Yesterday disaster waited around the bend

[austin_dern]

Some things are so bizarre or weird or awful that they take on grandeur, which is why I want to commend the current storyline in the comic strip Dick Tracy. Also, the comic strip Dick Tracy is still running. Maybe ``running'' is too active a verb; as a story strip, it more creeps lethargically from one tiny plot point to the next. This is as opposed to humor strips, which when they have storylines actually show the whole story within the lifetime of the readers there at the start.

Dick Tracy is fascinating for packing so much bizarre and gruesome material into stories which have so little happen. One story last year implied Tracy has a way of telling his support team, without using any but ordinary dialogue, to hire bulldozers overnight and have them destroy, over the objections of the police, a building in which all involved know the Mayor, Governor, several ``leading citizens'', and Tracy himself are. Make what you want of the supposed deep implications of the Romans having a word for ``kill one person in every ten of this group''; what does it mean that Dick Tracy has this contingency on call?

In the current storyline (well, it's sort of a storyline; it's really like an infinitely protracted moment enacted by people with no memory of, or ability to anticipate, events), Diet Smith --- whom you may recall for his prescient warning that he who controls magnetism controls the universe --- has somehow concluded what Dick Tracy really needs for his war on human rights is a gigantic, impractical, inconsistently drawn robot which it so happens speaks in what people who've never encountered l33t-speak but who have heard a hasty and inaccurate description of it think l33t-speak might look like. It's very good at punching holes in walls and at putting straws in milk cartons. Honest. And, better, the villainous Mister Braces --- I swear --- has whipped up his own robot who looks like the love-child of Crow T Robot and Larry 3000 from Time Squad. Mister Braces's Shego insists on asking, ``Tell me how an expensive robot makes you feel better'', but, man, how can his awesome insanity leading, three months from now, to Mister Braces's gruesome death at the hands of his own killbot not make anyone feel better? The cartoonists have to be playing for the people who read this with ironic, cackling glee, but do they know how amazingly they're hitting?

Bonus observation for those who read the Houston Chronicle's week-at-a-time Dick Tracy page: the comic strip reads as sensibly going one panel at a time top to bottom as it does going left to right.

Trivia: The designer of the Ferris wheel, George Washington Gale Ferris (Junior), was born in 1859 in Galesburg, Illinois. Source: Remaking The World: Adventures In Engineering, Henry Petroski. This fact does not help: already the statement ``the Ferris wheel was designed by George Washington Ferris'' sounds like something a dumb character says when he's trying to make up an answer and comes up with something desperately implausible.

Currently Reading: An Outline Of Man's Knowledge Of The Modern World, Editor Lyman Bryson.

Comments

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

gigantic, impractical, inconsistently drawn robot

Darn it, you had me Googling for nearly 15 minutes to find exactly what it was that stupid robot reminded me of...

The Mandroid!

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminators)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Ooh. Yes. I definitely see the resemblance there, and from the first YouTube clip of this movie I could find I have to expect this is a wonderfully stupid movie up there with Warrior Of The Lost World or Future War.

Also I really like the gentle putting down of the movie from The New York Times film critic: The commotion goes on for a little over 90 minutes. After about 20 of them, you may feel that your cortex is shorting out and it's time to get your oxygen transcribed. Don't we all at times?

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

The glacial pace of Dick Tracy is more impressive indeed to see in the week-at-a-time view; The villian/henchman conversation stretches into a week with all those facial closeups leaving little room for plot.

Traze-R, though, that's a good enough name if you want a wacky robot with a Dick Tracy-inspired head.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Dick Tracy --- any story strip, really --- is better read a week at a time. That way the lack of things happening is compressed and there's some hope of following the plot thread.

I can't begin to describe the joy I felt at Tracy's ecstatic, Dilbert-tie-straightening event of seeing this enormous killbot ready for his command. I just hope the whole Traze-R storyline keeps up to the high comedy of the introductory month, at least until the gore and violence breaks out.