapper when she debuted in 1930 and when she met Dagwood he was the straight man in the strip. Also something else I never knew was that his family was filthy rich & they disowned him for marrying her against their wishes. After they tied the knot they settled into the reversed roles of her being the straight one and Dagwood the fool.

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>But at this point, he's hording the rights purely for spite and malice.

From what I've heard? He STILL thinks he'll get a sequel off the ground.

He's 82, so we probably just have to wait a little over a decade.

You should take your grievance to /aco/
Good luck and godspeed

>look up some other story arcs on there
>Warbucks figures out a way to spy on anyone in the world via TV
>The Great Am owns slaves, and laughs his ass off when Annie marvels at how much he must be paying them
jfc, Harold Gray was pretty fucked up

In b4 BASED GRAY

Dagwood's parents only gave in after he went on a hunger strike and nearly died.
But they still disinherited him.

The only things changed in 90 years is they had kids, the dog had pups, and Blondie started a catering business .

Here's the wedding and some backstory.
>loc.gov/loc/lcib/0006/blondie1.html

Harold Gray was somewhere to the right of Ayn Rand. Warbucks (name alone tells you how he made his pile) had Punjab and The Asp make people "go away" occasionally because they were Evil, even if it couldn't be proven in a court of law.

The Great Am is apparently immortal. During the period when Leonard Starr drew "Annie" he implied he drew his powers directly from God. (Wish I could find that sequence again. They were fighting the Devil himself.)

Oh God damn it, now Am's chuckling about how he made a profit selling arms to both side in the Hundred Years War.
I think that story is here:

>Gray started a story arc bitching about a ration board, because his local ration board wouldn't let him drive around to look up research for Little Orphan Annie
>he had to give it up because people called him out on his bullshit
>mfw

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haha you ssaid dick

That's the sequence.
Thanks!
I found strips before and after but not that particular one.

Am made an appearance in Dick Tracey a year or two back. Now he owns Hotel Siam.
VERY high end.
Warbucks tells Annie he couldn't afford to stay there without Am offering him a reduced rate.

That was a big crossover. The Spirit and the Dragon Lady were there too because an immortality potion was being auctioned off.

>The Great Am is apparently immortal. During the period when Leonard Starr drew "Annie" he implied he drew his powers directly from God.

If I'm not mistaken, there's been more than one instance that's implied that he's actually Santa Claus on top of everything else.

I believe staton did the "finale" E-Man story a few years back.

American comics are so goddamnened stupid and gay right now.
Shit like that is fun and kooky.

his stuff can be too cartoony but i loved his stuff from Green Lantern

Ms.Tree sorta looked like Tura Satana (despite the fact that she was asian). Kinda looked modeled on her too an extent though I have never seen collins mention it.

Strange that Marvel would bother ripping her off. Its not like Ms.Tree was blowing up the comics rack at the time (maybe it was during the time the comic was being published under DC??)

Man, I never knew Sunday funnies had such deep lore and backstory

Marvel was trying to reinvent itself during this time. They were relying less on superheroes, and more on imprints like Epic and Star, trying to chase the success had by indie darlings like Ms Tree and Nexus. Trouble was, Epic started smelling its own farts by the end of the 80s and fizzled out soon after Vertigo came along, and Star Comics... well, Star had a TON licensed crap like Hugga Bunch, Popples and Chuck Norris Karate Commandoes. Even the stuff people remembered (He-Man, ThunderCats, Fraggle Rock) was just churned out, because nobody in the industry (apart from Larry Hama) gave two shits about licensed comics. Star did have some original stuff, but it was rather quaint stuff, even for 80s kids comics. Even their Spider-Ham comics were pretty corny.

Whilst I respect your dubs AND your quads, I must tell you to go fuck yourself. Planet Terry, Wally the Wizard and Amazing Spider-Ham were tight as FUCK.

The MoTU comic was also pretty damn good. At least as good as DC's current output.

>continuing incest themes between the Nitrates just like Mel and Susan Proffitt on Wiseguy
>suddenly they aren't blood relatives any more
The syndicate doesn't put up with much do they

Would that be this?
GCD lists this as their last appearance, dated 2009.
When you say "finale", what do you mean?
Wrapped up the series with no prospects of a sequel? Like Conan Doyle sent Holmes over Reichenbach Falls?

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Everything you ever wanted to know is in
>amazon.com/Years-Comic-Strips-Editors-Blackbeard/dp/0760761051
Well illustrated!
Some of the other books on that page are also quite good. Comics by Brian Walker and Smithsonian Collection by Blackbeard.
All are quite inexpensive second hand.

You want Moon Maid poontang? Ask for Pookie?

The story actually goes deeper than that. Dagwood and Blondie were actually engaged since the very first strip. Dagwood has a strong presence since the very beginning. Funny thing is, the parents actually consented to the marriage multiple times but their engagement has been on and off for various reasons, mostly due to something Blondie did or Dagwood's parents changing their mind.

One other interesting thing that gets cut out a lot is that Dagwood needed his parents' consent to get married, because he was actually too young to get married without parental consent. For his state and his time period, 19-years-old was apparently too young for men to legally get married without mom and dad's say so.

Well I've somehow managed to read almost all of DT from that first strip linked here to present. This is good stuff.

I always wondered how much of that era was reprinted. People are used to the post-marriage one.

>That was a big crossover. The Spirit and the Dragon Lady were there too because an immortality potion was being auctioned off.

Yeah and that was where they made reference to Doc Savage, and it was a reference to this:
docsavage.fandom.com/wiki/Fear_Cay

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