Dick Tracy

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m a fan of Dick Tracy. I’ve been plugging the excellent IDW reprints of the classic Chester Gould strips for years here in PopCult. A couple of months ago I brought you news of a new creative team taking over the strip, Joe Staton and Mike Curtis. Joe and Mike made their official debut just last week.

You can keep up with the new adventures of Dick Tracy over at GoComics.com, where you can sign up to have one comic strip emailed to you each day for free, or for 99 cents a month, have you choice of as many as 157 daily comics, plus editorial cartoons and puzzles crammed into your inbox every day.

Or you can just go to their website and read them for free.

Battlepug

Battlepug is a webcomic by DC Comics veteran Mike Norton (Billy Batson and the Power of Shazam, Young Justice). Originally created for a T-shirt design, Battlepug is now being done as a webcomic, with one page going up every Monday at the Battlepug website.

Battlepug is a great example of a talented pro getting to cut loose and do something just for the fun of it. Norton has been turning in very good work with little notice for years, often relegated to second-tier titles like The Atom or Green Arrow for DC, but his work on the recent Shazam title from DC proved that he’s a first-class cartoonist.

With Battlepug, he’s weaving a tale of adventure that is just a pure delight. It’s still early on, the first strip debuted on Valentine’s Day, but we’ve already met Moll, Colfaz and Mingo, and are now being told an adventure of a giant killer baby seal.

My only complaint is that one page a week is not enough.  The story is intriguing, the artwork beautiful, and the colors (by Allen Passalaqua) excellent.

Here’s a couple of pages (click on each strip for a link to the full-sized page). If you like what you see, bookmark the site and be sure to support Mike by buying the T-shirts and other merchanidse when it becomes available.