You know, in many ways I am a lucky man. Sure, I have troubles of my own — no one who writes on the internet can be expected to lead a wholly satisfying life. I’ve got health problems, money problems, career problems, romantic problems… I’m seven feet tall and weigh over five hundred pounds, so I get funny looks and I can’t travel on airplanes. I wake up screaming every half-hour, whether I was asleep or not. Just looking at something purple is enough to turn me catatonic with fear. I keep trying to make the switch from heroin to methadone, but it doesn’t take. Sometimes I’ll find myself covered in blood and matted hair, out in the woods, with no idea as to how I got there. I owe roughly the appraised value of the commonwealth of Virginia in high-interest credit card debt. My lusts for hardcore pornography have evolved to the point where unless there’s a horse involved, I’m simply not interested. Everything I touch ends up with big chunks of my skin still stuck to it when I move my hand away. Last night I slept in what I’d thought was a big pile of leaves, but those weren’t leaves. Sometimes in the middle of a conversation I’ll forget not just who I’m talking to and what we were talking about, but why I’m not trying to sell my body to them. My last relationship was with a magazine.

But at least I’m not kissing Tommie from Apartment 3G. That man, Gary, him I can look down on without compunction.

So I have fallen behind on explaining what is happening in Dick Tracy so you don’t have to, but rather than apologize for it I am going to explain what is happening in Dick Tracy for you right now.

There is a man named Braces who, surprise surprise, has braces. He has worked out that the only way to work successfully as a criminal in Chicago the unnamed city Dick Tracy protects is to engage the services of a giant robot.

Coincidentally, Tracy’s gadget-man, Diet Smith, has built Tracy a giant robot, just in case he wants one.

Now the two robots are about the lock horns in the halls of the Genesis Corporation, a biotech firm which stores all of its proprietary information on what look like reel-to-reel magnetic tapes. Braces and his robot were robbing the place when Tracy and his robot detected Braces’s robot’s robotic activity and closed in. Now Tracy’s robot (which when first introduced had a face eerily similar to Tracy’s own, but which has evolved over time into a sort of windswept Adonis) is about to fight Braces’s robot to a deadly standstill.

Tracy has no clue what the hell is going on; he’s spent this entire storyline basically just following his robot Trazr around and listening to its funny speech (for some reason neither robot uses vowels, except when the letterer forgets, and they use letters like U and R to mean words like “you” and “are”). This is why he’s been reduced to asking “what?” and making a bad joke about today being Halloween.

It would be pretty cool if Braces’s robot, Brute Force, and Tracy’s robot Trazr or Traz-R or Traz0r or whatever its name actually is, if they decided it was pointless to fight and teamed up to destroy all human? But they seem to have adopted the roles of inhuman monsters fundamentally aligned to diametrically opposed abstract concepts, so probably that is unlikely.

Alex Pizza, Secret Agent to the Stars, didn’t hum the Mission Impossible theme while he crawled through the narrow plenum between the suspended ceiling and the exposed wiring that hung loosely from the actual ceiling, but he was definitely thinking it. Using physic-craft he was reducing his body’s mass down to only a few decagrams, to ensure he didn’t fall down into the middle school library below; maintaining the spell required a fairly elaborate mental construction synchronized to the rhythms of the Great Celestial Flautist, and by happy coincidence the theme from Mission Impossible had the right number of beats per minute.

His target — Alec Baldwin’s estranged 11-year-old daughter Norway-Taft Baldwin-Basinger — sat fifteen feet below him, reading Harriet the Spy. Alex Pizza could sense her dimly with his third eye, but if he focused in on her he’d have to divert his attention from the physic-craft, and more than likely he’d fall on her. Instead of prying into her memories for evidence that she didn’t despise her father or where her mother kept her Oscar statue (the latter was his client’s request, the former simply something Alex Pizza wondered about), the secret agent to the stars let his body go slack. The N-(L-α-Aspartyl)-L-phenylalanine, 1-methyl ester he’d ingested a few minutes earlier was starting to kick in.

Maintaining the physic-craft while watching his hands slowly collapse into semisolid puddles and sink into the ceiling tiles below him was harder than he had expected, so Alex Pizza closed his eyes and kept them closed. This made the transition of his head (including the eyes) from solid to liquid easier to handle as well. Once his mind and body were fully acclimated to the phase change, he altered the physic-craft slightly and seeped through the drop ceiling as a pint of clear fluid indistinguishable from water, which fell directly onto Norway-Taft Baldwin-Basinger’s auk-denim jacket spread out on the floor next to her.

Norway-Taft looked up from her book with a start, exactly as you might if you had reason to think someone had thrown a water balloon at you and missed and hit the auk-denim jacket your personal shopper had picked out for you to start the school year with. Maybe you aren’t sold on an overcoat made of equal parts rugged cotton and the skin of an extinct North American waterfowl, but you’re nevertheless going to be annoyed that your environment isn’t bending to your will. Chances are you’ll squeal with irritation and look around quickly for some villain to blame — perhaps some oversized producer’s son with his tubby sidekick — and, finding nothing, you slam down your/the library’s Harriet the Spy and seek out an authority figure to complain to.

Then when you find the school’s librarian (in her glassed-in office, eating yogurt and listening to a streaming NPR station online) you throw the kind of mild fit you’ve taught yourself to summon up at a moment’s notice, and get her out to inspect the damage, and when there is no evidence of a loosed water balloon at all (no bits of colored latex on the floor, not even dampness on your auk-denim jacket) you become immensely frustrated, because clearly the universe is not playing ball. It does not, however, occur to you that a secret agent transformed himself — first into a puddle of liquid, then after you’d left the jacket and your bookbag unattended into a watermelon-scented eraser shaped like a strawberry — with secret magic and even now he lurks in the side pocket of your bookbag waiting for you to get close to your mother’s Oscar statue. Because you may be Alec Baldwin’s daughter and Stephen Baldwin’s niece, but you aren’t crazy.

You also wouldn’t be expecting a strange man to suddenly leap up from behind a shelf of Young Adult fiction (Laura Ingalls Wilder to Roger Zelazny), snatch your bookbag out of your hands, and pull his own doppleganger out of its side pocket. Again with the not crazy.

In any of those cases you might want new shoes, but as a common thing? No. Shoe-buying is a rare and celebrated event, akin to the birth of, if not a child, surely a middleweight piece of livestock, like a pig. Therefore it baffles me that any shoe store which does not specialize in shoes for children, or shoes for those rare individuals who define their sense of self-worth based in whole or part upon ownership of a menagerie of footwear, can long remain in business.

Would it shock you to learn that fully eight percent of the annual federal budget goes to subsidy of shoe stores, cobblers, home shoe repair kits, slipper-men, bootblacks, and all the rest of the vast and complex footwear economy which operates in shadow to our own? Look around you: do you see more than two shoes nearby? If so perhaps you are already compromised, morally if not legally. If so you surely are already culpable, and will be summarily dealt with when the well-meaning, God-fearing people of this nation rise up against the shoe-obsessed effete dilettantes responsible for the degradation of our country!

But I am already getting ahead of myself. In these uncertain economic times, I call not for violence, but for sound judgment and moral clarity: we simply cannot afford, as individuals or as a nation, to continue to throw good money after bad trying to prop up the collapsing footwear industry. Sturdy long-lasting boots have given rise to paper slippers, repurposed plastic bags, and in some cases empty shoe boxes sold as “designer” carboard pumps. Meanwhile the richest 1% continue to spend only a fraction of their household budgets on shoes; same as it ever was, the rich go richer while the poor buy shoes.

Next time you leave your home, pay a visit to your nearest shoe store. Take a good look around, and try to evaluate what you see with open eyes and an unbiased heart. Drink in the staff, listen to the customers’ comments and complaints. When someone asks you if you need assistance, respond with the password “ichor.”

You will be taken to the employee lounge in the back of the store. There you will find a waterlogged chest, rusted, covered with barnacles, and still leaking seawater. Open the chest with the passcode carved on the underside of the table in the booth of the Burger King where you had your first strawberry shake. Inside, you will find the command codes to the USS Thresher SSN-593. Commit them to memory, but do not eat them. Instead, read the printed words.

On the Canadian/American bordermarches Alex Pizza he decided his problem was that he was too dry. In front of him crouched his desk, or rather a desk; in a fundamental way it didn’t yet belong to Alex Pizza. Until he let loose his messy torrent of words and baptized it with new names, the desk had to be considered a hostile presence. Alex Pizza had written NOVEL in blue block letters at the top of the first sheet of the legal pad, which continued to balance on the desk’s snout, but had gotten no further in the half-hour he’d sat and stared out the window at the stormclouds and fog outside. The humidity congealed into wet tentacles that slapped against the plastic window and left streaks and a faint but undeniably biological odor.

In the back seat of Alex Pizza’s car he’d stashed two cases of Miller High Life, which webcomics had led him to believe was the cheap evil-smelling domestic beer of the common man. Option one was to brave the precipitation and retrieve one or both cases. Option two was to turn water into wine.

The water-into-wine gag was a big hit at parties, although once Alex Pizza had gotten a little bit too loose and started converting every liquid in the house to the fruit of the vine and the work of human hands. His host for the evening, John Belushi’s ghost wearing Jim Belushi (as he often did on weekends), had been less pleased than one might expect. Aside from the unpleasant smells and imagery in the bathrooms (which put some starlet, once rising and now forgotten, whose name sounded like Gernsback or Hembeck, permanently off merlot) Alex Pizza had converted over thirty-five thousand dollars’ worth of Belushi’s scotch collection before realizing his error.

Only a decanter of the other aqua regia had mollified the Belushis and gotten Alex Pizza back on their guest list. Aqua regia, the royal water, is a solution of concentrated acids, specifically 1:3 nitric and hydrochloric acid; it is useful for the dissolution of coinage metals. The other aqua regia is something else entirely, though it too will dissolve gold: the hairs of angels melted and then distilled three times over charcoal…

None of this reverie, Alex Pizza realized, was usable. He couldn’t go on Charlie Rose and explain about Belushi’s scotch, or the reluctance of angels to sell their hair even at a gigantic markup, much less put it into the Great American Novel. With a sigh he rose from the folding chair, patted the desk on its nose, and made the dash to and from his car.

Miller High Life, he quickly learned, is not a very good beer.

Today we see a further difference. Also that last panel is awesome. But instead of Doctor Figment Froid, mad scientist with a Svengali-like hold over Diet Smith and the Evil Mind Machine, this time the gatekeeper into the land of wonders and horrors which is Diet Smith Industries is…. a tarp!

This being Dick Tracy, I expect it is an evil tarp, probably in cahoots with a villain with an odd facial deformity which may or may not cause him (and it will be a him) to resemble a caricature of a famous 20th century politician. Tracy will get into a gnarled old man wrestling match with someone, and ultimately whatever the tarp was hiding will be forgotten in favor of a suitcase containing FIVE MILLION DOLLARS or somesuch.

It’s sweet of Lu Ann to cling to the belief that she and Alan still qualify as dating when they haven’t been in the same comic in ages that I’ve noticed. In the future when everyone has a jet pack and she and Alan are spending more time together she can broach the subject of the time she wandered into Alan’s apartment and found obvious evidence of infidelity. O, what a beautiful day that will be! There will be antigravity and nanotech and moon hotels.

But I am on the edge of my seat let me tell you about the latest revelations from the hellish bowels of Diet Smith’s underground bunkers. Will it be another mind-altering electronic device capable of reducing intelligent men and women to babbling Dick Tracy characters? Will it be a teleporter, or just a teleprompter? EDGE OF MY SEAT!
The emphasis in the last panel suggests that Alan has at least once before successfully convinced Lu Ann that there was a perfectly harmless explanation for his having women’s clothing in his apartment. “He said the thong and the bra and the last three blouses I found were just props for his one-man show Alan Alan Alan: Portrait of a Life on the Edge, so I’m sure there’s a reason he has this one, too!”

Or maybe she’s saying that while there might be a logical explanation for the plum-colored women’s shirt she’s holding, the heap of other colorful blouses (and pants, and Polaroids of Halley and Alan in flagrant acts of coeducational) are more suspicious.

When I found out Lynn had backpedaled on the retirement thing for what I count as the third time, I said okay. Let her do what she likes. If someone else wants to talk about it, and lord knows there are enough people online who are into talking about this, let them do it, you don’t have to.

On Friday, when I opened up my comics bookmark and saw this, though…

Who are Elly and Phil talking to, in the third and fourth panels? Are they speaking to one another, as they were doing in the first two panels? Their words indicate such, but their body language says no, they are welcoming a new wedding guest to their feat, and holding him — me — us — with glittering eye. Come to the wedding! the art says. Come to the celebration of “love” which is the wedding of Liz-whom-once-we-respected and Anthony. It would be a nice little artistic statement about including the reader in the joy of the moment, if it wasn’t so horrible.

I don’t want to read the last panel as a big ol’ FUCK YOU to Lynn Johnston’s ex-husband, but I can’t help it, because that’s what it is.

Anyway. When I was in junior high school I played through “Curse of the Azure Bonds,” the sequel to “Pool of Radiance” three times, and restarted each time I got stomped in the final battle. The summer before eighth grade I found “Secret of the Silver Blades,” the third game in the series, for sale for $15 in a Wal-Mart in Huntsville, Alabama, and played it through in a few weeks. When Dad finally upgraded our creaky 8088 MS-DOS 4.0 EGA machine to a quasi-modern 486 with Windows 3.1, he celebrated by buying a couple of games, including “Pools of Darkness,” the fourth and final game in the series (there were three series of Gold Box Games and nine or ten in total, depending on how you count).

Anyway again. The point is that while I’ve hardly gamed in the Forgotten Realms at all, and I haven’t read any novels and I don’t, technically speaking, know Drizzt from a hole in the ground (Elminster okay, Elminster shows up in “Pools of Darkness” and duels one of the antagonist’s chief lieutenants while the player fights every single other creature in the antagonist’s army), so I’ve got little love for the setting. Back in 2002 I joined a D&D group that met in Newton and it wasn’t a good fit; I dropped out after a couple of months.

However, one thing that developed over the course of those Gold Box games and the reading about the setting that I’ve done is a fondness for the Moonsea region, where most of the Gold Box games were set, and the Zentharim as an enemy – they’re a secondary enemy in the main four-part series I outlined above, and they show up in one of the other series, too.

So I was reading the new 4e book, and I looked up the Moonsea and the Zentharim. The Moonsea is a region in the setting, the shores of a massive freshwater inland sea with several neat cities around it, and the Zentharim, aka the Black Network, are basically the Forgotten Realms version of, I don’t know, they’re like SPECTRE or HUSH or COBRA, they’re a massive multinational conspiracy of evil wizards who operate openly as mercenaries and then they’re also a sect devoted to an evil god, they’re evil and they’re a big mob of guys and they’re based in a city called Zenthil Keep, which as far as I can tell has been destroyed two or three times now. Anyway the hundred and fifty years or so between “Pool of Radiance” and this book, it’s been tough on the Zentharim. Their leader Manshoon is still around (one of my favorite sequences in “Pools of Darkness” is visiting Mulmaster, the massive evil city, and when the guards see the PCs and how the PCs are absurdly high-level good guys, they say hey, you probably want to talk to Manshoon, right? If you like we’ll take you to him right now, please don’t kill us with righteous lightning, and you find him and kill him but it’s only one of his many clone duplicates and then you go through a portal to hell and beat up an evil god) but now he’s a vampire instead of a mortal with a lot of clone duplicates, and the organization has lost a lot of its power by backing the wrong horse in a war between a couple of evil gods, now it’s just a coalition of evil mercenary companies and evil-god devotees. Which is nice, sure, but it doesn’t make me sit up and salute. But then I read this, in the Nethril section:

Ravaerris: Prior to the return of Shade… the now-collapsed Zentharim maintained outposts on the edge of Anauroch [the Great Desert]. Raverris was the largest of these forts, housing a company of prospectors, diggers, soldiers, diviners, and a series of special vaults that held what treasures they could pry from the unforgiving sand.

So Netheril is a vanished ancient civilization based in a region that later became a great desert, Anauroch, and the Zentharim were excavating, looking for its powerful magic, when Shade came back, Shade being a city of the ancient highly-magical civilization in question, and “came back” revealing that in fact the civilization didn’t so much collapse as hide in a parallel universe.

When the Spellplague struck…

Don’t ask.

When the Spellplague struck, some relic, spell, or captive creature in the Ravaerris vault reverberated like a bell, sending out waves of force that collapsed the sprawling outpost into a hidden fault. A handful of Zhents escaped, only to watch gape-mouthed as the fault closed with a final shudder, stealing away Ravarreis and all of Zhentil Keep’s hard-won Netherese relics. The few scattered outlaws who yet wander Faerun tell each other when they meet that, somewhere, Ravaerris yet remains.

So that bit at the end got me excited; the idea that the Zhentharim, bastards that they were, had been brought to this low state and were telling each other campfire stories about their past glories? HOT. HOTT with two Ts, even. Now I’m trying to construct a one-shot or short campaign that externalizes this idea, because Raverris remains! is too good a rallying cry to abandon.

I also have this urge to write up a one-shot or short campaign wherein all the NPCs fit Commedia dell’Arte and/or Shakespearian roles. You’d have the wizard and his beautiful daughter and their clownish servant, you’d have Falstaff and Hamlet and Portia, yeah. The NPCs would be blatant stereotypes or aspiring archetypes, is what I’m saying here.

Maybe I can combine the two, I don’t know.

Okay, Garfield, fun is fun, but enough is enough. I have a hard enough time imagining a world in which Jon can cajole a woman into dating him more than once. Don’t make me imagine a world in which Jon is so appealing that Liz is not only willing to put up with him in exchange for a free meal and movie ticket, she’s willing to pay not just her own way but also Jon’s. That just doesn’t make sense.

I am right there with you in the whole cat who kind-of sort-of talks, with his enormous feet and his love of pans of lasagna and his teddy bear. I’ll even buy the cat’s capacity to squash spiders with a balled-up and suspiciously humanlike fist. But someone else paying Jon’s way at a social event? My willing suspension of disbelief has snapped back and stung my cheek and left me relieved it didn’t hit an eye.

Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe, when I didn’t object when Jon and Liz started dating — two years ago now — you took that as tacit approval for all kinds of insane romantic hijinks. So let me say clearly that I draw the line at Liz paying for anything, at Liz being happy to see Jon after a long time spent apart, at Liz laughing at Jon’s jokes, at Liz refusing any kind of desperate gesture in the stuffed animal or flowers or handheld electronics or jewelry or fistful of hundred-dollar-bills departments. Liz [BLANK]s Jon, and the blank better not be anything but “reluctantly puts up with.”

Are we on the same page now, Garfield? Because otherwise it’s just me who’s the total loser, not me and Jon, and I don’t want to give up my Justifiably Single Unpleasant Bachelor totem-figure.