Dick Tracy’s first appearance, October 4, 1931.
Dick Tracy today.
Joe Staton and Mike Curtis are doing great work, making Dick Tracy a lot of fun to look at and read. I heartily recommended clicking here to go to the new team’s first installment in the series, back on March 14, then keep clicking and reading. Then I suggest paying a measly $12/year — $11.88, actually — to join GoComics as a paying subscriber. If you like comic strips it’s a real deal, and the best 99¢ a month you can spend.
Harry Bliss is a savvy and cynical cartoonist-illustrator whose work appears in The New Yorker, and his Bliss comic strip is in the Boston Globe. Bliss lives in Vermont, and the Democrat and Chronicle up there did this profile on him.
Maybe you’ve heard that Marty McFly is auctioning replicas of his famous back-to-the-futuristic Nike sneakers, to benefit the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.
Another fundraiser for the MJ Fox Foundation is Team Cul De Sac, named after the delightfully fanciful comic strip by Richard Thompson, who has Parkinson’s. A book is in the works, full of contributions from many different artists, including a painting by Bill Watterson, of the Cul de Sac character Petey.
When the book is published, the original art will be auctioned. Here’s a video preview.
After the craziness of the Iowa straw poll, where the ostensible winner lost and the GOP front runner didn’t participate, KRUU-FM in Fairfield, IA does something more reasonable and interviews novelist Monte Schulz.
[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Aug/monteschulz.mp3|titles=Monte Schulz interviewed on KRUU]According to Amazon, Monte’s next book, The Big Town, will be out in February. Nice cover!
I’m comfortable having a couple of non-fiction books going at the same time, but novels I prefer to read all the way through to avoid spoiling the mood, and I’m starting Monte’s current novel, The Last Rose of Summer. Monte has a knack for defining distinctive characters, and in the first book of his 1920’s Americana series, This Side of Jordan, Chester is as chilling a cold-blooded killer as any villain you’d never want to meet. The funniest moment in the story for me is Monte’s nod to his father that I wrote about at this link.
Long before Hugh Laurie’s Gregory House, there was House, a bizarre 1977 Japanese movie about a haunted house that eats unmarried girls. House adheres to the Japanese Pop culture obsession with schoolgirls, and it’s essentially a ghost story, but with an amazingly varied, unrelenting series of creatively twisted, comic-horror images.
Because the movie is so utterly strange, it’s no surprise that on Amazon the customer reviews are all over the place. Watch the trailer and you’ll know whether or not you want to see the whole thing.
Alan Moore, who wrote Watchmen and V for Vendetta says, “With any legitimate trial of whistleblower Bradley Manning still being at an unspecified date in the future, it would seem that what is presently on trial here is Western culture itself.”
