Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Dickless Newspaper Leads To Discovering Online Humor


Recently Dick Tracy was dropped from the Plattsburgh daily newspaper. The comic strip has been around too long, the creativity of its late creator, Chester Gould, a dim memory. Reading it was checking out a new train wreck each day.

But Dick lives on thanks to the Web. Over at gocomics.com you can read Dick's adventures but with an added benefit missing from the newspaper version: snarky comments from readers.

For example, here's a panel -- the weekly Crimestoppers feature -- from the Sunday, April 11, 2010 strip that announces that a Dick Tracy statue will be on display:



And how do the online readers respond?

JDGGenius_badge said: "Well the statue would be a crime stopper. The pigeons would use it instead of your car!"

jtpozenel said: "Will his statue have deformed hands?"

China60 said: "If the last panel in today’s strip is any indication, his hand will be coming out of his shoulder."

And here's that last panel China60 was referencing, Dick reading some snail mail:



Someone left a comment stating that the readers were being too negative about the latest version of DT as rendered by Dick Locher. But I think the sarcasm is justified when dumb mistakes slip by. In the latest adventure someone throws a note wrapped around a rock through Dick's front window. He unwraps and reads the note one day but in next day's segment the note is still wrapped around the rock.



This causes a reader, a mrbribery, to observe: "So you re-wrapped the rock after reading the message yesterday?"

One online reader sums up the sad state of Dick Tracy online this way:

Dr.Midnight: "…besides, the negative comments are usually more entertaining than the strip itself…."

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