Comic history Comic strips

Dick Tracy, With Special Guest Stars… (beginning)

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D. D. Degg December 4, 2019 1 minute 1 comment

In the nearly nine years that Mike Curtis and Joe Staton have been doing Dick Tracy special appearances and cameos began showing up fairly quickly. These eventually turned into regular guest starring roles for (mostly) retired comic strip characters. Currently Steve Roper and Mike Nomad are taking a turn as guests in the Dick Tracy comic strip.

Within three months of taking over the strip on March14, 2011,
Mike and Joe were featuring cameos by real people, such as Chang Apana.

But I’m going to restrict myself to comic characters appearing in Mike and Joe’s Dick Tracy.

First up, and I will not guarantee that this is a complete list, is Hank O’Hair of Brenda Starr.

This is more a walk-on than a guest appearance, Hank only shows up in that one strip.

digression…
Dick Tracy and Brenda Starr herself had met for a week in 1994:

In the Spring of 2012 Hotshot Charlie would get into three strips, which is closer to a guest-starring role.


Those strips would also feature cameos by Terry Lee, Burma, the Dragon Lady, and Milton Caniff.

Five years later Hotshot Charlie and Lai Choi San would make another appearance,
as a small part of a different guest-starring story.

Back to 2012 and the the other comic characters are getting more camera time,
Walt sticks around for a week.

A couple days after the Walt Wallet guest spot a non-Chicago Tribune-New York News character
from DC Comics makes an unauthorized cameo in a nonspeaking role:

(Check the daily strip before this Sunday for other special appearances.)

Next up is the first extended guest-starring sequence,
though the comic characters are a bit of a mix-up.

David L. Hoyt and Jeff Knurek are the current creators of the Jumble puzzle, but they are also comic characters as Jeff often draws the pair into the Jumble comic image. This story starts on March 8, 2013, though David and Jeff don’t show up until March 21. The story runs until mid-April with the Jumble team showing up occasionally to help Tracy’s team solve the mystery of The Jumbler.

But what makes this special is that it is a true crossover, for while this story in Dick Tracy is happening over in the Jumble puzzle of early April Dick Tracy is appearing!

Jumble is distributed by Tribune Contents Agency, the same syndicate as Dick Tracy. The next guests are not. As such they are never fully shown or identified, though it is not hard to figure.

This short sequence lasts a week.

What not short is this list. So this will now turn into a multipart look at Mike and Joe’s guests in Dick Tracy. As they say … Stay Tooned for Part Two. Part Three here. And then the Addendum.