Earlier we managed to get through the first three years of special guest appearances
by comic characters in Mike Curtis and Joe Staton‘s run on Dick Tracy.
Let’s try get through the next three years (2014-2016) in this installment.
The guest spots come early as the first Sunday of 2014 presents Vitamin’s co-star.
Mary Perkins shows up occasionally in this theater-based story.
It would be in June of 2014 that Mike and Joe would present to the comics reading public a master stroke. So good that all future guest appearances would be judged against it.
And forcing all future guest stories to be SPECIAL.
Four years earlier on June 13, 2010 the Little Orphan Annie (then titled Annie) comic strip ended, with Annie having disappeared “somewhere in Guatemala.” Unable to find Annie a desperate Daddy Warbucks manages to get the world famous detective Dick Tracy to take up the case. A case that turned into a four month extravaganza; including a side trip to 1944.
And that four months doesn’t include some foreshadowing earlier in the year.
The Annie story also featured a brief appearance of another strip character,
something that would become a regular habit in future comic character stories.
It should be noted that Little Orphan Annie debuted August 5, 1924; so this story was a 90th anniversary celebration. Though, disappointingly, Annie didn’t even show up in the August 5, 2014 Dick Tracy strip.
It may be noticeable that I am struggling not to use the word “crossover” in regarding to these strips, since there was no strip to crossover with in the previous stories. In early 2015 we have an honest-to-goodness crossover.
Those without a subscription to Comics Kingdom do not have access to the Funky Winkerbean strips; but going to the January and February 2015 posts on the Funky blog can read them there.
In June 2015 Annie returns for a month-long visit with Honeymoon.
Next is another crossover, but just a two day fling.
Tracy, at a detective convention, sees a familiar face. Why familiar? Because a year earlier.
That same day in the On The Fastrack comic strip:
Next in 2016 is a really strange team-up.
Anyone remember those “Steve is dreaming” strips by Milton Caniff in the ’70s and ’80s?
The partnership lasts only a week. Notice that Fearless Fosdick and Evil-Eye Fleegle are used with the permission of Capp Enterprises. Unlike Little Orphan Annie, Mary Perkins, Hotshot Charlie, and some others, Fosdick and Fleegle were not Tribune properties.
Also not a Tribune property:
So this three-day guest remains a mere phantom.
And that’s about it for the 2014-2016 years.
Well, there are a few guests introduced before the year ends.
But the story involving them is really a 2017 episode. So, Stay Tooned for Part Three! Plus an Afterword.
Some day, there will be a case in the current era of the strip where the revelation will be that this version of “Dick Tracy” was actually “Sam’s Strip” all along!
I like that in DT, the guest characters do more than pose and wave at the readers. And yes, the crossover with the cast of Little Orphan Annie was a highwater mark.
It’s probably covered elsewhere, but I give high marks to Scancarelli’s rendition of Dick Tracy in a prolonged tribute he did for the… 90th?… anniversary of DT. He drew (and wrote) the character better than the team that was doing the regular strip at the time, if memory serves.
If memory doesn’t serve, I’ll just go to the Jot-em-Down store and hang with Lum and Abner. Less pressure anyway.
Thanks so much for including the Sunday crossover with Lum and Abner!
You may have forgotten that the comic strip character The Cardinal (whose strip was at the time on GoComics.com, and is now at Comics Shepa, although on hiatus) was shown as the star of a movie about him on June 23, 2015 strip. Annie and Honeymoon were at a mall planning to see the movie! The whole storyline at the mall was inspired Cardinal creator Kurt J. Kolka’s championing of anti-bullying. (The security officer who appeared – – along with her real-life son – are colleagues of Kolka.) The Cardinal strip of June 21, 2015 announced the then-upcoming appearance http://www.comicssherpa.com/site/feature?uc_comic=csfjg&uc_full_date=20150621