What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why is Dick Tracy all about Little Orphan Annie again? December 2023 – March 2024

This year is the centennial of the debut of Little Orphan Annie. While Annie is no longer in production, Mike Curtis has been glad to make his tenure on Dick Tracy a guest home for them. In celebration, then, we’re getting a backstory that seems to tie in to some Annie plot I don’t know anything about, the case of one Boris Sirob, and how it brought Annie to an orphanage.

This all, then, should catch you up to mid-March 2024 in Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, Charles Ettinger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. At this link are all my Dick Tracy posts, so if you’re reading this after about June 2024 and want to know what’s going on, try here. There might be something you want to know.

Also: The past couple months saw the transition from Shelley Pleger as main artist to Charles Ettinger. I don’t think the style has changed that dramatically, but if you were wondering why it’s changed at all, that’s why. Nothing like Rod Whigham taking over the art on Judge Parker while Mike Manley recovers his health.

Dick Tracy.

24 December 2023 – 16 March 2024.

We were at the close of a story, last time I checked in, so this time starts with the boards nice and clear.

So our story began with comic book celebrity guest stars Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster stopping in to visit Dick Tracy because … they’re related to the Plenty clan and can work with relative Plentia Kopz on something that hasn’t come to light yet.

So our story actually begins with Rikki Mortis, onetime assistant to Abner Kadaver, getting out of jail on the support and secret messages of Fata Morgana. Morgana’s a travelling stage magician and occasional hit person and, apparently, Kadaver’s understudy. And needs an assistant to carry out some work. First is the murder of Patrick Throughton, who’d been scheduled to testify against drug lord Jon Pertwee. No, I don’t get what the Doctor Who Actor Names thing is teasing either or why they’re picking on Jon Pertwee. Still, it’s a clean hit, calling Throughton up on stage and sawing him in half with a chainsaw, and then later that night he dies of poison.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 14th of January, 2024. I’m not sure why Morgana had the fast-acting poison here; the slow-acting kind used for Throughton’s murder seems to provide a much better chance for getting away with it. I guess that Morgana realizes the kind of strip she’s in and knows it’s not death without a witnessed corpse.

Morgana gets another job. It’s a hit on Tess Tracy. She hasn’t been in enough stories lately, so the Bosco crime family steps in to want her gone. Mortis can’t have any part of this, not after Dick Tracy let her say goodbye to the dying Abner. Morgana can work with this. She goes to the Tess Tracy Detective Agency, spinning a story of being afraid of a stalker. Bad luck for the hit: Tess is caught in traffic, and her partner Johnny Adonis accidentally gets jabbed with Morgana’s poison pen.

Morgana figures to disappear a while, doing so mid-show, alongside an elephant. And she disguises herself as Bob Baxter, okay enough magician who sometimes fills in when Morgana does one of her vanishing acts. That cover would be decent if George Bosco — alarmed by Dick Tracy asking to see his organization’s books — didn’t go to Baxter on the off chance that he can make people disappear too.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 3rd of February, 2024. My love notes that “THAWK” is an interesting choice of onomatopoeia there. I agree.

Unlucky for Bosco, Dick Tracy’s there. I think the implication is he followed Bosco, but my initial read was that Tracy was there to ask Baxter some more questions about Morgana’s disappearance. Anyway, in the scrum of arresting Bosco, Baxter escapes into the bootlegger’s tunnels underneath. She sheds her disguise, goes back to recover Baxter’s performing rabbit Harvey, and meets up with Rikki Mortis to get the heck out of the story. And that, the 10th of February, ends our introduction to Fata Morgana and the fall of the Bosco crime syndicate.

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The 10th of February also ends our time with Shelley Pleger as main artist for the strip. After that is a two-week Minit Mystery written by Eric Costello and drawn by Dee Fish, a fresh poisoning puzzle that also has a solution in stage magic. Or at least stage magic-style trickery.

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The current story, and Charles Ettinger’s tenure as main artist, began the 26th of February. This with a phone call from Oliver Warbucks, at the Hotel Siam. We get a mention of J P McKee and Captain Easy. The name “J P McKee” means nothing to me. Captain Easy I recognize as the concept-drift champion comic strip Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, which I never read either. Anyway the important business is: Warbucks has made contact with Bob Smith, a figure we saw in a teaser back in May 2023. Smith has a picture of Annie’s parents.

From here we get into a flashback, explaining how Annie came to be orphaned. Way back in the day gangster-coded palindrome Boris Sirob planned to kidnap Not-Yet-Daddy Warbucks. Tracy was guarding him. Also guarding him: two FBI agents, Harold and Winifred Gray. You may recognize the name “Harold Gray” as the person who, in our history, created the comic strip. Go ahead and guess what Actual Harold Gray’s wife was named.

Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger’s Dick Tracy for the 10th of March, 2024. This story might lead you to wonder about the timeline, since, like, who says “flatfoot” since Johnny Dollar went off the air? Heck, who says “banker’s hours”? So that suggests “a long time ago”. But the Grays are sure their child will be born a girl, when the biology of pregnancy was completely unknown to the medical establishment until 1994. And Annie is … not an adult … today, in 2024. So in short: there is no way to make this all consistent, just don’t worry about it.

In the story, in flashback, the Grays are undercover agents planted in Sirob’s organization. Harold and the extremely pregnant Winifred get the task with doing the actual kidnapping. They’re happy to subvert the kidnapping and let Tracy arrest the getaway driver, but now they can’t go back to Sirob without giving themselves away. And they’re thinking very hard about their imminent daughter, and the orphanage they’ve seen many times over the course of this assignment.

How does that all come together? I have some guesses, but obviously, no telling yet. I imagine the next month or two will answer it all and then I can get back to you in June to retell it, in fewer words.

Next Week!

One of my easy weeks! Yes! I recap a mere dozen comic strips as we go back to the time of King Arthur in Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant, all going well. See you then.

Why Does _Dick Tracy_ Look Weird Now?

This week (the one that started the 11th of February, 2024) Dick Tracy looks different because it’s a Minit Mystery, drawn by guest artist Dee Fish. (And written by Eric Costello, who’s created Minit Mysteries for the strip before.) I don’t have a credit for Dee Fish as guest artist before this, but I don’t claim to be complete in my records or good at research.

After the 25th of February, though? The answer may be revealed by the alert people of The Daily Cartoonist. D D Degg observed that the Dick Tracy page at Tribune Content Agency Intellectual Properties Franchise Opportunities LLC GmbH Inc’s web site credits Charles Ettinger as partnering with Mike Curtis to make the comic. Ettinger was guest artist for a November 2017 story rerun in January 2022, and for some time at the start of 2018 guest-inked the comic strip.

There’s no word yet when the handover will happen, trusting that it will. Nor why Shelly Pleger, the current artist (and before that, inker), might have left. If I hear anything, it’ll probably be from The Daily Cartoonist, so you’d find out sooner from them. But you never know. If I carry this blog on long enough I’m bound to have a scoop someday!

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why was that library woman killing people? October – December 2023

Well, she was a serial killer, so if Xaviera “Ex” Libris weren’t killing people she’d be failing her role. But we never did get a direct explanation of her motives in the just-concluded story in Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. Instead, we got a solid story of detective work, Tracy and gang going over what they knew and what they could tease out from that until it pointed to, admittedly, the character who people talked about a lot more than she seemed to contribute to the plot. We do get a few bits, at least. Theft of rare books is right there; most of the murders we hear about were to acquire rare books or to kill someone who was leading the cops to her. There’s the hint there may be some ancient family relations tied into this. We never get a deathbed confession of Libris having been after, say, the one book her great-grandfather wanted and could never buy. There’s room for that, if you want that rationalization, though.

So this should catch you up to late December 2023 in Dick Tracy. If you’re reading this after about March 2024 I should have a more up-to-date plot recap at this link. I’ll also bring news about the strip there, if I get any. And now, on to what’s not going to be one of my longer plot recaps, if all goes well.

Dick Tracy.

1 October – 23 December 2023.

My last plot recap came as another of the mayor’s old friends got killed. It was the start of this story, where people turn up with pinpoint stabs to their chest and ancient, rare manuscripts missing.

As promised above, this is a fairly direct story of detection and deduction. If it ever lagged, it’s because Dick Tracy and his team, all of whom did stuff, reached the legitimate ends of what they could figure on one path. And my opening told you who did it. It was clear enough from a bit after her introduction that Ex Libris was the villain, but we had to read along to figure how she was doing it, how she was going to get caught, and what was supposed to be so ugly or weird about her. You know, that Chester Gould theme where people look as horrible as their morals are. She never does look bad, though, just uninterested in the people demanding time away from her from her pharmaceutical-industry ownership and her antiquarian-book library. And the killing and robbery, she wants to get that done too. But you empathize.

The threads that get us there. Sam Catchem learns the teacups at Wilhelmina Caxton’s murder scene have a small saliva sample from an unknown person. He eventually goes undercover as a waiter to snag drinking glasses that Ex Libris was using, which provide the samples to place her at that scene.

Lee Ebony finds an informant within the world of Tracytown’s bookbinder community. Half a year ago Xaviera Libris came in wanting the early-20th-century binding on a 13th century book replaced. But wanted the previous owner’s book plate discarded, something rarely done as you need those to show provenance. The informant has the old cover, just in case. And keeping his promise that she wouldn’t see him again, he gets murdered right after. Stabs to the chest.

Lizz Worthington-Grove finds a case from months ago, just across the state line, of someone murdered with the same stab in the chest. Electronic toll records place Libris’s car over the state line when that murder was done.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 10th of December, 2023. I wonder if fencers are ever bothered by how whenever they’re in pop culture they’re either Captain Picard or a killer. I guess they have it better than ventriloquists and wax museum owners do. Ooh, you know, a wax-museum-owner who fences and does ventriloquy at open mike nights would be an unstoppable pop culture villain.

Sam finds, in security camera footage, a hooded figure with two cases approaching Caxton’s place. One’s the sort of rare book case that Libris explained to Tracy a competent rare-book thief would need. The other is a long, slender carrying case of unknown purpose. And he has later footage of Libris carrying the same two cases

And Tracy has the final insight, checking just what sport it was that Libris was an Olympics alternate for (information given way back in October, reader time). It was epee fencing, Now there’s a plausible-enough-for-the-comics explanation of how she’s killing and why it’s by pinpoint chest wounds. All that’s left is to confront her in her impossibly fabulous library.

She’s ready to attack Tracy with sword and rare-books case. But he’s wearing a blade-proof vest and a case-resistent hand. She’s only foiled when she runs up the spiral staircase too fast or something and falls to her death. Problem solved, including the need for a trial.

We do get a week of Tracy reflecting on the waste of all this, of people hurt and professional lives ruined and knowledge lost. Even the sadness that the heirless Libris’s library, one almost as good as The Phantom’s rare books collection, will be auctioned off and broken up. It’s more somber reflection than I’m accustomed to in these stories. It’s not a bad note to have, though.

And this wraps things up in suspiciously good time for my plot recap here. On to the next adventure!

Next Week!

We’ve had ghost cats in the sky and real cats on the boat. What’s on the agenda now? Selkies and hobgoblins? We’ll have more details on Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant sometime early next year, if the scrolls are speaking to us truly.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why did the crook warehouse burn down? July – September 2023

Leech Madsen set it on fire. The recently-concluded story in Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy climaxed, in part, with a fire at the telemarketing scam shop that the schizophrenic Audie runs. It starts in the server room. Madsen seems to have started the fire and then go to shake down Audie for the rest of the money to be had. This seems like a poor plan to me, as Madsen went and got lost in the chaos of the fire. But we have to allow even villains blackmailing other villains to sometimes make bad decisions.

Hope you enjoy catching up to early October, now. If you’re reading around December, I expect to have my next Dick Tracy plot recap done. That essay, and all my Dick Tracy recaps, should be at this link. And now, the story.

Dick Tracy.

9 July – 30 September.

Sprocket “Susan” Nitrate, onetime film scammer turned girlfriend of author Adam Austin, had a temp job working for a telemarketing scam firm. The boss, Audie, who keeps having movie-quote conversations with imaginary figures, has other stuff going on. He’d sent ‘Leech’ Madsen to pay off Anders, the guy who’d been supplying stolen telecommunications equipment. Madsen shot him, instead, and pocketed the payoff. And figures to get back to Audie and collect his own payoff too.

From there, though, we have a surprisingly direct plot. Dick Tracy and Sam Catchem hit up their street sources, looking for places that might be housing a suspicious lot of activity. This leads them to a recently-evacuated warehouse, the spot where Audie set up before moving above the TV station, the only other working building in the neighborhood. They also check security camera footage, good detective work that leads nowhere.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 9th of August, 2023. An aspect of this story I like is that Susan/Sprocket’s an experienced enough hand at this that everybody recognizes she should be let to run things, especially in an emergency. It’s a subtle beat of how authority will break free of formal structure.

Anders, in the hospital, recovers enough to start naming names. The cops announce their lead on the shooting to the press. This gives Sabrina, the boss’s right-hand competent person, the tip-off to evacuate. And Susan discovers another reason to evacuate: the server room is on fire! And, more, Madsen is back, holding a gun on Audie. It’s all a big confusing mess. Madsen flees, but in the smoke and confusion ends up running into Dick Tracy and Sam Catchem. Madsen keeps on fleeing, eventually running into the Abandoned Blade Runner Building. Worse, the floor he climbs to collapses. He’s lucky to not fall directly onto a heap of concrete blocks and wood shards and rebar, but because he lands in a great heap of pigeon droppings.

Meanwhile, the fire. Susan (remember her?) oversees evacuating the telemarketing lair. And she leads Sabrina and Audie through the sewers finding, in the end, an abandoned lair with power and water. They thank her; Susan promises to not remember her at all.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 23rd of August, 2023. Also an interesting beat: Susan gets away with her part in this scam. She’s among the few Dick Tracy villains to get away with it, and to have no obvious reason why she wouldn’t continue to. (The Pouch is the other one who comes to mind. He got away with using a popcorn maker to shoot a guy, back in the 70s, so he’s probably escaped justice? We’ll see.)

After a heck of a day at work Susan returns to her and Adam’s hotel room. Adam’s book contract thingy went well, and he’s ready to take an overseas vacation. Susan, equipped with a fresh forged passport, is ready to go too. The story comes to its happy end the 16th of September.

Although that was after a 15-day pause for another Minit Mystery. From the 27th of August guest writer Eric Costello and guest artist Mike Sagara told a little puzzle about a murder of a Knights baseball player at Weeghman Park. Get the references?

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The current story started the 17th of September and it’s looking like a nice little murder mystery. Someone killed Wilhelmina Caxton, yet another friend of the mayor’s, so you know there’s pressure to get answers quickly. No sign of forced entry, no sign of struggle, just stab wounds to the chest. Missing: a late 13th century manuscript.

Also dead: Dr Aldus Manutius of the Pfister Institute, who hadn’t been seen in eleven months or so but you know how these Institutes are, everyone figured he was busy on something or other. He’s also dead by stabbing. He had been cataloguing medieval manuscripts, last anyone saw him. And that’s what we know for now.

Next Week!

What is Wales going to do with all these Saxon invaders? Also, can we maybe use the seas to feed people? I check out Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant if all goes to plan.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why is Mumbles back in jail? April – July 2023

In late May Dick Tracy spent a week focusing on Silver Nitrate. We saw many old Tracy villains in the background as Silver narrated for the audience. One of them was Mumbles, whom we last saw out and hanging around a furry convention. It’s not clear why he’s in jail; we haven’t seen anything he’d done. I think the least bad reconciliation of these facts is supposing the panel is recollections. That it’s not the present immediate situation. But maybe Mumbles is up to stuff we haven’t heard about, too. [ Confidential to C.L.: ping me about this. ]

This should get you up to speed for mid-July 2023 in Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. If any news about the strip develops, or if you’re reading this after about September 2023, this link should have a more useful summary. If you’re reading this around mid-July 2023, this should be enough of a summary for you.

Dick Tracy.

16 April – 8 July 2023.

Last time in Tracey Town, the new villain Gameboy was on the loose. He’s a game-themed villain committing the most archetypical supervillain crime: themed property theft. Special guest star That Guy From Pawn Stars has an idea what Gameboy’s next target will be. The target is … a printer’s proof of the 1930s promotional giveaway map for a then-new-time radio show. It seems off-theme. “Shouldn’t this be a story Jim Scancarelli puts into Gasoline Alley?” asks Tracy. Ah, no, Pawn Star Guy explains. Jim Scancarelli would just have the old-time-radio characters show up. Tracy tugs his collar loose and makes an embarrassed ‘glurk’ noise before saying, “Let’s explore that some time that’s not now”.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 23rd of April, 2023. This particular strip is about making sure B.O.Plenty and Chick Tracy’s appearance later in the story doesn’t come form nowhere. But there is possibly another story setup being done here. Simmons Corners was the setting for the Li’l Orphan Annie radio series, as you surely inferred from Gameboy’s note. The ap was a real one, printed in 1936. But in the Dick Tracy continuity Little Orphan Annie isn’t a once-popular comic strip/radio/musicals star. And, as you can see, the real map has drawings of Annie and Sandy that we don’t get a clear look at in the comic. I don’t know how this is to be reconciled; the easy supposition is that the Dick Tracy universe map is about an Annie-like character who filled her pop culture niche. But it could be stranger than that. I don’t know the story; I don’t get scoops on comic strip news.

The map is going to be at the Metro Toy Faire, and it’s rare, so why not? Well, someone in a Gameboy mask crashes the Faire, stealing a nothing game. While everyone’s distracted someone else makes off with the old-time-radio map. Gameboy’s got to have a hobby, you know.

Meanwhile, B.O.Plenty is back in the story. He’s got a hen, Chick Tracy, who’s lined up for a modeling job for Chic’N De-Lites. She’s a clever chicken, able to do tricks and be photogenic. More on this to come.

The Chief has an idea for Gameboy’s next target. It’s a World War II prisoner-of-war edition of Monopoly. These were sets made with secret compartments holding files, compasses, silk maps, and foreign currency to aid escapes. The Chief claimed the Red Cross distributed them. He’s wrong, but in an understandable way. I’ve read pop histories mentioning the games and making the same claim. (I would have sworn it was in this history of the Parker Brothers I read once, but I can’t find the book again.) Other aid organizations, custom-created for the purpose, distributed them. This way if discovered the useful service of a true neutral organization could go on.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 12th of May, 2023. We never get, by the way, a definite statement about whether Gameboy had legitimately turned the Milton-Bradley ‘Time Bomb’ toy into an actual toy or whether he was bluffing. I feel sure the elderly man observing ‘Oh look! A time bomb!’ is referencing something, but I’m not sure what. The closest match to my mind is the bit in Doonesbury where an elderly Cambodian couple testifies that the war criminals Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s “secret” bombs were no secret: “Look honey, here come the bombs” he said. Still, there is something Jay Ward about this man’s declaration.

The Chief’s instincts are right; Gameboy can’t resist the target. While another fake Gameboy steals a cheap game loudly, the real Gameboy reveals what he claims to be a real bomb. Luckily, Chick Tracy — there for a promotional stunt — mistakes the bomb for a toy and tugs the string that deactivates it. Gameboy’s captured and all is well.

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The 14th of May starts a weeklong diversion. The rarebit fiend Dick Tracy has an adventure with Fearless Fosdick, his parody from Li’l Abner. It’s a reference many commenters didn’t recognize. GoComics needs to expand its selection of Li’l Abner strips to repeat.

The current story starts the 22nd of May, with Silver Nitrate narrating his and his sister’s backstory. They were making film forgeries. Last time they were out, Sprocket escaped, taking on a new life as “Susan Keats”, girlfriend of novelist Adam Austin. Sprocket is thinking of taking a temp job at a place that claims it won’t mind her barefoot-everywhere in-touch-with-mother-Earth vibe. (I don’t know whether Adam Austin knows about Susan’s past.)

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 7th of June, 2023. I’m not sure that Susan’s talk here is that good, but it is an economic way of showing that she can talk people past their immediate concern, needed for any sales position. Also, I mean, she’s being considered for a telemarketing scam organization. The actual bar is likely “doesn’t blurt out ‘I love my job at the FTC!’ during the interview”.

What the job is, is telephone scams. But she’s good at that — it’s not far off the work she and Silver used to do — and her supervisor seems nice. And the boss, Audie, is always wandering around quoting old movies at nobody in particular. So she’s working for an Internet nerd, though mediated by a human.

And then storylines intersect! It turns out the scammers are targeting B.O.Plenty and his wife Gertie pretty hard. Only the intervention of Chick Tracy can stop them falling for every call. Tracy agrees to tap the Plentys’ line and see if they can figure something out.

Which, with the aid of detection, they do! In what is unmistakably an act of scientific detection, Tracy finds a distributor who reported a hijacked shipment of telecommunications gear and a would-be recipient who didn’t. They ask the shipper for information on the buyer. They’re barely out of the office when the manager, Mr Anders, calls someone to say Tracy’s on to them and he’s got to get away. Tracy and Sam Catchem can barely find the false address of the “buyer” before Anders is found murdered.

And in another unmistakable act of super-detection, Tracy searches Anders’s office and finds … a bit of shaped stucco. Now where in town is there old shaped stucco? Well, the Nomar shopping area, built around fifty years ago, during the great Art Deco era of the … early 70s. They prowl the area. They can’t find which of the many buildings in the neighborhood is missing a thumb-size chunk of stucco. But Anders’s murderer, Madsen, sees them prowling and thinks they’re on to him.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 6th of July, 2023. And a note to head off future confusion: Madsen here is lying. He shot Anders dead and, I assume, kept the payoff. That’s what we’re seeing the gun for. Yes, I know this is a lot of “unreliable” narration this recap — Madsen lying about what he did, possibly Silver Nitrate having a montage rather than interacting with something in the present, possibly Gameboy faking a bomb — but Madsen we at least that he’s lying and have a good idea why.

Madsen meets up with Audie, claiming to have paid off Anders and that, once Audie pays him off, he’ll be out for good. No links for the cops to find. Audie says he doesn’t have that in petty cash, he used it all to pay Anders to get out of town. And, meanwhile, Sprocket/Susan is figuring she’ll be out of here in a few days, when Austin’s book business meetings get done.

And in a weeklong interlude starting the 12th of June, Diet Smith discovers a Space Coupe in his backyard. He shouldn’t have one; his was lost somewhere in deep space when a couple guys hijacked it, and he doesn’t have plans to build another. It’s a gift from the Moon Governor. Smith asks Tracy if he knows where the Lunarians are. Tracy doesn’t answer.

There was also a single-day strip, tagged with a note to expect next year a story about Little Orphan Annie’s parents. I’m surprised there are still open mysteries about her parents. But I trust Mike Curtis’s understanding of the canonical Annie.

Next Week!

Prince Valiant and his son join together on an adventure into Wales to find out: what’s the deal here, anyway? I get a week of plot recaps even I can’t be late on as I review Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant, if all goes to plan.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why didn’t the last two stories finish? January – April 2023

THe last two stories in Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy did finish, with reasonable enough conclusions. They share the quirk that both had a big, unresolved piece, and the same one: a mysterious person putting out a hit on Dick Tracy, and Tracy doesn’t know who or why. OK, that’s not a unique element in Dick Tracy stories. One of these may be setting up a future story. The other is a sort of prequel. So the coincidence in resolution is probably coincidence.

This all should catch you up to mid-April 2023 in the comic strip. If you’re reading after about July 2023, I probably have a more current plot recap here. I’ll also post any news I need to share about the comic at that link. Now on to the action.

Dick Tracy.

29 January – 15 April 2023.

Team Tracy was taking all-around forger Art Dekko into custody. While they walk him to the car, a sniper on the roof of a nearby building shoots at him. Or at Dick Tracy; they don’t know. Tracy has Dekko and Officer Lee Ebony indoors while he chases the sniper. The sniper is Kryptonite, or was, as he and Tracy shoot each other, Tracy more successfully.

Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 8th of February, 2023. Though the characters don’t know who the target was we the audience do. Kryptonite said to himself he recognized the yellow trenchcoat as Dick Tracy and that “I’ll bag him someday”. He, uh, doesn’t.

Art Dekko spins a tale of how the mysterious 99 coerced him into forging a Leonardo da Vinci painting. The attempted murder is evidence for his story. Tracy’s able to find evidence linking 99 to various extortion and money laundering schemes. She’s escaped to Miami, though, and we overhear her on the phone talking with someone who promises, “listen to me, 99, and you’ll always be one step ahead”. Who is doing the speaking? And what for? We don’t know, as of the story’s close the 25th of February.

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The 12th of February was a week of reruns, a repeat of the Minit Mystery solving the death of Ultraman TV star George Reeds. It’s a one-week story and the mystery is solvable from the clues we get, so, do enjoy. It was an oddly-timed interlude in the conclusion of the Art Dekko story.

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The 26th of February started the just-concluded story. It’s told in flashback, Dick Tracy telling Sam Catchem of the time he met Nero Wolfe. Yes, that Nero Wolfe, of many charming cozy mysteries. Also a couple of old-time radio series that are free for the listening. The best-cast is the one with Sydney Greenstreet as Nero Wolfe, although none of his actual stories were adapted to that series. Nero Wolfe is a massive detective who would rather not leave home, good day. His factotum and right-hand snarker Archie Goodwin goes into the world to gather evidence and flirt with any women who happen to be in the story. Wolfe solves the crime, he prefers, without standing up.

Tracy’s story starts with Archie Goodwin appealing for Dick Tracy’s help. Nero Wolfe’s been kidnapped, he says, and is somewhere in Tracy’s distractingly unnamed city. What Archie knows: Wolfe got a telegram of such import that Wolfe left home without eating dinner. It’s a turn of events so unlikely that Nero Wolfe fans hearing about this right now are writing Internet Angry comments about how no he did not. He did so, and Archie has the telegram to explain it. The telegram sender offered Nero Wolfe some of Basil St John’s unique black orchids if Wolfe visits him alone. All those Internet Angry people are now saying, okay, yeah, that checks out then. Wolfe is even more motivated by orchids than Eugene the Jeep is. Tracy agrees to investigate Wolfe’s disappearance, even if it isn’t shown to be a kidnapping yet.

Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 12th of March, 2023. I’m not sure how Zeck got the black orchids. He claims to have snagged them from Basil St John (Brenda Starr’s beau), but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything besides that Mike Curtis knows he can tie in more references to things. (By the way that appearance of Oliver Warbucks back in late January hasn’t developed into anything yet.)

Wolfe, meanwhile, may be kidnapped but he’s having a fine time of it, mostly sitting in a chair reading while supervised by ‘Duncan’ and ‘Mr Zeck’. And this is a big tipoff to the Nero Wolfe fan. Arnold Zeck is a crime boss who appeared in several of Wolfe’s novels, in case you wondered whether Nero Wolfe had his own Moriarty. Of course he does.

After a week of this they give Wolfe the tease of seeing some black orchids. Meanwhile Tracy and Goodwin are on the trail by going around asking if anyone has seen a really fat guy. No, fatter than that. If you don’t understand how he’s moving without the aid of Oompa-Loompas you’re not thinking fat enough. This isn’t a fat joke because Nero Wolfe wears his enormity with pride and he’s got the coolness to back it up. I’ll get there.

Mr Zeck, meanwhile, meets with someone he’d like to hire for a second job. It’s Dick Tracy’s own Moriarty, Flattop, who’s happy to take on a kill-the-cop job. He figures he can roll it in with another bank job, even if his short-tempered big brother Blowtop doesn’t agree. The top brothers end up in a duel: Blowtop’s to do the bank job, Flattop to do the Tracy hit, and whoever brings in the most money for their work wins … uh … control of the family, I guess. And from the tone of this the hardcore Dick Tracy fan realizes this is not only a prequel to Nero Wolfe’s Moriarty. It’s also the prequel to Flattop’s adventure with Dick Tracy, a story that ended, reader time, before my father was one year old.

Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 2nd of April, 2023. I can absolutely buy Wolfe and Goodwin’s dialogue here, but I’ve listened to the old-time-radio series enough that I hear the actors performing it and adding their charisma to things. Anyway, yes, the resolution did end up being that once Nero Wolfe decided he’d had enough of this and was leaving, it was impossible to stop him. Fair enough.

Tracy, in a stroke of luck, spots the bank robbery as it’s starting. Flattop sees a chance to finish his side gig; it’s foiled when Archie Goodwin fires a warning shot. Mr Zeck is annoyed with Flattop, thinking now how he’ll have to deal with Wolfe himself. And no, he won’t. Nero Wolfe, having had enough of captivity, has taken his black orchids and left. He meets Archie and Dick Tracy as they were at the end of his trail. It’s like that episode of the Adam Weest Batman where he had to stop fighting the Green Hornet because plot got in their way.

Wolfe explains his escape, pausing to sneer at the ineptness of his kidnappers. All the time he spent “reading” was his studying the routines and operations of his captives and observers. When he knew Mr Zeck was gone he pulled out the knife he’d secreted on his person, a trick he learned in his youth as a spy. And tossed it right at some ambiguous but important part of Duncan’s body. With that, he got out to the street and phoned the cops. Along the way this freed some other captives we didn’t hear much about. Duncan and, we presume, Mr Zeck fled before the cops arrived and neither of our super-detectives know who was kidnapping them or why. But that is where Dick Tracy leaves off his reminiscence.

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Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 9th of April, 2023. From this I guess we learn Sam Catchem’s not a fan of Monopoly, probably more a Mice and Mystics player. Anyway, I know people just happen sometimes to be named Brad and it’s something they do all right, sometimes even thrive on. But ‘The Federal Bank robbery as retold by Brad” feels like a weird sentence. I can’t give a good reason why.

The 7th of April began the current story. A man with dice on his mask robs the Federal Bank (incidentally the bank that the Tops had tried robbing). He leaves behind a calling card: the street sign outside changed to show the intersection of Boardwalk and Park Place. And you get to thinking, wait, the new Dick Tracy villain is a guy who’s way too into Monopoly?

No, of course not, that would be silly. Gameboy, his name is, leaves a note behind referencing the Shenanighoul. This was a monster who appeared in the 1960s kids game show Shenanigans that I know from like two references on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Gameboy robs a rare prototype board game from the Toy Museum, and promises more. Sam Catchem has an idea for the next target: an 1860s Milton Bradley board game on display at the Gould Library. Sounds plausible to Tracy, at least, and me too. I don’t know in detail where this is going. But I too would bet on Gameboy trying to play his Get Out Of Jail Free card. We’ll see.

Next Week!

King Arthur is back in the days of Prince Valiant! And … he’s right back out again! What is all that about and why did we see him at all? I’ll finally recap the plot in Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant next week, all going well.

I Knew This Would Fail but Not How Much It Would Fail

I understand if you haven’t been reading Comics Kingdom’s 1943-vintage reruns of Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond’s Secret Agent X-9, what with by this time Hammett and Raymond having nothing to do with it. I think it was Robert Storm and Mel Graff by then, and Robert Storm didn’t even exist. But let me catch you up: Secret Agent X-9 is chasing down a baddy named the Little Corporal, a name which I’m sure had no significance at all to readers of 1943.

The Little Corporal has been trying to escape and after his first attempt — disguise himself as a gorilla in a midway show — failed, he ran to the Ferris wheel. It turns out you can’t really escape pursuit in a Ferris wheel, so he jumped down a tree, waved to Fatty Raccoon, and ran to the Scenic Railway roller coaster. So now you’re caught up to seeing how someone can escape on a roller coaster:

Robert Storm and Mel Graff’s Secret Agent X-9 for the 24th of September, 1943, reprinted the 17th of March, 2023. I know you’re wondering why the roller coaster happens to be being dismantled like this and you have to remember, there was a war on.

By the way the attempt to escape on the Ferris wheel wasn’t even the first time I’ve seen an adventure/crime comic where the bad guy tried to escape on a flat ride. There was a 1930s Dick Tracy adventure where the crook tried to escape on a Caterpillar ride. A Caterpillar was kind of like a Musik Express or Himalaya ride, cars going around and around on the track, but it had a canopy covering the cars most of the ride and the crook snuck out of the ride while the canopy was over. So that was a dumb plan but it was a better grade of dumb than “get on the Ferris wheel and try and climb out when the cops get to the ride platform”.

There Might Be Something Weird and Dick Tracy-Based on TCM Tonight

I owe my love thanks for noticing this. Turner Classic Movies is running a series of Dick Tracy movies from the 40s today, from 8 pm Eastern. None of them are long and the last of them has Boris Karloff so you won’t be sorry spending time there, at least. And it may help you catch up on obscure references for the daily comic strip.

But the interesting thing to me is what’s listed for 10:30 pm Eastern. It’s titled Dick Tracy Special: Tracy Zooms In. TCM’s web site offers no information about what it is and the page for it pretends there is no such thing. What it appears to be is a thing Warren Beatty does every several years, doing a performance as Dick Tracy, in order to retain the movie rights. So I don’t know what to expect other than “a thing that keeps a contract option alive”, which we’ve always known as our best entertainment value.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Since when is Mumbles a furry? October 2022 – January 2023

The current storyline in Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy included some scenes at a furry convention. It was a decent way to get the story’s main villain (Art Dekko) on-screen and explain his deal (art forgery). And, along the way, we encountered Mumbles, whom you remember from that one odd yet strange scene in the Dick Tracy movie. I mean the one with the polar-bear-shaped water cooler that’s a tape recorder. Mumbles says he’s a furry and acts surprised Tracy didn’t know.

Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 8th of December, 2022. It would be easy to believe this is a scam, but we saw Mumbles annoying Dekko by looking for art of the Chipettes. The Chipettes are the female counterparts to Alvin, Simon, and Theodore introduced in the 80s cartoon, which you know if you’re a “greymuzzle”, defined as “a furry who has knee and back pain”. So … I guess he’s legit?

It’s a moment that left me startled. It felt weird to write a personality trait like that into a character who’s been with the comic since before anybody ever heard of Chuck Yeager. I understand, Mike Curtis is the writer of the strip, he has the right to play with the character any way he likes. But — as with Francesco Marciuliano’s decision that Abbey Spencer’s father had a secret second family — I do wonder how the writers feel about adding big new traits to long-established characters. I’d love to know if they feel intimidated changing, or at least augmenting, someone that way.

Oddly, this threw me more than the same storyline’s revelation that Officer Lee Ebony, part of the strip since the Carter administration, was lesbian or bisexual. I don’t know why this registered as different except maybe that the Mumbles news came first. But I know at least one friend of mine wondered if Mumbles was there as part of the storyline, using “I’m a furry” as his abili. Doesn’t appear to be so; he just, you know, has a life outside whatever his exact guitar-based crime deal is.

And there might be something Mike Curtis has in mind for all this. He’s a writer not afraid to plant stuff for use years later. For example, and relevant to the first story of this recap, Curtis established Sam Catchem as a fan of the fictional-in-our-universe comic strip Derby Dugan ages ago. (For us, it’s a series of novels by Tom De Haven, with illustrations by Art Spiegelman.) It set him up as having a reason to hang around the Derby Dugan musical being put on at Vitamin Flintheart’s theater.

So this should catch you up on the comic for the end of January 2023. All my plot recaps, and news about Dick Tracy, should be at this link. So if you’re somewhere around May 2023 or later, you’ll probably find a more useful plot recap there. If you’re here at the end of January or the starting end of February 2023, though, read on. This may help.

Dick Tracy.

30 October 2022 – 28 January 2023.

Steelface, who runs an automobile chop shop outfit, called in a favor from his nephew Robert Parrish. Parrish had wanted a key part in the Derby Dugan comic strip musical and Steelface arranged it. In trade, Parrish swiped a couple cars needed to make quota. One happened to be Derby Dugan superfan Sam Catchem’s car. With Catchem’s wrist radio in their possession Steelface’s gang can clear out ahead of the cops’ raids.

Derby Dugan author Tom De Haven (to them, historian of the strip) meeting the performers causes Parrish to twig onto Sam Catchem being a cop. Before he’d only known him as a friend of Vitamin Flintheart hanging around the theater a lot. And guilt-stricken at this, he sneaks Catchem’s wrist radio out of his uncle’s shop and back to Catchem’s pocket.

Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 17th of November, 2022. I admit I was expecting Steelface (‘Mr Arceneaux’) to die from the metal scrap in his face being ripped out, and was a bit disappointed that the far more sensible and reasonable thing — that he started screaming in pain and they shut everything off fast — happened instead. Such is what happens when you have genre conventions on your mind.

Steelface, fuming about the theft of the wrist radio, has a car accident. He drives to the hospital where they start giving him an MRI. The powerful magnets resonate mightily with the chunks of metal in his face. They cause extraordinary pain before the hospital staff yanks him out of there and asks, oh, like you were named Steelface literally?

Parrish, who’d got a text his uncle Steelface was in an accident but nothing more, comes clean about everything to Catchem. Steelface, maimed by the MRI pulling his skin out, decides to take his chances with car crashes. He races out of the hospital to find his car, ironically, stolen. Or “stolen”, since he was using a bait car, and Dick Tracy and Sam Catchem were right there to pick him up. And that wraps up the story, the 25th of November.

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After a pause to observe Charles Schulz’s centennial the current story started. Tom De Haven is back, looking unsettlingly like Les Moore, to show Dick Tracy some animal cells he got from a 1930s Derby Dugan cartoon. Tracy’s impressed, he guesses, until De Haven reveals there were never Derby Dugan cartoons. Someone’s selling forged animation art. This … doesn’t seem like a Major Crimes Unit case. But Dick Tracy knows who’s writing this strip. He goes to meet Sam Catchem’s pal Eric, who deals movie memorabilia at Fanfur Con. That’s how we get the revelation about Mumbles mentioned above.

Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 5th of December, 2022. See, like, is the Jester Bunny really Mumbles in costume? Or what? The scene is funny and not every installment has to be more than an amusing moment, but is this just an amusing moment or is it setting something for later?

Eric’s not saying he knows anything but that Art Dekko guy’s selling counterfeits. So he is, although not clearly enough that Tracy and Catchem can nab him. But he’s got a plan, that he explains to his moustachioed assistant, Sue Reel. Art Dekko explains a lot this story, mostly by explaining how Art Dekko didn’t get where he did by making obvious mistakes. Such as taking shortcuts in his counterfeiting. We get this shown by his demanding wardrobe tags for a fake George Reeves Superman costume be made right. (Granting, that is the sort of oversight a casual inspection would catch.)

His big plan? Faking a Leonardo da Vinci. In Paul Chandler he has a talent who can do the painting. He sets Chandler up with period materials and special paints and access to da Vinci sketchbooks. And while Dekko is happy to explain this to his assistant, he’s not telling anything where any cops can hear.

Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 14th of December, 2022. Wait a minute … is that Derby Dugan on the right page of the sketchbook in the second panel there? You have to tell me if that’s Derby Dugan, you know.

Enter Blaze Rize, last seen in the strip somewhere around 2015-16. She had been part of a scam to defame Dick Tracy with forged video. She turned state’s evidence against the gang. In the past few months she’s started a relationship with officer Lee Ebony, who’d met Rize when undercover in Mr Bribery’s gang. She’s willing to do the cops a solid and goes into Dekko’s memorabilia shop. She finds a post-it note to ‘Call Paul Chandler’, the first thing that looks anything like evidence for the cops.

Fortunately, everybody is ready to blow up a perfectly good scam. Chandler demands a bigger share of the Da Vinci job. Dekko declares he didn’t get where he is by not being fair, and agrees. And pays for Chandler to take a vacation in Panama City, Florida. Dekko then declares (to himself) that he didn’t get where is by doing his own killing. He calls a hit man named Kriptonite, or Kyptonite, or Kryptonite, depending on which day you read. And before he knows it Chandler enjoys an early-morning swim with nobody but the fishes and the hired killer spearing him, leaving his corpse to wash ashore days later.

Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 26th of January, 2023. I assume that 99’s name is a Get Smart! reference but I’m not following the logic yet. I also don’t get the logic of why Art Dekko actually went to Paul Chandler’s apartment. Like, I get saying he was going there: he wants to have other people think he checked in on Chandler and was mystified that he hadn’t returned from his holiday. But as he had said to himself a few days before, he could just get a couple coffees and pretend to have visited. I can imagine even going up to the apartment and knocking on the door, so neighbors might attest he’d done the ‘reasonable’ thing, but 99 said she caught him breaking into the apartment.

Dekko tells Reel he’s going to Chandler’s place, pretending to check on him. He’s confronted by a woman calling herself 99 and demanding half the da Vinci job’s take. And warning she’ll call in Kryptonite if Dekko tries to trace her. She muses how if Chandler had needed Dekko’s connections to pull off the scam, and if he’d only kept his cool … and, of course, she’s planning to knock off Dekko whatever happens. Meanwhile, Dekko observes that he didn’t get where he is by not being able to turn people against each other. Where he is is hiding in the storeroom, living on Montoni’s Pizza, so you know he’s in dire straits. He’s thinking of how to break up whatever links 99 and Kryptonite might have.

And that’s how we got where we are now. We have had a couple appearances by Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks, who’s got some hand in Diet Smith rebuilding his laboratory. And worrying about Annie growing up. And, this Sunday receiving a mysterious package that Diet Smith needs to know about. We may suppose that’s to be dealt with in a coming story.

Next Week!

Garbage truck rides: are they only for the impossibly old anymore? Or are they also for immortal being such as Santa Claus? Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley is unafraid to tackle the tough issues, and next week, I might be too! See you then.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? What kind of idiot steals a cop car? August – October 2022

The current story in Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy has Robert Parrish, who’s been paying for his acting career by stealing cars, stole a cop car. One may ask why any criminal with a lick of sense would do that. And the answer is that it wasn’t, you know, a cop car. The thing with the seal of the city and some motto about serving and protecting on it. It was the blue sedan owned by a a person who happens to be a cop, in this case, Sam Catchem. It happened to have some of Catchem’s work gear inside too. But the robbers have no idea they’re getting a cop’s car; it’s just, a car.

So this should catch you up to the end of October 2022 in Dick Tracy. If you’re reading this after about December 2022 a more useful plot recap should be here. I’ll also post any news I get about the comic strip. Now on to the last couple months and how the Earth got saved from conquest plus right before a musical went into production.

Dick Tracy.

14 August – 29 October 2022.

Dick Tracy accepted Moon Governor Thorin’s invitation for him, Honeymoon Tracy, and Mysta Chimera to visit the Lunarian hideout. This so Honeymoon and Chimera could learn something of their heritage. The heritage is of pulpy 1930s sci-fi adventure, with big angular architecture and psychic powers and snail-based economies and all. Also so Tracy could learn there’s a rogue faction respecting their pulpy 1930s sci-fi heritage by conquering the Earth. And what do you know but Ro-Zan is preparing to launch his conquest of the Earth, like, tomorrow! To show he’s serious he orders the electro-killing of Marina, who pointed out this was madness, madness I tell you, at the pre-conquest rally.

Marina’s friend Shay-Gin flees the rally to tell Tracy and Thorin what’s happening. They choose to go to the space coupe hangar, to see Ro-Zan’s weaponized space coupes and get ambushed. That plan succeeds, and Ro-Zan orders his men to electro-kill Tracy and Thorin. Tracy faces the electro-firing squad with a strange calm and also Mr Bribery’s ring to neutralize Lunarian powers.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 27th of August, 2022. Dick Tracy is showing a lot of faith that Mr Bribery’s ring, made to control Mysta Chimera’s powers — which were created by human body engineering — will work on a bunch of Lunarians. (Could be Chimera and Honeymoon are doing something to help out, too.)

The ring does more than neutralize the powers; it shoots the electro-kill ray back at the firing squad. It’s dispersed or something enough to only stun them all. Tracy and Ro-Zan get into a Star Trek fistfight, the only way to overcome this genre of villain for good.

With the conquest of Earth halted, Tracy asks what the Moon Government will do with the coup plotters. Thorin promises the New Moon Valley has a zero-tolerance policy about crime. It’s a reminder that this sort of pulpy 1930s sci-fi has a technocratic fascism built into it. It’s things to think about, especially as Tracy refuses to turn over Mr Bribery’s ring. Thorin considers how they have to rethink their zero-tolerance policy, especially as he can’t execute Ro-Zan, his own brother.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 30th of August, 2022. Dick Tracy is lucky that Lunarians also have that ‘human off switch’ where you can punch them in the back and if you’re in a 1950s or 60s action TV show they pass out.

Which, first, yeah, zero-tolerance policies are generally bad as they squeeze out judgement. Especially when it’s about something like execution, which you can’t repair if you get a judgement wrong. But Ro-Zan was trying to overthrow the government and conquer the world, which needs a serious response. On the other hand, Thorin thinks of how they need to find a ‘permanent solution’ to handling crime and again with the technocratic fascism.

Back to the text. Liska — who’d been sweet on Dick Tracy — gives him a gift of some Lunarian ground-escargot coffee, a reminder of nice times in the valley. And the Lunarians conclude this isn’t the right time for them to engage with the whole world. Not until they can get their taking-over-the-world problem dealt with. Tracy et al return home, and we return to mundane plots.

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I’ll handle some small ones that seem to be threads for another day. The first, explored for a few days in mid-September, was about the Cinnamon Knight. He’s retiring from his costumed-vigilante superhero thingy, and going to the Police Academy. The second, getting a couple in late October, had a man with no clear pupils sorting through papers. He finds an old note from ‘Harold and Winifred’. The name, and art style, suggests Harold Gray, creator of Little Orphan Annie (his wife was Winifred). We saw this paper-sorting fellow a couple months ago, with a narrative box promising that he’d be important to Tracy someday. How has yet to transpire.

Also the strip took a two-week pause for a ‘Minit Mystery’, written by Walt Reimer and drawn by Joe Staton, who only retired from the strip a year ago. That one broke from the Minit-Mystery format, offering an ‘adventure’ instead. It had significant-looking funny names were there, people like Wren Christopher and Dr Anita Bath. But it was about a museum theft of precious artifacts like the Froyne of Layven. It didn’t have any element of ‘why were the boots wet but the umbrella dry’ sort of reasoning.

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The big story, though, started the 16th of September and it’s still going on now. It’s instigated by Vitamin Flintheart, whose newest play is the musical Funny Papers. It’s a history of the comics, told through the history of the comic strip Derby Dugan. In our reality this is a series of novels by Tom De Haven, with illustrations by Art Spiegelman. In the Dick Tracy universe it was an actual comic strip that Tracy’s sidekick Sam Catchem is a huge fan of. And that’s got a musical, now. Derby Dugan, the strip, evokes a lot of Little Orphan Annie; I don’t know if this will tie in to that fellow with the letter from Harold and Winifred.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 8th of October, 2022. I’m assuming the director is willing to hire Parrish for an important role in a musical before hearing him sing because Steelface got to him. But we do see a good bit of rehearsals and don’t see anyone wondering how this guy got the part. I admit I’d enjoy the dramatic irony if it turns out Parrish would have got the part without owing Steelface a favor.

Fellow name of Robert Parrish really wants to perform as Pinfold, the street urchin who inspires the Derby Dugan character. He goes to his uncle Steelface, who runs a car-theft ring. Steelface feels like a long-established character to me. His gimmick is he was an arc welder who got enough metal embedded in his body that he wears magnetized plates on his head. But I can’t find him in the Dick Tracy Wikia. Could be Curtis and Pleger created someone new who feels like an established villain. (Steelface’s real name is given as Arceneaux, last name unclear. I guess Parrish but can’t say for sure.)

Parrish easily snags the Pinfold part. And Sam Catchem is so eager to see the rehearsals he asks Tracy about 400 billion times if Vitamin Flintheart would do the favor of letting him. Since Tracy’s saved Flintheart’s life about 400 billion times this is easy to arrange.

Catchem and Parrish get to nerd-pair-bond over their Derby Dugan fandom. When Parrish gets a phone call from Steelface, though, Catchem’s alert. He fills Tracy in on how back in the day he and the Boston police tried to bust up Steelface’s car-theft ring. Meanwhile Steelface’s call is for Parrish’s help: they don’t have enough cars and Parrish is really good at lifting them, and owes a big favor. The time-pressed Parrish swipes something right next to the playhouse. It turns out to be Sam Catchem’s car.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 17th of October, 2022. I appreciate the progress of “welder” to “metal fragments in face” to “wears steel plates on his face while he oversees a car theft ring” here.

Parrish is horrified to have accidentally grabbed a cop’s car. Steelface isn’t. For one, it’s freaking hilarious. For another, there was cop gear in it, including one of the wrist radios that Tracy’s unit uses. Steelface’s group can use it to monitor the cops and, like, clear out their chop shop ahead of the raid.

And this is where we’re standing as of early November.

Next Week!

So if Polly hasn’t gone to Mars, then why is Walt Wallet trying to hitch a ride on a garbage truck? I follow the twisting paths of Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley next week, if things go like they should.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why can’t Dick Tracy neutralize the Moon People’s superpowers? May – August 2022

The current story in Joe Staton Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy is about a block of Lunarians planning to conquer Earth. And they have a good bid for it too, given that the former Moon Valley people have antennas and energy powers and stuff. The Lunarian’s leader wants to head off this invasion and warns Dick Tracy of Earth’s potential conquest here. But … didn’t we see that the Lunarians’ powers can be suppressed? How big a threat could this be?

So we did. When Mr Bribery had Posie Ermine captured and genetically engineered into the clone Moon Maid, he had a remote control ring made to control her powers. Brock Archival got hold of the ring, and used it in a 2021 story to keep the Moon Maid helpless. So Earth has the technology to disable the Lunarians’ superpowers.

Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 15th of July, 2022. Tracy reassures the Moon Governor that the Lunarians could melt all our anvis and we’d be all right. Historical villages would have to find something else to take the place of their horseshoe-making demonstrations is all. They could shift to, I don’t know, barrel-making? That sounds like something they could do.

What is not established, though, is first that the Lunarians know anything about this. Dick Tracy knows (or should), but he has good reason to keep that confidential. It’s also not established that anyone but Mr Bribery’s dead henchmen know how the ring works or how to duplicate it. And, it turns out, even if they could duplicate it, the Lunarian Invasion of Earth is set for quite soon now. There may not be time to make and deploy rings to strategic defense points. And, of course, even a failed coup would be quite bad for us all. Thus the urgency to warn, to act, and to stop this menace.

This essay should catch you up to about mid-August 2022. If you’re reading this after about October 2022, or news about Dick Tracy breaks, there’s likely a more useful essay at this link. Thanks for being here.

Dick Tracy.

29 May – 13 August 2022.

Mr Memory, last seen in the unsuccessful pilot for a 1960s Dick Tracy series, had robbed a guy at the ATM, last I checked. Then used some kind of implant to clean out the whole cash machine. And not just the cash machine. He loots half the bank’s assets, and similarly hits four other local banks. They try to keep quiet about this, to avoid a panic. But retiring vigilante superhero Cinnamon Knight — by day a mild-mannered bank worker — tips off Dick Tracy. Tracy’s only leads are that the five banks have a common security service provider. And the security camera shows a large man whose presence causes the camera to go blurry. Tracy checks the Dick Tracy Wikia and figures Mister Memory is the first suspect.

Mister Memory, meanwhile, is getting to know his neighbors, the Plenty family. They think kindly of him ever since he gave B.O. a lift into town. Gertie brings over gifts of sorghum and hot biscuits and for a while it looks like we’re going to see a villain redeemed by kindness. I’m up for that, especially when the villain is only using his experimental computer chip implants to digitally rob banks.

Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 19th of June, 2022. It’s all right, the owl was just attacking Dick Tracy’s hat. The owl’s a Dick Tracy super-fan and wants to be featured in the Wall of Hats.

So when Tracy and Sam Catchem finally get to Memory’s place — the GPS goes awry as they get closer — they find the Plentys, rallying to Memory’s defense. Mister Memory agrees to go downtown and answer questions, though, if he can use the restroom first. Tracy agrees to fall for this and lets Memory sneak out to his motorcycle. It’s raining a little, and Memory regrets not practicing more on the motorcycle: he skids out in a car’s backspray and crashes. And, fortunately for Dick Tracy, B.O.Plenty talked about how Memory asked him to enter some codes in the computer while he was off establishing an alibi. This means there’s something to hold Mister Memory on. That, and a mention that the Crimson Knight is applying to the police academy, brings us to the end of the story.

It’s all structured okay, but once again Dick Tracy gets the bad guy by luck. Like, he’s following the correct trail and has good evidence to lead him there. And Memory has a fair reason to flee, and be bad at fleeing. But I liked the guy and felt like we were just getting to know him, so I’d have been up for another month of twists and turns in his story.

Oh, and there was a teaser for another story: the 13th and 14th of June we saw a whiskery old guy discover a bunch of old legal documents in the garage. We’re promised that “one day this man will be important to Dick Tracy”. But we’ve seen the comic is comfortable letting that sort of thing sit for years. We still haven’t resolved those haunts at the Plenty house, for example.

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The current and science fiction-based story began the 28th of June. It’s about the former Lunarians, who years ago abandoned their valley on the Moon to set up an Antarctic colony. The Moon Governor — now the Ambassador — arrives at Dick Tracy’s door, inviting Dick Tracy, Honeymoon, and Mysta Chimera to visit New Moon Valley for a week. Tracy is suspicious of the Lunarians’ motives. But Dick Tracy Junior feels his daughter should know something about her heritage and this is what he can offer. It’s a half-hour flight by Space Coupe to New Moon Valley.

Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 27th of July, 2022. A thread I didn’t know how to fit in the main essay: Ro-Zan is smitten with Mysta Chimera and we see that he’s stunned how much she looks like the original Moon Maid. There are a few scenes like this, suggesting him crushing hard on her, but it hasn’t developed to the point of his kidnapping her or anything big and stupid displays of misplaced love like that.

The Moon Ambassador — Thorin, we learn is his name — has a warning for Dick Tracy. There’s sentiment among the Lunarians that they should open up and join Earth society. Fine enough. There’s also a movement that figures they should join as Earth’s conquerers. They can use the Lunarian superpowers of having antennas that shoot energy bolts and telepathy and stuff. I know you agree that humans aren’t doing so great on their own. But the Lunarian society draws a little too much from pulpy science fiction of the 30s and 40s. So it’s got this technocratic fascism built in, even when it’s just getting together in groups to watch Japanese cartoons. Also the Lunarians keep the place way too cold and I’m not sure they blink.

Thorin doesn’t know who might be leading the faction and detectives are unknown in their land. Like, what if it were his second-in-command, Ro-Zan, leading the would-be Lunarian conquest of Earth? On the other hand what are the odds of that? Dick Tracy pokes around as unobtrusively as he can, sometimes chaperoned by Marina, a Lunarian widow smitten with the outsider. But all Tracy’s shown to work out is that a lot of the Lunarian population is missing. Thorin explains that when they abandoned the Moon many Lunarians went into deeper space and haven’t been heard from since.

Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 14th of August, 2022. You can see how Marina here hasn’t learned enough from the Earth’s supply of television or she’d know not to interrupt the fascist rally with a declaration of how they’ll fail. She should silently resolve to go warn Dick Tracy and then be murdered in a remote alley before she can tell anyone what she knows instead.

Marina, humiliated after she kisses an uninterested Dick Tracy, accompanies her friend Shay-Gin to her meeting. The meeting is Ro-Zan’s rallying his troops the night before they make history. The history they plan to make is seizing power and launching a war against the humans. Marina is horrified, and says so. Ro-Zan orders her death, and his armsmen use their antenna energy beam thingies to cook her. So, uh, this is looking serious now.

And that’s where we are as of mid-August. In case we’ve been conquered by the Lunarians by October 2022, uh, well. There’s those lost Lunarian colonies that I bet might come to our aid? Maybe? We’ll see.

Next Week!

Hey, what’s the other story strip in production that might get us an invasion from, or of, outer space? That isn’t Brewster Rockit, I mean, since that’s a comedy? And that isn’t Safe Havens since that one already transformed Mars into a new green world and revealed to the world that mermaids are real, they’re shapeshifters, and they’re from Venus? Oh, possibly Rip Haywire although I think that’s a little outside its style? Well, I was thinking of Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley, to recap next week, if all goes to plan. See you then.

What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? Why was Dick Tracy in Gasoline Alley? March – June 2022

Dick Tracy appeared in Gasoline Alley recently to kick off a story. The premise is that Tracy was hoping to bolster the image of police among young folks. In a moment of synchronicity this is also a storyline in the Vintage Ben Bolt dailies on Comics Kingdom. Ben Bolt had the boxing superstar become a beat cop to convince teens to like cops. Dick Tracy has a more direct plan: bribery. They’ll have kids find spending limits in Easter eggs, then the cops drive them to the mall to buy that much in goods. A couple of the regular cast get singled out for the pilot project.

So this should catch you up to early June 2022. If you’re reading this after August 2022, or any news about Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley breaks, there should be an essay here about it. Thanks for reading this essay.

Gasoline Alley.

21 March – 4 June 2022.

Rufus and Joel, the clown princes of City Hall Janitors, had emerged from hiding last I checked in. They were terrified that Hollywood Movie Mogul Cecil B DeMillstone wanted to sue them into oblivion, for waxing the floor he’d slipped on. They had misunderstood, as you could only have guessed if you knew Jim Scancarelli’s comic style. DeMillstone wants, instead of making a Gasoline Alley movie, to make a sci-fi comedy starring Rufus and Joel. DeMillstone wants them in Hollywood and once and even buys plane tickets.

Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 1st of April, 2022. I understand the plucked-from-obscurity story that Scancarelli’s trying to tell here. But so far all the movie folks have seen is that they mopped a floor that other people slipped on … it doesn’t feel like much of a movie, there. I figured they’d be brought to Hollywood so they could mop floors there.

They’re willing to go to Hollywood, but not by plane. They hitch up their mule, Becky, and get there … slowly. Very slowly. Their adventures fade out of focus the 11th of April, and we see them sometimes while the other plot takes center stage. They resume focus the 25th of May, when they’ve gotten only two inches on the map away from Hollywood. And, finally, arrive! Where everyone looks at them like freaks or a promotion for The Beverly Hillbillies. They ask for Cecil B DeMillstone’s movie headquarters and learn there was a terrible mistake. They went to Hollywood, Florida, a twist I somehow didn’t see coming. Well, I’m sure they’ll be fine.

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So the other story ran from the 11th of April through the 24th of May, with a few moments checking in on Rufus and Joel’s progress. This story starts with Dick Tracy, of Dick Tracy fame, stopping in. He’s looking for kids to give shopping sprees to. The Mayor’s choice for this treatment? Aubee Skinner, Ava Luna, and Sophie, who foiled those counterfeiters at the Halloween party and then visited Santa.

They get a great Easter egg, with a $250 spending limit. Aubee hopes to buy something for her parents, but gets distracted when she notices shoplifters. Two people stuffing a lot of watches and jewelry under their big coats. The kids know they can’t accuse grown-ups of shoplifting before they even leave the store without paying.

Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 10th of May, 2022. I get the use of signifying names for minor characters. It’s part of the genre of story Scancarelli wants to make, helping establish character without doing characterization that’s not really needed; we don’t need to explore Ima and Eura Swifty’s characters. So, “Officer Barbara Waffles” is a name I don’t get. If it’s a riff on Barbara Walters, all right, but that seems like a name you’d give to someone who was a reporter? Maybe the character goes back far enough that the link made sense originally, but her storyline developed to where now the name doesn’t quite fit? If someone knows, I’d be glad for the insight.

They don’t tell their chaperone, Officer Barbara Waffles, although I don’t know why. It’s possible the kids have made a mistake. They figure to watch the shoplifters, though. The shoplifters see them, and start to flee the store. Sophie runs after, grabbing their loose hat, and somehow the guy trips over her, falling outside the store and knocking over his partner. So now, at least, they’ve left the store without paying for a lot of stuff.

They’re well-known shoplifters Ima and Eura Swifty, quickly taken to jail. And the kids, already renowned for busting up a counterfeiter, get the thanks of Dick Tracy himself for busting up shoplifters. So, have to suppose these kids have a good impression of the cops of Gasoline Alley.

And that’s the standings. This past week we’ve been with Rufus and Joel in Hollywood, Florida, and we’ll have to see what they get up to in the eleven weeks ahead.

Next Week!

Beaver-induced logging fires! Non-fungible tokens! And an older Mark Trail not understanding technology! I look at Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail in a week, if all goes well.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why wasn’t Coffyhead arrested for kidnapping that woman? March – May 2022

In this past Dick Tracy story, Coffyhead kidnapped TV presenter Dot View to ensure her boyfriend Tonsils would deliver a drug package. Tonsils worked with Dick Tracy to get the cops to bust Coffyhead, but Coffyhead had swapped the packages so there was nothing to hold him on. Except kidnapping Dot View, you’d think, right?

What happened was Dot View refused to press charges. Coffyhead explained, to one of his henchman, that he suspected she wouldn’t want the scandal of a trial. And he called it correctly. We learned Coffyhead’s explanation over a week after (reader time) his release, so it has the air of a retcon to answer reader complaints. But that’s impossible given the lead time in comic production. Mike Curtis and Shelly Pleger had the explanation in mind and saved it, is all.

It’s a little surprising Dot View would regard it as scandalous to be the victim of kidnapping. But while Dick Tracy takes place in a fantasy universe where magnetic spaceships fly people to Jupiter and cops rush in to dangerous situations to save lives, it’s not so much of a fantasy as to depict the law-enforcement system treating violence against women as a crime. (And, as a more direct explanation, she may have wanted to avoid her boyfriend having to testify about his transporting drugs.)

So this should catch you up to late May 2022 in Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. If you’re reading this after about August 2022 there should be a more up-to-date plot recap here. Thanks for reading.

Dick Tracy.

13 March – 28 May 2022.

My last plot recap coincided with the start of a new story. This simplifies my giving of backstory. Vitamin Flintheart signed a Matt McCuller, an up-and-coming “tribute performer” to Tonsils. The original Tonsils, introduced and killed in 1952, was a singer forced by Mr Crime to try killing Dick Tracy. Everyone calles McCuller “Tonsils”, so I’ll go along with that.

New Tonsils doesn’t need to be pressed into crime. He’s trying to get out of drug-running in favor of his singing career. Coffyhead, a coffee-themed villain from 1947, is annoyed his new supplier is quitting on him and vows to teach him “some manners”.

Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 10th of April, 2022. Boy, imagine feeling Tonsils’ confidence about being able to handle anything as complicated as lunch, never mind life. On a sincere note, though, I like the center panel in the bottom row there, Tonsils being surrounded by glitter and starry skies as everything seems to be coming together. It’s good emotional illustration.

Coffyhead recognizes Tonsils when he sings on the Dot View Show. (He hadn’t known his supplier’s name.) Tonsils’ performance with Dot View goes great despite tensions: the original Tonsils had a fling with Dot View. She has a similar relationship grow, quickly, with the New Tonsils. Several strips this sequence are about View’s issues having a duplicate of her relationship from back in the Truman era. And Dick Tracy is annoyed with Flintheart for making him interact with the spitting image of someone who tried to kill him. “But Richard,” Flintheart protests, “there are over 50,000 people on the eastside of the city alone who’ve tried to kill you!” Tracy grants the point but, still, the stuff he has to deal with, you know?

Coffyhead, pretending to be a new nightclub owner for Flintheart, hires Tonsils to sing. When Flintheart realizes there’s no such nightclub opening he tips off Dick Tracy. But Coffyhead has already grabbed Dot View to demand Tonsils deliver drugs. And this is where Tracy explains enough of Original Tonsils to the new that readers have any hope of understanding the backstory. New Tonsils goes along with the sting, which fails, as Coffyhead gets the packages switched somewhere the cops can’t find. And Dot View declines to press charges for kidnapping.

Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 17th of April, 2022. An unstated piece of this is that his ruin was entirely Coffyhead’s petty, ego-driven fault. He was sore at Tonsils for backing out of future drug deliveries, yes. But as he admitted, he didn’t need Tonsils for deliveries. Coffyhead could have got his revenge and kept his successful drug operation going if he’d just sent someone around every week to key Tonsils’ car.

The cops figure out where Coffyhead’s drugs are coming from anyway. Sam Catchem tears open antique chairs at Cawlie’s Furniture to find the bundles hidden inside. The cops manage more precise hits on Coffyhead’s drug deliveries, driving him up the wall figuring out where the leak is. We readers learn it’s “Stuntman Mike” passing information along, but not who that is. Coffyhead reasons it out and figures it’s the delivery guy whose shipments keep getting nabbed by the cops. The delivery guy is Bronko, who was also in the original 1947 story introducing Coffyhead. Back in ’47, Coffyhead abducted and tortured Tracy Junior and Bronko, trying to smash the Junior Crimestoppers Club. It’s weird that Bronko would go work for someone who’d abducted and tormented him years ago. And weird that Coffyhead wouldn’t ponder that more. But as he interrogates Bronko, Dick Tracy breaks in, and grabs Coffyhead. We learn Bronko is, of course, Stuntman Mike. He grew up from the Crimestoppers Club to join the FBI, and was working undercover against Coffyhead.

Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 9th of May, 2022. It may seem foolish for the police to raid places so close to Bronko’s deliveries. You’d think they would know they were tipping off Coffyhead that Bronko was passing them information.

So that’s all a happy ending for everyone besides Coffyhead, who probably should have stuck to running that San Francisco coffee shop he’d opened after leaving jail. Maybe he was gentrified out of business.

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And that, the 15th of May, concludes that story. The current story started the 16th, with someone using hypnotic glasses to rob a guy at the ATM. And, after that, using some kinds of implants to clean out ATMs. This appears to be Mr Memory, an owl-keeping new addition to the comic strip canon. (He appeared, played by Victor Buono, in the pilot for the 1967 Dick Tracy TV series.) He lives near B O Plenty, and gave Tracy’s pal a ride into town. Also, the Cinnamon Knight, another “caped superhero” like are running around all the comics these days, gives Tracy two bits of news. One is that he and his wife are retiring from costumed-superheroing, since they’re expecting a child. The other is that the bank his real-life’sona works at got cleaned out in a robbery last night. And that’s where we stand.

Next Week!

Have Rufus and Joel made it to Hollywood yet? Have a trio of unbearably adorable moppets busted up a shoplifting ring? Are there even more Dick Tracy appearances out there? I answer “yes” three different times, but in more words, when I look at Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley next week, if all goes well.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why did that guy’s Wrist-Radio Explode? December 2021 – March 2022

In the recently concluded story in Dick Tracy the villainous Mr Bones’s purloined Wrist Wizard exploded. This was hard on him. It seemed like an arbitrary and unexplained resolution to Mr Bones’s murder plan.

It was remarkable good luck for Dick Tracy. It wasn’t unexplained, but the explanation was given back in December of 2016. The old model of Wrist Wizard — the evolution of the famous two-way wrist-radio — had a defect that could cause it to explode. I expect it was inspired by that time those real-world phones kept catching fire. Still, it’s not like they all caught fire. Anyway, this is the second time one of them exploding has saved Dick Tracy.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 11th of December, 2016. Haven’t heard how the Wrist Wizard redesign has gone. Might be they’ve figured since they’ve lasted five years with this design of just stuffing it in old wrist-radio cases they had the new design and didn’t realize it. I’m not sure that four buttons and a speaker is enough of an interface for everything the Wrist Wizard did (two-way video communication, the ability to respond to eye blinks of a wounded officer). But then the Wrist Wizard had two buttons and a keyboard projected holographically on your palm so can say?

So this should catch you up to mid-March, 2022, in Joe Staton, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. If you’re reading this after about June 2022 a more up-to-date plot summary should be here.

On my other blog, I finally finished my A-to-Z, explaining Zorn’s Lemma. I’ve also, often, used the mathematics blog as a chance to talk about comic strips with mathematics themes. Pi Day, of course, encourages comic strips to mention mathematics. Or pie. So I linked to old Pi Day comics roundups there. I’ll have this year’s roundup soon, don’t worry. They talk a good bit about pie.

Dick Tracy.

26 December 2021 – 12 March 2022.

Mr Bones, hired by the remains of The Apparatus crime syndicate, had a decent plan for killing Dick Tracy. It was to shoot him. To get Tracy in shooting range, Mr Bones stole the Dick Tracy memorabilia collection of Blackjack, who’s a criminal, yeah, but a superman. Blackjack broke out of jail to recover his collection. Mr Bones hooked up with Blackjack, only to abduct him.

The plan: Mr Bones would, as Blackjack, text Dick Tracy promising to turn himself in. And once Tracy was near enough, shoot him. Blackjack he tied up, dropped a fake suicide note beside, and set the gas going to blow up the hideout. So this would make it look like Blackjack had shot Dick Tracy and then killed himself.

Joe Staton, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 14th of January, 2022. You know we never had to deal with this sort of thing when we had Casio calculator watches and land-line phones. Not to be a Plugger or anything but, just saying.

This goes wrong a couple ways. First, Dick Tracy turns out to be hard to shoot at close range. Second, Mr Bones did not expect the Wrist Wizard from Blackjack’s collection(?) was getting ready to explode. (He used the Wrist Wizard to contact Dick Tracy as Blackjack.) Third, nobody expected that when the Wrist Wizard exploded Mr Bones would fall over the ravine to his death. Also, Blackjack was able to escape his bonds enough to call the cops. I don’t know how he escaped his hideout exploding around him, though. His bonds were rolls of plastic wrap tied around him while he slept, which I can believe as a cost-effective way of holding someone. I would think it would mess up making his death look by suicide, though.

And with that, the 15th of January, Mr Bones’s story closes. We follow with two weeks of a Minit Mystery. And a repeat, which so far as I know Dick Tracy hadn’t done before. (Could barely do before.) This repeated a two-week mystery, solving the murder of Mr H K Krispies, based on parlor-room mystery rules. Seems fine enough, if you like that sort of mystery.

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The new, current story started the 30th of January. For it, Mark Barnard gets a guest writer credit. It stars Yeti, last seen in December 2020, I thought killed by his own poison spider after a spectacularly failed meteorite heist. Yeti’s gimmick is selling poisons, and business is bad enough without someone killing his customers. He sends his underlings Ferret (sister to Rabbit, underling killed last story around) and Ape to check on his clients. They get to Hiram “Boss” Moran’s place to find Dick Tracy and Sam Catchem there, investigating Boss Moran’s murder.

Tracy and crew notice the poisons Hiram had. Also rose petals on the grounds. They suspect could maybe be Yeti doing the killing? Yeti, meanwhile, hears of this on the radio and is livid, suspecting Ape and Ferret have betrayed him. Ape and Ferret, meanwhile, don’t know where to go given that Yeti won’t care that there is no conceivable way they could have prevented Moran’s killing. And along their way to not knowing where to go, they sideswipe a patrol car.

Tracy, for the heck of it, checks the owner of the sideswiping car and finds it’s Constance, sister of Thomas “Rabbit” Dooley. They know Rabbit as a poisoned body found outside city limits. So they conclude Yeti’s probably alive and selling poisons again. And Catchem keeps thinking of those rose petals. It reminds him of the flowers Daisy Dugan kept on his lapel, except for not being daisies.

Joe Staton, Shelly Pleger, Mark Barnard, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 2nd of March, 2022. The commenters referred to the woman here as “Natasha”, based on the Boris-and-Natasha pose in the first panel. That stuck with me hard enough that half my references to her in this post called Rose “Natasha”.

Ape and Ferret, at least, confirm that seven of Yeti’s ten clients are still alive. But who could be targeting Yeti’ clients? They drive back to the sewer entrance to Yeti’s lair, unaware Tracy and Catchem trail them. Also that ahead of them is … Daisy Dugan. He’s angry, with reason, at being left for dead in the failed meteorite heist. With him is his sister Rose. Their revenge: first killing his market, then here, to leave Yeti to die in agony.

(I get either leg of this plan: killing Yeti’s clients so his business collapses, or shooting Yeti so he bleeds to death in the sewers. Doing both seems like they couldn’t decide on a revenge. Possibly Rose and Daisy couldn’t agree and finally went with both.)

Foiling them is the arrival of Ape and Ferret, who draw their guns. And coming up behind them are Dick Tracy and Sam Catchem, bringing more guns to a four-way armed standoff. Yeti starts shooting his poison darts at everybody, Ape and Ferret included. Rose starts shooting her bullets at everybody. Tracy and Catchem duck out of the way until Daisy Dugan surrenders.

Ape, Ferret, Daisy Dugan, and Rose Dugan they’re able to capture alive. Yeti disappears into the tunnels, but Tracy is confident there’s no way he can escape this time. And that, the 12th of March, seems to end this part of the Yeti’s story.

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Sunday the 13th sees the start of a new plot, one lead off by Vitamin Flintheart and a celebrity impersonator he’s found. I have no idea where this might go. But that’s what the next plot recap is for, eleven weeks from now.

Next Week!

So how about a goofy, silly representation of the movie business? No, I’m not putting Funky Winkerbean in my rotation. We head on down to Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley and maybe see what’s become of Rufus and Joel. If all goes to plan, anyway. See you then.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Were those drones from the future watching Dick Tracy? October – December 2021

The big storyline in Dick Tracy was set off by “Time Drones”. That is, the kind of hovering aerial camera/microphones used to record viral videos of drivers attempting the new traffic circle. The Time Factory blew up, though we saw many drones hovering over the ruins. And Smith asks if Tracy remembers “what my first time travel drone, the ‘mystery ship’, saw”. Tracy does, and Smith says, “I think that future is now”. Tracy’s memory is better than mine, or those of most readers. jonahhex1, a GoComics commenter, identified what all this was about. The fleet of drones was not from our, 2021’s, future. By “The Future” what was referenced was this moment from 2014, the story introducing the time travel shenanigans into our strip:

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 6th of November, 2014. I think we’re all impressed that Staton and Curtis dropped in something that they wouldn’t pay off for seven years. But I would like them to pop over and borrow some narrative bubbles from The Phantom because one little tag reading “Nov 6, 2014” would have saved me a lot of confusion reading the strip. Now on to resolving the haunting of B.O.Plenty’s home!

These drones, then, are not a fleet of onlookers from the future gawking at a major disaster. They’re just contemporary drones gawking at a major disaster. Diet Smith has said he doesn’t plan to build new Time Drones, and nobody’s been shown trying to change his mind.

This should catch you up to December 2021 in Mike Curtis, Joe Staton, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. (Joe Staton stepped down from the strip in late October.) If you’re reading this after about March 2022, or any news about the comic strip breaks, I should have a more useful essay for you here.

And a last bit of self-promotion. While I’ve put my mathematics glossary project on a (brief, I hope) hiatus, I do still have what I think are quite nice discussions up there. And I’m bringing some older discussions out of the misty past, using the old-fashioned time-droning of going on at length. Thanks for considering my pop mathematics writing.

Dick Tracy.

3 October – 25 December 2021.

Diet Smith’s newest super-invention is the Time Drone, able to bring aerial surveillance to anyone, anytime, through all history. I know, you’re busy thinking how “the past” includes split-seconds in the past. But I ask you to consider how much this could mess up Silver and Sprocket Nitrate’s forged-historical-movies business. By day it offers glorious opportunities to historical and archeological researchers. By night it offers Sterling Eliot, Smith Industries mole on behalf of The Apparatus, the chance to find lost loot for the crime syndicate. And, for himself, a chance to look at this coming week’s lottery numbers. At least until the Time Drone apparatus explodes, killing Eliot and two others, and wounding Diet Smith.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 17th of October, 2021. I’d thought the problem might have been the attempt to send a Time Drone into the future, rather than the past. But the ‘Mystery Ship’ went into the future all right, in that 2014 strip. I suppose we have to conclude it was just a mishap of technology that’s still young, even if it could be operated by a lone person, that caused Sterling Elliot’s untimely death.

Diet Smith convalesces under the care of Daddy Warbucks, a man who knows how to not get in trouble when people around him turn up dead. (Fun fact: both Oliver Warbucks’s first and second wives died while with him at sea.) Tracy, meanwhile, pursues Briar Rose. She was the Law Enforcement Magazine reporter who’d interviewed him the previous month, and was going on to interview Diet Smith. She was a fraud, not affiliated with Law Enforcement Magazine or any other magazine. It’s a slender lead, but the only one they have.

It’s also a good one, as she is under The Apparatus’s protection, whether she likes it or not. She has some criminal “business” going on, that I can’t quite get clear. But The Apparatus is the bigger fish, so if they say she has to work from their hotel room, she has to work from their hotel room. Ace of Spades, the head of The Apparatus, decides she’s a good one to take the blame for whatever the heck happened at Smith Industries. He has her put somewhere Dick Tracy can find her after her shocking death.

Mike Curtis, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 15th of November, 2021. One can snark that this is another Dick Tracy mystery resolved by dumb luck. If Catchem hadn’t decided to try a new deli he’d have missed the whole thing. But Briar Rose’s offer to tell everything is motivated, at least if we trust she worked out that the promise of a ‘safe house’ was a lie. It’s a reasonable thing for her to work out, even if it was worked out off-screen.

Sam Catchem finds her, though, as she’s being moved in. It’s a lucky break; he happened to stop at the deli underneath the death-site apartment. He follows, catching and shooting the zentai-clad assassin holding Briar Rose. Rose is happy to flip, and I can’t blame her.

Dick Tracy moves fast, taking on the disguise of the Jack of Spades, Rose’s failed assassin. So he’s doing some actual super-detective work here. Mumbles takes him back to the Ace of Spades, who wants to know, where is Rose’s body? If Rose is dead, why was “Jack” unconscious when Mumbles recovered him? What about this makes any sense? And as it’s weeks away from my plot recap, they tear his hood off and reveal Dick Tracy. Meanwhile the cops, who’ve been listening over the two-way wrist radio, move in and grab everyone with a weird face or speech gimmick. Ace of Spades as well as Doubleup are able to escape through the plot tunnels, but otherwise it’s a pretty good catch of villains.

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The next phase started the 11th of December. This with a museum exhibit on America’s Top Cop. That would be Dick Tracy, who’s been fighting The Apparatus (under various names) for 90 years now without clearing them out of the city. But then The Apparatus (under various names) has been trying for 90 years to kill Dick Tracy and that hasn’t taken. So Ace of Spades, from his new hiding place, hires Richard “Mr Bones” Bonhomme to take a shot at him. No rush, just, you know, succeed this time.

Mike Curtis, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 18th of December, 2021. Blackjack’s Hat doesn’t represent a time Tracy cheated death. Way back in March 2012 when we met Blackjack, he surrendered to the cops once he was allowed to set Tracy’s hat on a fire hydrant and shoot it. This so he could get a credit on Tracy’s Wall of Hats without risking harm to “my pal”.

Mr Bones’s thoughts turn to Blackjack. You may know him as that guy who played Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumpin” (“I got knocked down/ but I get up again”) while robbing banks and being a Dick Tracy superfan. Blackjack’s storage lock of Dick Tracy memorabilia got stolen recently, and Blackjack broke out of jail to find it. Mr Bones — “From the DT Collector Forum” — hangs out at the exhibit until Blackjack appears, and admits: he’s the one who stole Blackjack’s collection. But he’s happy to return it … we don’t yet know what for.

Yes, it does seem like Mr Bones stole Blackjack’s collection before being hired to kill Dick Tracy. I don’t know whether this is because Mr Bones was hired long before we first saw mention of it. He did say he suspected Dick Tracy might be the target, but I don’t know when he got the idea The Apparatus wanted him to kill someone. It’s also possible (as I write this) that Mr Bones is bluffing about the stolen collection, to manipulate Blackjack.

Also I appreciate that the in-universe Dick Tracy Collectors have a Forum. I hope this means their main social group is on a charmingly semi-maintained phpBB forum rather than being a Facebonk or Reddit or Discord something bad like that.

Meanwhile, Patty Cure, a woman who’d been letting The Apparatus use her doorstep as a package drop, turned herself in. The Apparatus came to her looking for someone with “management experience to run an escort service”. And they didn’t stop pressuring her after the big raids. Lizz Worthington goes under cover as Cure, to learn what The Apparatus does want her to do. And that’s where we stand on the brink of the future.

Next Week!

Is that Halloween party still going on? Why aren’t we seeing more Santa Claus? I look in on Old Time Radio’s own Jim Scancarelli, and Gasoline Alley, to ring in 2022, I hope. See you then.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Are new people taking over the comic? October 2021

Yes and no. Sunday’s Dick Tracy caught me by surprise, as one unrelated to the current Time Drone storyline. It was instead about a bunch of people talking about how they made a great team, but one’s at the end of the line and he says goodbye.

What this is, as ever per D D Degg at The Daily Cartoonist, is pencil artist Joe Staton leaving the strip after a decade. (Also, wow, it’s been a decade since Staton and Mike Curtis took over Dick Tracy!) Shelley Pleger, who’s been the inker and letterer for all that time, is to take over doing layouts and pencils too. Mike Curtis is staying on as writer, so far as I’ve heard.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 24th of October, 2021. It’s a bit startling to hear how many people are involved in supporting the making of the strip. I imagine some of these people are spouses, whose support may be more about emotional stability and reminding one to eat and such. And that some of it is people who handle the paperwork of keeping many comic strips organized. Still, when you read books about how to draw a web comic you don’t hear about what kind of support staff you need to successfully draw three or four panels a day and eight panels on Sundays. It’s no wonder every web cartoonist I’ve known is exhausted.

I’m a touch surprised the change in lead artist came mid-story, but I suppose one has to step down sometime. And with the reappearance Monday of Oliver Warbucks we have reason to think the story’s got a fair while left in it.

If any more news about the comic strip comes to my attention, or you’d like to read my plot recaps, you should find an essay here. And tomorrow I intend to have a recap of the last three months’ worth of Mary Worth. Thanks for reading.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why is there time travel now? July – October 2021

The current story in Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy has super-inventor Diet Smith sending machines back in time. It’s presented as the continuation of something he had tried before with humans.

Back in 2017 there was a throwaway mention of Diet Smith experimenting with time travel. Denny Lien was kind enough to explain a bit. Some years before 2017, Diet Smith mentioned working on a time machine to rescue his long-dead genius son Brilliant Smith. Brilliant, inventor of the two-way wrist radio, was killed in 1948 by the racketeer Big Frost. But there was no controlling when the time machine would send you, which limits its use for this sort of rescue operation.

I don’t, and Lien didn’t, know quite when this earlier time travel experimentation was done. I assume it’s something from that period in the 60s when Chester Gould tossed all sorts of wacky sci-fi fangles into the strip. You know, the Space Coupe, the psychic Lunarians and Tracy Junior’s bride from the Moon. The nation that controls magnetism controlling the universe. All of that stuff Gould put in with the assertion it was as much hard science as anything done in a forensics lab, scoring an own goal. But I can’t find when time travel was in the strip before. It could have been one of the antics in the Dick Locher run, for example, when the stories became very weird and impressionist and hard to follow. But it’s hard to think of Locher-era characters as driven by the emotions normal people have.

So this should catch you up on Dick Tracy for early October, 2021. If there’s any news about the comic strip, or you’re reading this after 2022 starts, there may be a more useful essay at this link. I’ll try to have one anyway.

And in mathematics blog news: I have interesting material on my mathematics blog. I’ve started my Little 2021 Mathematics A-to-Z, a glossary of various mathematics terms. The first essay of this year’s set discusses Multiplication.

Dick Tracy.

11 July – 2 October 2021.

Vera Alldid and Mysta Chimera have disappeared, eloping, according to their social media. Everyone agrees it’s unlike them. It threw Alldid’s popular comic strip J Straightedge Trustworthy into unexpected reruns, mid-story. And Mysta Chimera, who’d been doing publicity as the comic strip’s Mars Maid character, had thought Alldid a creep. Still, what are the cops supposed to do about two people vanishing on a story nobody who knows them believes? Look for them?

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 28th of July, 2021. Believe me, I feel weird too wondering why Dick Tracy is showing such restraint in investigating the disappearance. I guess it is better that he’s willing to suppose it isn’t inherently a crime if Mysta Chimera marries someone he doesn’t like.

Homer “Peanutbutter” Barley, a freelance cartoonist and old acquaintance of Dick Tracy, takes action. He points out to Dick Tracy that Mysta Chimera is not actually a Lunarian. She’s the brainwashed, genetically-altered daughter of the quite human crime boss Posie Ermine. Thus she is a missing attractive white woman. With this to go on, the cops swing into action. Tracy checks in with Brock Archival, the last person the missing people were known to meet.

It’s the obvious lead, but it’s a good one, since the wealthy Brock Archival has kidnapped them. He intends to keep them both on his private island, and he’s got the private island — and the ring that neutralizes Chimera’s Lunarian powers — to do it. Alldid shoves them into a secret room when Tracy knocks on the door. Mysta uses her last ounce of strength to blast a telepathic cry for help that Honeymoon Tracy (herself half-Lunarian) picks up. And she relays that to her grandfather.

You might ask: wait, Mysta’s telepathy had been starved by lack of direct sunlight. How can she now have the energy to send out a last blast? Yeah, because if there’s one thing we can’t buy in narratives, it’s the last gasp of an exhausted hero finally making the difference.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 12th of August, 2021. I don’t know how Alldid’s pen nib got stuck there. I don’t see where Alldid planted it on-camera or had an unsupervised moment when he could have off-camera. Still, the pen nib is there, isn’t it?

With something that kind of resembles probable cause if you squint, Tracy asks to inspect Archival’s mansion. And he consents, because how could you find people shoved into a closet? This does give us some actual super-detection. Tracy follows strange scuff marks in the carpet to find one of Alldid’s drawing pen nibs. From there he finds the secret room holding Alldid and Chimera. Archival fumes that Tracy can’t possibly prove a kidnapping charge and Chimera kicks him in the Great Hall.

So, the 20th of August, this story resolves. Alldid gets back to his studio to draw comics. Chimera gets home again. The powers-controlling ring gets handed to Diet Smith because when would he ever do something ill-advised or dangerous with super-technology?

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The next and current story got seriously under way the 21st of August, although it had a teaser a few weeks earlier. This debuts Diet Smith’s newest creation, the Time Drone. It’s a drone, like you might fly over the park and record video with, except it travels through time and space too.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 8th of September, 2021. I suppose as long as they keep looking around and not seeing a Time Drone pop into the room gathering evidence they can feel confident their plan is working.

Smith’s got a few videos. Dick Tracy’s iconic villain Flattop. The building of the Great Pyramid of Giza. He sends one to Ford’s Theater to catch a show. Another to see Washington’s Inauguration. The “treasure pit” at Oak Island, Nova Scotia. He announces this to the public, and the Ace of Spades, new head of The Apparatus crime syndicate, sees opportunity.

We don’t know his plans. From the 9th of September we got a short diversion, Dick Tracy talking with Briar Rose of Law Enforcement Magazine. Tracy tells the story of how the murder of Tess Trueheart’s father spurred him to move from patrolman to detective. How the city attracted newer and weirder criminals. How Tracy stepped up to become the super-scientific detective of world renown. It all smacks of an anniversary celebration, and it’s curiously timed: the comic strip debuted on the 4th of October, 1931. I’m not sure why this sequence ran a few weeks early except perhaps to get us fans talking about it early?

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 12th of September, 2021. This particular strip comes up to but doesn’t quite force us to accept that Tess’s father’s murder was in the Prohibition era (for us readers it was in 1931). Look at precisely what’s said. So that’s a fair squaring of the circle that these characters don’t (much) age without retconning events to have happened later than they appeared in the newspapers.

And then one more story promising to start. Blackjack broke out of prison. Someone stole his collection of autographed Dick Tracy memorabilia and he intends to do something about it.

Not particularly threatening to be a story: Rikki Mortis is pregnant with Abner Kadaver’s child. So there’s the hope for a new generation of horror movie hosts to be Dick Tracy villains.

How does the Time Drone fit into Blackjack’s plans? I don’t know. They might not at all. Staton and Curtis are comfortable introducing something they don’t follow up for months. Sometimes years. Several years ago B O Plenty complained that his house was haunted. Could that be the Time Drone which we saw used to take photographs of the whole entire family? I’m not confident saying it is. We’ll have to check back in a couple months.

Next Week!

Bears discover fire, and they don’t approve. All that and leaf-gathering as as I recap Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley, if things go well.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Who’s this Mars Maid now? April – July 2021

The “Mars Maid” is a character in the J Straightedge Trustworthy comic strip, which Vera Alldid draws in the continuity of Dick Tracy. Trustworthy is a riff on Tracy, yes. Alldid created the Mars Maid after reading an article about Mysta Chimera, the false Moon Maid.

The real Moon Maid, who came from the Moon and married Dick Tracy’s son, died decades ago. Mysta Chimera is the brainwashed and mad-science-altered Glenna “Mindy” Ermine, daughter of a racketeer. The mad scientists Dr Zy Ghote and Dr S Tim Sail — presumed dead in space — created her at the behest of major crime boss Mr Bribery.

This should catch you up to mid-July in Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. If you’re reading this after about October 2021, or if any news breaks out about the strip, I’ll have an essay of perhaps more use to you here. Thanks for reading.

Dick Tracy.

18 April – 10 July 2021.

Our last visit with Dick Tracy was one week past the start of a story. Abner Kadaver, retired horror-movie host turned assassin, had recovered from tumbling down Reichenbach Falls with Dick Tracy. He broke his old partner Rikki Mortis out of jail and set about his old contract to kill Dick Tracy. But he’s also got a job from a shadowy figure, the Ace of Spades. Ace represents The Apparatus, the big crime syndicate in Tracyburgh. The Apparatus wants to cancel its contract to murder Tracy, in favor of killing Charlie 21. Kadaver accepts, but Ace knows, he’s gonna try killing Dick Tracy anyway.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 9th of May, 2021. Sam used to feel self-conscious about ostentatiously waving his hat around like this, sure. But he’s found that sort of thing foils a sniper’s attack like one time out of four he escorts a witness anywhere. He doesn’t care why it works, he’s just going with what does work.

Charlie 21 is a bookkeeper for The Apparatus, turned State’s evidence. Tracy and Sam Catchem have the extended escort mission of keeping him alive long enough to testify. They hate the job, since the only thing worse than an escort mission is an extended escort mission. Plus Charlie 21 keeps wandering off.

Kadaver’s first assassination attempt fails. The poison dart hits Sam Catchem’s hat instead. Mortis blames the downdraft from the building Kadaver was shooting from. Kadaver blames his trembling arm, and the complications of his advanced plot disease. He has Mortis pledge to carry out the contract if he dies.

Meanwhile, Charlie 21 wants to see Vitamin Flintheart in The Tempest. Flintheart is starring in The Tempest, opening next week, so that part’s easy. But bringing him to opening night would be incredibly stupid. Flintheart suggests he could watch the closed dress rehearsal instead.

Kadaver is also up-to-date on Tracyboro’s theatrical community. He reasons Tracy would never miss opening night of a Vitamin Flintheart show. When Mortis goes to buy opening-night tickets she sees Charlie 21 arriving for the rehearsal. He rushes down and they get into the theater … somehow. Not sure.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 28th of May, 2021. The wild thing is like a decade back I was seeing John Larroquette in The Best Man and this exact same thing happened! Larroquette had to break the scene and call for the house lights and everything. Weird.

Tracy spots Kadaver in time to push Charlie 21 out of the way. The dart hits Tracy’s arm instead. 10 of Spades, a shadowy figure we presume to be affiliated with Ace of Spades, is there. He scolds Kadaver for disobeying The Apparatus’s order to kill Charlie 21, not Dick Tracy, and won’t hear how Tracy got in the way. Kadaver’s shot before the cops can break the scene up. Mortis takes his mask off and whispers something “I have to tell you” that’s not any of our business.

And so Abner Kadaver seems to be dead. Charlie 21 completes his testimony and goes off to Other Protective Custody. 10 of Spades appears to be arrested. And with the 6th of June, the story of Abner Kadaver ends.

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The current story starts with a tease that 6th of June. Vera Alldid creates the Mars Maid for his J Straightedge Trustworthy comic strip. And he hires Mysta Chimera to play the Mars Maid for publicity. (The Dick Tracy Wiki notes there was a 1964 contest to find a “real life” Moon Maid. In case you question whether an attractive woman might actually dress in costume to promote a comic strip.) That goes well, despite everyone warning Chimera that Alldid is a womanizer. She doesn’t need much help to find him creepy and even electric-shocks him when he’s getting too much.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 2nd of July, 2021. Everybody thinks they want to collect a cartoonist but the reality is they depreciate in value a lot, like, worse than new cars. Also they’re constantly nagging you to have an opinion about Mell Lazarus’s Miss Peach and nobody has the energy for that.

No hard feelings, though. They accept an invitation to meet Brock Archival, a comic historian and collector. Archival would like to buy an Art, if it’s up to his exacting standards. And take some pictures of Chimera as the Mars Maid. When that’s all done he mentions how his guests should stay overnight, and also for the rest of all time. And he’s got Mr Bribery’s ring, which repels the Moon Maid’s powers, so what are they going to do? And that’s the cliffhanger we left Saturday on.

There’s some other stuff in the meanwhile. Particularly, Honey Moon Tracy has been going more and more steady with a kid named Astor Boyd. Going to movies, holding hands, that kind of thing. I don’t know if that’s setup for a future story or simply life. I mention so if this does become plot-bearing I’ll have this reference.

Next Week!

Urgent for Tom Corbett, Space Cadet! What is old-time radio doing in modern-time comic strips? Oh yes, it’s Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley next week in this spot, if all goes to plan. See you then.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? What was in Pouch’s blue balloon? January – April 2021

The blue balloon was something with a secret message that The Pouch was trying to send to an unknown party. We haven’t learned what the message was. Nor who was to receive it. Nor why they shot Pouch over a couple-day delay of it? For this story, at least, it’s a MacGuffin. I expect that it’ll come back later. Staton and Curtis have enjoyed planting things for use months or years later. (But, they have yet to follow up on whatever was haunting the Plenty household years ago, too.)

That what we do see of the message is a binary sequence suggests it could involve “Matty Squared”. This is a digitally uploaded former henchman of Mister Bribery. He was last seen in 2018, heading for “the server farms down south”, after the arrest of Mister Bribery’s gang. But that’s a guess.

So this post should catch you up to mid-April 2021 on Dick Tracy. If you’re reading this after about July 2021, or if there’s news about Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy there should be a more useful post here. Thanks for reading.

Dick Tracy.

24 January – 17 April 2021.

Aquarius and his drug-dealers in the 1312 Bedwell commune had captured Tiger Lilly. Lilly was there to retrieve a stolen blue balloon for information broker The Pouch. Aquarius, meanwhile, wanted to harass The Pouch for chasing away his dealers such as “Dollar” Bill Dolan. (Pouch’s cover is selling balloons at the zoo, and wants disreputable crime like drug dealing kept away from his scene.) The Pouch had, in fact, told Tiger Lilly to take care of Dollar Bill. Lilly did this by killing Dollar Bill and disposing of his body in the woods. I’m not sure if Aquarius knew or suspected that, though. But that’s where we were in January.

Organic farmer Tim Wildman, evicted from the Bedwell Commune a year ago, gives backstory. The Commune’s organizer, and mansion owner, is Peggy Bellum, paraplegic since a car accident three years ago. Her nephew Aquarius was doted on until the accident, which “changed” him, though he still tends his aunt. But the changes brought drug use, and dealing, into the Commune. Meanwhile, Peggy Bellum’s brother Stephan — handling her money — wants to sell the mansion for “development”, which she can’t refuse hard enough. Stephan tells that Aquarius is drug-dealing, a revelation that convinces Peggy her brother is lying to scare her into selling out. So that’s the people with money or property think about all this.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 5th of February, 2021. One weakness to the story is that it’s unclear what’s not suitable for Peggy Bellum here. I suppose that there’s drug users on the property but it’s not obvious to me that implies Bellum’s being ill-treated. But this may reflect a department, or character, assumption that any sign of drug use is proof of abuse.

Where did we get from there? Well, a bunch of parties pursued their own Brilliant Schemes at once. This all makes sense, but it did make the day-to-day action harder to follow.

First party: Tiger Lilly. The Bedford Commune drug dealers caught him and tossed him into the root cellar out back. Not the basement and I’ll explain why that matters. He’s able to break the ropes tying him down. And to break through a ceiling vent (the door is too solid), in front of the cops. I’ll explain why cops are there, too. He doesn’t know that Dick Tracy Jr’s trail cameras spotted his dumping of Dollar Bill’s body. Still, you see why he’d figure he should run. But has the bad luck to try carjacking the truck that B O and Gertie Plenty are canoodling in. So he’s arrested for involuntary manslaughter.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 18th of March, 2021. Have to feel for Tiger Lilly, getting beat up in a stylized flashback like that.

Second party: Pouch. He wants that blue balloon back. He breaks into the basement — not the root cellar — planting a device to release mercaptan. The residents figure it’s a gas leak, and all evacuate. Cheesecake, Aquarius’s girlfriend or possibly wife, takes Peggy Bellum to a hotel to wait the trouble out. Pouch breaks in, finds the balloon, and has to hide while Dick Tracy’s gang searches the place. I’ll explain why they’re there later. But he succeeds, and turns the blue balloon over to his contact. His contact shoots him. This seems like an overreaction even to being days late on the delivery. But we don’t know what the message — seen in black light to be a string of binary digits — was about.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 21st of March, 2021. The contact here also took Pouch’s money. He supposed it was further punishment for the delay getting the balloon delivered. I wonder if the contact didn’t just want it to look like a mugging. I suppose it depends whether the contact rifled Pouch’s wallet, a hard-cased thing that deflected the bullet.

Lucky for Pouch, his titanium wallet deflected the bullet, and park cops noticed and rushed him to the hospital. He won’t say anything about who shot him or why. Less lucky for him, he passes Tiger Lilly on the way out of the hospital. Lilly, reasonably but wrongly thinking Pouch left him for dead, slugs him. (Remember, Pouch couldn’t have seen Lilly, and had assumed Lilly had ditched him.)

Third party: Dick Tracy. He’s got the corpse of Bill Dolan. He and Sam Catchem suspect a link with 1312 Bedwell, since look at those numbers. But the only tie they can find is Tim Wildman. He’s an organic farmer who gave Catchem the tip that the Bedwell Commune was even in this story. He’s glad to give them backstory about the Commune and his eviction from it. Tracy figures there’s at least enough to do a wellness check, in case there’s any abuse of a disabled person going on. And a stray witness is able to tell Tracy and Catchem that Pouch is in this story too, so they hope to interrogate him.

Tracy arrives at 1312 Bedwell with the representative from Child and Family Services. In case you wonder why marginalized people will refuse the civil benefits to which they’re entitled for their protection. They all get there as Tiger Lilly escapes the root cellar. Also, by coincidence, shortly after Pouch sets off his mercaptan bomb.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 12th of March, 2021. Oh, using the dumbwaiter. OK, great plan but letting everyone else on the expansion set to Betrayal at the House on the Hill know; the dumbwaiters connect you to the next landing one floor up or down. They don’t connect to other dumbwaiter rooms. I know, it’s not what we expected either and we kept making that mistake.

So. Pouch is able to hide from the cops, and gets to his appointment to be shot. Tiger Lilly escapes his confinement, only to get clobbered by B O and Gertie Plenty and arrested. Ty, the drug dealer who took up Dollar Bill’s beat, comes back to the house in time to get arrested. And while they’ll get to interrogate Pouch in the hospital, he won’t say anything about anything.

Fourth party: Oscar Grubbard. I know, who? I’m not positive, but he seems to be working for Peggy Bellum’s brother Stephan. But after Stephan tells Peggy about Aquarius’s drug-dealing she fires him. This as he’s bringing tea to her. My best guess is he’s meant to be Stephan’s caretaker for Peggy?

Anyway, with Peggy declaring she’ll revoke the power of attorney given Stephan, Grubbard acts. This in drugging Peggy Bellum (and incidentally Cheesecake). His brilliant plan: smother Peggy Bellum, let Stephan inherit all the money, and then abscond with the money to Bogota. It feels like an improvised execution. Aquarius’s unexpected visit to his aunt foils it, starting a fight that Tracy and company are luckily on hand to interrupt.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 3rd of April, 2021. I guess Grubbard doesn’t quite say he’s going to make off with the Bellum fortune, but it would be odd for him to kill Peggy Bellum and flee to Bogota without it. But Grubbard here is an embezzler, so maybe he’s overestimating his skills at opportunistic murder.

So this gets things resolved as well as they could. Tiger Lilly’s arrested for manslaughter. The cops would like to ask Pouch about his “I am innocent of the crimes you are investigating” T-shirt but he refers them to his T-shirt. Oscar Grubbard’s arrested for assault and attempted murder. Most of the 1312 Bedwell residents get charged with drug possession or trafficking. Aquarius also gets a false imprisonment charge. The strip doesn’t specify if this means imprisoning Tiger Lilly or imprisoning Peggy Bellum. Peggy Bellum donates the house “to charity”, and moves in with Tim Wildman.

I’m sympathetic to people who didn’t follow the story as it unfolded. There are a lot of threads, and they were woven together. And the plans of some parties interrupted plans of others. If you have a GoComics membership I recommend going back and rereading it all at once, though. The pieces do fit together well. It’s easy to imagine this as a competing-capers-gone-wrong movie.

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So the 11th of April finished off that story. The current story began last week, the 12th of April. Abner Kadaver, back from the dead, breaks his accomplice Rikki Mortis out of jail. That’s as much as I can tell you now.

Next Week!

Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley did nothing for the centennial of Walt Wallet discovering Skeezix! Has the strip recovered from this strange anti-nostalgic blow? If all goes well next week we’ll see what the Wallet family has been doing.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? What is the deal with this blue balloon? November 2020 – January 2021

Pouch is this balloon-seller at the city zoo, by day. He’s also an informant, passing messages along to the criminal and, sometimes, cop worlds. The current storyline had him forced to sell a blue balloon. Why is Pouch so freaked out about selling the blue balloon? Because that balloon held information for a job, for one of Pouch’s clients. They need it back within an hour. Why was Aquarius, the buyer, so determined to get the balloon? He doesn’t know why it’s important, but it’ll be leverage. How did Aquarius know there was any reason to care about any of these balloons? … I don’t know. Maybe he reasoned Pouch would have something if he was still hanging around the zoo at sunset.

So this should catch you up on Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for late January 2021. If you’re reading this after about April 2021, I hope to have a more up-to-date plot recap here. That link also will hold any news about the comic strip which I get.

Dick Tracy.

1 November 2020 – 23 January 2021.

My last plot recap coincided with the end of a story and start of a new one. Lucky for me. Also lucky for Mark Bernard, guest writer for this story. Not so lucky for Rabbit, delivery man for Elegance Fragrances. Rabbit mistakenly included some of the boss’s poison with a legitimate perfume delivery. The boss — Yeti — kills him. And sends Daisy Dugan to recover the poison. Daisy recovers it, but comes close to Dick Tracy, who’s investigating a string of poisonings. Daisy shoots at Tracy, causing the scientific detective to wonder why someone’s shooting him. Other than, like, half the town is relatives and remakes of crooks he’s killed.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Mark Barnard, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 12th of November, 2020. You know, sitting around hoping something will turn up is a classic stage of business decline. If you have good reason to think the trend will turn back to you, all right. But anyone who’s studied corporate history will tell you this is the time to find a new market. Develop your product lines or use your resources to buy something that is selling now. Just saying.

The poison business isn’t what it used to be. Yeti has a plan to tide himself through the slump: stealing a million-dollar meteorite from the city museum. The plan is to drive one of the well-marked Elegant Fragrances trucks to three blocks away from the museum, sneak in through the sewers, and grab the rock. It’s our first clear hint that Yeti may not be Dick Tracy’s most ingenious opponent ever. The delivery van’s noticed by the cops’ drone camera network. Also, the cops have a drone camera network. It’s an element that fills a much-needed gap in Dick Tracy’s surveillance-state dystopia.

Grabbing the meteorite goes well, though, since Yeti and Daisy can just step over the security lasers. Climbing back down into the sewer goes less well, as Daisy slips and breaks something. Yeti leaves him to die. Yeti puts the meteorite in the back of the truck, takes off, hits the curb, and loses the meteorite right out the back of the truck. He doesn’t notice until he gets home.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Mark Barnard, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 26th of November, 2020. All things considered, this maybe wasn’t a case that needed Dick Tracy’s Major Crimes Unit.

So, ah, good job, Yeti. He gets his gun ready to shoot Dick Tracy; Sam Catchem shoots it out of his hand. Yeti flees to the back room, telling himself that he’s survived far worse. I would like him to name two examples. He won’t, though. In his haste to gather his papers and flee, he lets loose a giant poison spider who kills him.

And that, the 5th of December, closes the story. I’m sorry to see Yeti go, since he had a weird name and a snooty attitude about poisoning being elegant while guns and knives suck. And there’s his whole vendetta to destroy Dr Harvey Camel’s life. That’s enough for a character. It’s disappointing that he so completely foiled himself. Dick Tracy hardly had to show up.

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The 6th of December, 2020, started the still-running story. And this is by Staton and Curtis on their own. It’s the one with, yes, a hippie commune. It starts at the city zoo, where balloon dealer and information-seller Pouch growls at a cocaine dealer name of Dollar Bill. Pouch — one of the few Dick Tracy characters to have got away with murder — doesn’t want drug dealers messing up his businesses.

Pouch calls on Tiger Lilly to rough Dollar Bill up a bit. Lilly roughs too much up, and snaps Dollar Bill’s neck. Pouch leaves Lilly to clean up his own problems. Lilly leaves the body to be discovered, figuring it’ll send the signal to keep the drug deals out of Pouch’s park. Dick Tracy gets the signal too, and suspects the start of a drug war. “It looks serious,” says Dick Tracy, “Prilosec and Meclizine have lost patience waiting for the Rolaids Empire to crumble. They might maneuver Cimetidine into giving a push.”

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 27th of December, 2020. OK yeah commune whatever, do you have those lavender sugar cookies? Because those are good and we should examine them more.

Aquarius, who runs the dealing network Dollar Bill was part of, replaces him with a guy named Ty. And warns Ty to be careful of the cops. Ty is immediately spotted by Sam Catchem. Ty runs into a farmer’s market, though, disappearing in the crowd. One of the farmers tips Catchem off to the commune, though. Catchem and Tracy go to the commune at 1312(!) Bedwell. They ask Aquarius for information and get nothing, not even his name.

This does send Aquarius to Pouch, to figure out his deal. He does this by asking Pouch where to find Dollar Bill and Pouch is having none of that. Aquarius offers to buy one of Pouch’s balloons, though, the blue one, which he refuses to sell at any price. It turns into an argument that park cops come in to break up. Aquarius offers to make peace by buying all the balloons, including the blue one. Given the scene, Pouch can’t refuse.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 12th of January, 2021. The tag of ‘Blue’ is funny every time it appears, yes, but because we’re seeing the colorized dailies. The strip can run in black-and-white. It happens that for some reason the last week and a half it’s run in black-and-white on GoComics, too; I don’t know why. I still have no idea how Aquarius knew there was anything special about the blue balloon.

Tiger Lilly follows Aquarius. So Aquarius is incredibly aware of Tiger Lilly’s pursuit. Aquarius returns to the commune, and Lilly breaks in after everyone goes setting up an ambush. Lilly’s overwhelmed, and captured, and Aquarius demands to know who sent him and what he’s after.

And that’s where we stand. It’s on a lot of characters noticing the people following them. Also thinking people were following them who weren’t. It’s a curious little motif for the comic. We’ll see where it leads in about twelve weeks.

Next Week!

My schedule calls for Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley. But I realize I may want to postpone that for … let’s say two weeks. So I will have a Gasoline Alley plot recap at this link, but around the 16th of February. So I’ll go to the next strip on my routine instead, then, and that’ll be … ooh! Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail. Should be fun. See you then.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Did Svengoolie bust an actual vampire? August – October 2020

Svengoolie did not. For a moment it looked like the vampire-killer was confessing to the horror-movie host. Svengoolie was instead used, with some elegance, to provide exposition about how a gadget needed for the story should work.

This essay should catch you up on Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy through to the end of October, 2020. Any news about Dick Tracy that I get, or after about February 2021 new plot recaps, should be at this link.

On my other blog I continue writing about mathematics terms, one for each letter in the alphabet. This past week, I revisited a topic I’d already written, because I forgot I already wrote an essay about tiling. Come on over and stare at my embarrassment!

Dick Tracy.

9 August – 31 October 2020.

Dethany Dendrobia, star of Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack, was the guest star last time we checked in. She was in the Greater Tracypolitan Metro Area to investigate weirdness with a warehouse her company was buying. The weirdness: Coney, an ice-cream-themed villain. He’s searching the warehouse for a fortune left behind by Stooge Viller, a villain who died in 1940, our time. Coney’s desperate because the property management company “accidentally” sold the warehouse to Fastrack. To buy time and the warehouse, Coney’s gang kidnaps Dendrobia’s fiancee, Guy Wyre.

Sam Catchem’s informant has a tip for Wyre’s whereabouts: “some old warehouse”. It’s kind of a crazy lead, but you know what? Sometimes the crazy leads pay off. With the help of FBI Inspector Fritz Ann Dietrich they raid the warehouse, catching Coney mid-lick. Coney tries to put it all on Howdy, the Howdy Doody-themed henchman and yes you read that right. Dendrobia finds Wyre, and more, the restroom behind him. And one of those old-fashioned toilets with the water tank that’s up by the ceiling. She pulls the chain and finds piles of cash. This because none of the people searching the warehouse for Villier’s Millions ever looked in the toilet water tank.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 20th of August, 2020. Yes, Dethany’s washing her hands in that first panel and I don’t know why. She rushed past her bound fiancee to do it, too. One of the GoComics.com commenters speculated that Howdy was planning to keep the loot for himself, and pretended to have found nothing. Possibly relocated the loot while waiting for his chance to sneak it out. This isn’t explicitly supported in the text. But it would answer my doubts that in 80 years nobody checked the water tanks.

So all’s squared away, and Dendrobia and Wyre can get back to their Halloween-scheduled wedding. (It did go on, over in their home comic strip of On The Fastrack, as a mostly online event. Some family attended, after a strict two-week quarantine.)

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The 23rd of August started another two-week Minit Mystery, with guest writer Mark Barnard and guest artist Jorge Baeza. The mysterious ‘Presto’ makes the city’s new Aurora Rising statue vanish when his ransom isn’t paid. The story is one of how Tracy follows his one lead. But there is a legitimate mystery and the statue’s disappearance is by a more-or-less legitimate piece of stage magic. Also, there’s a guest appearance by Smokey Stover, so, you’re welcome, Dad. I had nothing to do with it.

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The Halloween story started the 7th of September with a mad sciencey-type carving fangs. And in an atmospheric and silent week, does a vampire-attack on a woman, Faith Brown. She dies of blood loss from two wounds in her neck, and there’s chloroform in her blood. He goes on to admire his fang-and-pump apparatus. And how after a “minor adjustment” he’ll be able to add Faith’s sisters’ blood to his “collection”.

Honeymoon Tracy and Adopted Orphan Annie pop into the story the 13th, as their journalism tutor Brenda Starr gives them an assignment. Pick a story from the paper and they do their own investigation. They’re interested in the “vampire” killing. Starr recommends talking with Professor Stokes, Biology Professor at Local College. He’s the guy with the fangs, and he’s known to be an expert on vampire lore. Honeymoon and Annie go to Dick Tracy to see if he can get them an introduction. They’re too young to realize that if you’re even a bit female, and ask a white nerd about his obsession, he will never stop talking to you, including about it.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 22nd of September, 2020. So this one time decades ago I was taking a picture in a dimly-lit computer room. When the flash went off, this friend who had an online vampire roleplay going howled in an instinctive pain. He said it was because the flash was right in his eyes but … you know? I should check how that picture came out. Since it was a photo I took in like 1997, probably unfocused and with everything interesting under-lit.

Tracy goes along with them, though, since he needs to get some suspects into the story. Stokes admits how he’s part of the local Nosferatu scene and sure there’ll be a certain amount of blood-drinking there, but not him. And it’s always from volunteers. And he has some literature.

Meanwhile Faith’s bereaved sisters — Hope and Charity — are not too bereaved not to talk themselves into buying a car with their inheritance. Not from Faith’s death, particularly; a fortune they’d come into before her killing. Their Uncle Matthew had been a “patron to some really eccentric types”. If Faith-Hope-and-Charity weren’t found, the money would have gone to the eccentrics. Have you spotted the eccentric in this story?

Then there’s another break. TV horror-host Svengoolie had a fan send him a “working artificial vampire system”. Could it have something to do with the vampire killing? No, it turns out. The machine’s from a Local College student, and does have actual blood-draw gear, but its motor wouldn’t draw enough blood to kill. And “confessing to Svengoolie” would be weird even for the Dick Tracy universe. But, the Local College student did find the parts he needed from the college lab. And here we get explained how Stokes could make this vampire machine, without a villain monologuing and without anyone telling someone things they should already know.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 28th of September, 2020. “Daddy Warbucks is busy this week informing heads of government at the G8 summit just what symbolic reforms the wealthy are going to allow them to make in the next year. And after that he’s visiting Mr Am, his immortal friend who’s Ambiguously God. But once he’s back from all that he’ll be very impressed I saw a man who says `Berwyn` while stagehands throw rubber chickens at him.”

Professor Stokes learns of Hope and Charity buying a car with the money he feels entitled to. I don’t know how. He calls Hope Brown, though, with the promise of running a new-car-warranty scam. And stops in, coincidentally as Brenda Starr is visiting. Starr mentions she bought a new car and needs a warranty scam. He doesn’t have a card, he explains, but jots down his name and number.

Starr goes into action, because what kind of agent meets a client without business cards? In 2020, when I’m assuming smartphone owners transfer contact information by waving their phones in someone’s direction. So she calls Dick Tracy with her suspicion that Hope Brown’s the next vampire victim.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 15th of October, 2020. Starr knows Professor Stokes, at minimum by reputation, as she’d recommended him to Honeymoon and Annie for vampire information. This may make you ask, then, why didn’t Stokes recognize Starr? But there’s no reason to think they’ve met. She’d habitually be making notes of “people with deep knowledge on esoteric subjects”. And even if they had, normal people do not remember every person they’ve ever met. Even people who, like Brenda Starr, have hair that’s always sparkling in the light.

Stokes descends on a woman leaving Brown’s office. She turns, beating him up. It’s not Hope Brown. It’s Officer Lizz Grove, in disguise. Stokes breaks free, though, and runs to a nearby Jazz festival. And into the path of a cop car, that kills him. The police are aghast at killing a white guy who wasn’t protesting police violence, of course. But that wraps up the vampire problem.

Now the parts where I’m confused. It’s in motivations. I understand Stokes wanting to kill the Brown girls, on the hypothesis that would somehow get him the inheritance. (I can imagine ways Uncle Matthew might have set things up so this could work.) I could also understand him just taking “revenge” on people he’s decided wronged him by existing. I can also understand Stokes wanting this “collection” of blood he mentioned. I don’t understand these motives applying at once. Well, maybe Stokes was a complicated person.

Brenda Starr has one last question, though, for Adopted Orphan Annie. It’s one I would have thought too obvious to ask. Annie could have picked any story in the newspaper to investigate. Why was Annie interested in a weird, freakish killing that drew a six-column, two-deck headline? Why not the business piece about soy futures coming in even more in line with forecasts than analysts expected? Annie explains she knew murder victim Faith Brown, from a distance, aware she had been a kind and helpful fixture of the neighborhood. I guess it’s nice to learn give Faith Brown some traits besides being the inciting victim. But if Annie never met her how did she even know Faith Brown’s name? It’s an explanation that makes me less clear about what’s going on.

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Besides the Minit Mystery and the number of guest stars were a few special strips over this era. The 18th of October was dedicated to James “Bart” Bush, a longtime Dick Tracy super-fan who recently died. On the 6th of October much of the strip was given to Sam Catchem reading the “Quowit the Happy Hangman” comic strip.

On the 1st of October we saw a mysterious gloved hand emerge from the rapids. That seems likely to be Abner Kadaver, TV horror host-turned-killer for hire. Last we saw him, back in 2016, he died going over the Reichenbach Falls, like that could ever work. I am surprised he didn’t somehow get into the Halloween story.

Next Week!

I think the story about Joe Pye and his kids, escaped from jail, wasn’t a rerun? So we get back to Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley and see how they’re handling a reunion with Joe Pye’s wife. Again, that’s if anything goes to plan. Good luck to us all.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Who is Dethany and why does she look like a villain? May – August 2020

Dethany Dendrobia, the pale Goth guest star is from Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack. I’ll get to what she’s doing in Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy some paragraphs down. On The Fastrack is a longrunning workplace-humor comic strip. It turned up often enough when I was Reading the Comics for my mathematics blog. Dethany Dendrobia is the comic strip’s third protagonist. She took over the strip about a decade ago from the previous lead character, Wendy Welding. Dendrobia is Goth, yes, and I forget whether her paleness is makeup or her nature.

Holbrook’s three comics (On The Fastrack, Safe Havens, and the web comic Kevin and Kell) go in for a cartoony world. In it, for example, the Computer Bug, source of so many problems, is a real literal character, who can speak with and negotiate with you and all. Dendrobia, hardworking and cheerful, is also Goth, fascinated by death and time’s ravages. So her “freakish”, Morticia Addams-influenced, appearance codes her in Dick Tracy as a villain. But in her home comic strip this is how a normal person looks.

While the characters are crossing over there are some differences between the comic strip universes. Dick Tracy is carrying on as though the Covid-19 disaster weren’t happening. Except for the Crimestoppers tips at the top of Sunday panels, which carry warnings about scams. People faking being from the IRS asking for stimulus check information. People running fake health screenings. Scammers telling you the schools are “safe to reopen” for in-person classes. People claiming that employers should not be legally liable for their employees getting the coronavirus at work. People selling fake vaccinations. The frauds you would expect.

On The Fastrack, meanwhile, has made the characters being locked down an important part of the story. The easy way around this is to say the Dick Tracy events happened, like, last year or so. Except both strips have built in how Dendrobia is preparing for her wedding, to Guy Wyre, this coming Halloween. (Dick Tracy also recently made a guest appearance in On The Fastrack, there as a hologram, to avoid spreading non-ironic death.)

It gets more “inconsistent”. In Holbrook’s other newspaper comic, Safe Havens, Fastrack built and launched a spacecraft to Mars. That crew went and bioengineered that planet into new life. In that strip, Dethany is the chief flight director for Fastrack Inc. There is no good reason I haven’t been doing plot recaps for that comic. But that’s even harder to reconcile with what we’ve seen here. Especially since Holbrook decided to freeze the On The Fastrack characters’ ages, when Dendrobia took over. But Safe Havens continues aging the characters in loose realtime. You never hear this mentioned by people who say they can’t understand the relationship between Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean.

(Tom Batiuk’s Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean both take place in the present day. But Funky Winkerbean is also a decade “ahead” of Crankshaft. That is, if a Crankshaft character appears in today’s Funky Winkerbean he’s ten years older than he “should” be. A Funky Winkerbean character appearing in Crankshaft is about a decade younger. That’s all.)

Dick Tracy.

17 May – 9 August 2020.

Actress Fortuna Dyer was getting into character for her Breathless Mahoney bio-pic. Thing is Breathless Mahoney was a villain. Dyer wants information out of B.O.Plenty, who back before his heel-face turn kind of got pretty near murdering her. Tracy gives Dyer an interview, recapping the Mahoney-Plenty story of the 40s. And asks her not to contact Plenty, who’s gone all good.

Dyer bails Shaky out of jail, a surprising fast return for last story’s villain. Shaky’s uncle, the original Shaky, was married to Breathless Mahoney’s mother. Dyer says she wants more background on Mahoney. So he’s got a job now, that’s great. The job seems to be talking about their relatives over dinner with Dyer. That doesn’t cause any conflict at all with Edison Lighthouse, Shaky’s girlfriend, whom he starts missing date nights with.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 30th of May, 2020. “Because if you do shake all the time, well, this could be even better than that time I was dating Chef Wiggly!”

Lighthouse, annoyed at her abandonment, turns to her one friend: Ugly Crystal. You know, whom she met while fleeing the cops last time around. Over coffee at the mall Crystal recommends dumping Shaky. She doesn’t know what his deal is. But she knows someone sending his signals is not good. Lighthouse challenges Shaky, who admits to what’s going on, even though it’s a little weird.

Meanwhile Dick Tracy learns that Shaky’s out of jail, when Sam Catchem notices Shaky at the filming location.

In another mall hangout, Ugly Crystal mentions how her dad’s got a cool Oklahoma Days centennial belt buckle. And there’s a whole world of belt-buckle-collectors who’ll pay good money for that sort of thing. Shaky, eavesdropping, hears how this could be worth thousands. He forms a plan. Shaky is confident in his plan, even though his plan is quite bad. He needs cash. Dyer’s been pumping him for information, but all she’s delivered is the promise of a movie cameo. When she puts off a dinner date, he breaks in to Ugly Crystal’s home to steal her dad’s belt buckle.

So a thing Ugly Crystal maybe never mentioned to Shaky when he mistook her place for a safehouse? Her dad’s Lafayette Austin, undercover cop. Also he has like a dozen belt buckles so it’s easy to find one’s missing.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 21st of June, 2020. Having yet another instance where characters play Dick Tracy characters, particularly with Current Shaky playing Original Shaky for this movie cameo, made this a confusing strip to read when it came out. What we’re seeing here, through the first panel of the bottom row, is a movie scene being filmed with Shaky playing his uncle the Original Shaky, and Dyer playing Breathless. The last two panels are the real Dick Tracy intruding, breaking up the scene with an actual real-world arrest. This seems needlessly jerky of Dick Tracy. Like, he couldn’t have waited one minute for the scene to be clear? But, Shaky responding to something off-script so plausibly suggests that maybe his real calling was an actor. He’s certainly not a competent crook.

Tracy goes to the movie set to arrest Shaky, who’s doing his cameo as Uncle Shaky. The arrest is for “harassment”, and I’m not sure who he’s harassing. But he’s got the belt buckle on him too. There’s a short fight, and a new arrest, and that’s it for Shaky.

Also maybe for Dyer. On Shaky’s arrest she drops her method-actor pose of demanding everyone call her Breathless. .

Oh, and that $2,000 buckle was actually a $20 buckle. Ugly Crystal was “worried” about Edison Lighthouse being with Shaky. And Shaky thought that baiting Shaky into stealing from Austin might “[help] save Fortuna Dyer”. Which … I guess succeeded, but it feels like some class of entrapment at least. Also it’s not clear that Tracy did much besides have the matter solved for him.

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The current story began the 5th of July. It brings in Dethany Dendrobia from Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack. Fastrack itself is a company with a slightly vague portfolio, but a lot of what it does is data warehousing.

Dendrobia’s in Tracy Town because Fastrack is buying a new warehouse. Dendrobia’s investigating the string of construction accidents. Someone’s following her, and took a shot, tearing her overcoat. The warehouse is one that used to belong to Stooge Viller, whom GoComics commenter Neil Wick writes was the fifth-ever Dick Tracy villain, back in 1933. Viller survived a couple stories and died in 1940.

The antagonist is someone named Coney, a rotund fellow whom we meet buying a double-wide ice cream cone. And the motive: there’s a rumor that Viller hid millions somewhere in the building. But after a month of work Coney’s gang hasn’t found anything.

Tracy and Dendrobia investigate the warehouse. They find Coney and his gang. Coney insists he’s the building’s owner. So, all right. That stalls things for a couple days. Coney goes to Wilson Properties, complaining about these snoopers. Alex Wilson says the warehouse was sold by mistake and they haven’t been able to negotiate anything with Fastrack. It’s … a heck of a mistake. But, don’t worry. The real estate investment trust that fraudulently sold the building? Whose mistake results in the attempted murder and actual kidnapping and possible death of several people? They will never face a consequence.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelly Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 30th of July, 2020. OK, yeah, but, like, Villiers was operating in the 30s. There was probably some candy bar named “Villiers’ Millions” and it was advertised as the combination bar that filled you up like a five-course dinner served to a member of the Sugar Trust. They sponsored Stoopnagle and Budd for three months in 1934.

Still, it gives underling Howdy a new chance to get rid of Dendrobia or else. Howdy by the way looks rather like Howdy Doody. This makes me think we’re supposed to recognize Coney from something, but I don’t know what. He looks generically like an ice cream mascot but that could just be good character design. He also doesn’t look anything like the iconic “Tillie” caricature of Coney Island showman George Tilyou, which knocks out the other obvious association.

Howdy gets some information from Bookworm, which might be a shout-out to the Adam West Batman. With that information he drives over to On The Fastrack and kidnaps Dendrobia’s fiancee, Guy Wyre. Howdy gives Dendrobia the ultimatum: get her boss (Rose Trellis) to let go of the warehouse and she gets Guy Wyre back.

And, the 9th of August, Sam Catchem meets up with Sleet. Catchem knew her back when she was a racketeer and paid $500 to kill him. So it’s nice they’ve gotten past that. What relevance it has to these proceedings is unknowable as of Sunday. (He was getting information about Wyre’s kidnappers.)

This catches you up to mid-August 2020. If you’re reading this after about November 2020, or want what Dick Tracy news I come across, I may have something at this link. Thank you.

Next Week!

I look through a couple months’ worth of Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley, unfortunately still in reruns for the dailies. I believe at least some of the Sunday strips are new, but haven’t checked. I’ll let you know what I find.

And one last note. Over on my mathematics blog I’m spending the rest of the year explaining one mathematics term at a time. I’m leaving a lot of mathematics terms un-explained. But you might like what you see. Thanks for reading.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? How was Shaky’s extortion of Tess Tracy supposed to work? February – May 2020

There is no possible way that Shaky’s extortion of Tess Tracy could have worked.

I’m happy to catch you up on Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. If you’re reading this after about August 2020 I probably have a more up-to-date plot recap here.

Also, if you’re interested in comic strips with a mathematical theme? I am, too, and I write about them regularly at my other blog. Plus there’s some other interesting stuff happening there. I hope you enjoy.

Dick Tracy.

23 February – 17 May 2020.

Shaky, nephew of a Dick Tracy antagonist killed in the 40s, was attempting revenge. His plan: give an alibi to James McQueen, who he doesn’t care anything about. McQueen had been convicted of first-degree backstory. The evidence against him was gathered by Tess Tracy’s detective agency. Shaky figured to extort Tess Tracy. His deal: she pays him to suppress his (fake) evidence, or he goes to the press saying she suppressed evidence.

Shaky is confident in his plan, even though his plan is quite bad. The only way it could fail is if Tess reports the scheme to her husband, star detective of the Major Crimes Unit. Somehow, she does. Shaky shows up for his first payoff, and Dick Tracy provides it by shooting him. Shaky shoots Tess, though.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 8th of March, 2020. Tess Tracy would spend a while in the hospital. I’m not sure we’ve seen her discharged yet. We did see several days of doctors agreeing this was very serious and Dick Tracy seen from behind, standing somberly.

Shaky and his wife(?) Edison flee to a safe house. “Ugly” Crystal, daughter of undercover cop Lafayette Austin and (the late) Ugly Christine, is there. I think we’re supposed to take that Shaky got a key to the house from Mister Bribery, Ugly Crystal’s uncle. Crystal takes this intrusion with calm. She nags him about smoking until he flees, and then calls the cops.

Shaky and Edison show up at the door of his cousin Quiver Trembly. Who tells him to get lost: she’s dealt with Dick Tracy twice and has had enough. But he has ideas to help Trembly’s charity-donation scam. So she agrees to deal with his crazy. Within minutes, the cops converge on him. Trembly says she’s not even gonna fight this. I’m not clear that she has any reason to think Dick Tracy knows she exists, but I understand her wanting to skip to the end. Edison gets out of the car and tries to get lost in the crowd. Shaky, though, he’s got a plan.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 5th of April, 2020. I’m supposing the interrogation of Shaky mostly centers on “what about your plans made you think they were anything but quite bad?” and “have you considered that you’re not good at crime?”. Maybe, “so have you ever had a plan that turned out like you planned?”. Certainly at least “do you have other interests that might get you not-arrested sometimes?”.

Shaky is confident in his plan, even though his plan is quite bad. Shaky holds a construction crew foreman at gunpoint, demanding to be raised by a crane on a steel girder, the better to shoot Dick Tracy. So, you know something? Using a handgun? From 50 feet off the ground? When you’re on a steel girder? Held only by ropes? That you cling to? When you’re a guy named “Shaky”? Turns out that’s a bad way to be a sniper. The cops arrest Shaky, and Trembly for good measure. And figure they’ll get the accomplice (Edison; they don’t know who she is) later on.

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The 7th of April saw the new, current story start. Its center is B.O. Plenty, Junior Tracy’s father-in-law. And like many Staton/Curtis stories, it’s steeped Dick Tracy lore of the 40s. Breathless Mahoney was, before Madonna played her in the movie, step-daughter of the original Shaky. I learn from the Dick Tracy wikia, which tries to explain the Plenty-Mahoney connection. If I have it right, Mahoney, on the run, stumbled into the Plenty farm. While hiding there she drugged Dick Tracy and, with fled to the city with Plenty for some reason. They got separated, but reunited when Plenty stole the car she was hiding in. Plenty strangled Breathless “nearly to death” while robbing her. She got arrested and recovered from the battery, but died in prison anyway of plot disease. B.O. would reform and become a respectable citizen and part of the Tracy clan.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 8th of April, 2020. I guess B.O. Plenty’s explained things just fine here. I don’t know that I need to detail it further.

So, someone’s making a bio-pic about Breathless Mahoney. B.O. Plenty tries and fails to keep the news secret from his family. The lead actor, Fortuna Dyer, wants to know everything about Mahoney. So she’s talking with everyone who knew her. And she’s telling people to call her Breathless during the film shoot. And while she talks with Dick Tracy. And while she looks over Mahoney’s career and works out exactly when and how she blew it. She mentions how she’s a method actor. So she’s looking forward to a long life as a respectable and respected member of society.

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Those are all the major plot threads that have been going on the last few months. There are a couple of minor ones. The most ambiguous is a two-week Minit Mystery, written and drawn by Charlie Wise. It’s about Mysta Chimera, who used to be Mindy Ermine, a crime boss’s daughter. She got mind-wiped and genetically engineered to be the new Moon Maiden. So now she’s a Lunarian with sci-fi powers that Chester Gould would hilariously insist was based on real science. In the “Mystery”, Chimera gets kidnapped. It’s by Scarmony Corybant, former cellmate of Mindy Ermine. Corybant’s looking for plans for the Space Coupe, Diet Smith’s famous magnetically-driven spaceship. Which, again, Chester Gould would hilariously insist was based on real science.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 20th of April, 2020. Guest artist and writer Charlie Wise. I won’t quarrel with you if you don’t like the way Charlie Wise drew the characters. But having Corybant’s memory be shown behind them, with herself in a featureless outline (done several times in the sequence) is a quite good choice.

While fighting Corybant, Chimera says how now she remembers hating her jokes. Corybant complains how Ermine broke her promise to write her cellmate. Or to, when they got out, buy a pony farm, which Chimera finds as weird as I do. They fight long enough for Dick Tracy to arrive, and catch Corybant. Chimera, though, thanks Scarmony “for showing me who I was,” and does buy a pony farm. And sends Corybant, in jail, pictures from it.

So, first, this wasn’t any kind of mystery. Not in any aspect. Second, it seems to establish that Chimera is regaining some memories of her life as Mindy Ermine. Is that part of the continuity now? I would be surprised if Staton and Curtis would let Charlie Wise change something about a major character in a way they didn’t approve. But it does mean they have an excuse to revert this change if they decide they don’t like it. So I’m not quite sure what we did watch, then.

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Another little bit: Annie Warbucks has been accepted into the Young Journalists Academy. One of her teachers is another cancelled-adventure-strip star, Brenda Starr. I wasn’t figuring on some vague wordplay when I started that sentence, but you’ll notice I let it stand.

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Mysta Chimera, who’s been having a heck of a year, got a visit from Dennis Deyoung, of Styx. This in a follow-up to her being kidnapped by a Mister Roboto-themed Styx fan.

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And Dick Tracy put off talking with Fortuna “Breathless II” Dyer a bit to recommend against paroling William “Broadway” Bates. Bates is a con artist, going back in the strip to 1932. He’s also The Penguin’s brother, but in ways that could be denied in front of a trademark hearing. So that’s a refresher that the character exists and might do a thing.

Next Week!

Farms: they’re like scrapbooking, but for food! What does this weird string of words mean? My recap of Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley should have an answer. Someone remind me to answer that.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Who’s Shaky and why’s he want Dick Tracy dead? December 2019 – February 2020

Shaky is the villain in Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy right now, in late February 2020. If you’re reading this summary after about May 2020 there’s probably a more up-to-date plot recap here. But this Shaky is the nephew, or nephew at least once removed, of the original Shaky. This first Shaky was a con man with a relentless shaking habit, and amazing dexterity, who died in the comic strip in January 1945. Asphyxiation, nasty stuff. The Dick Tracy Wiki helpfully explains there were a second Shaky, related to the first, who appeared in a 1986 and a sequel sometime in the 1990s. That character’s described on that page for Shaky. The current Shaky they dub Shaky II, because he is the third of that name and gimmick. I’m glad this acts as if it cleared things up.

Dick Tracy.

1 December 2019 – 23 February 2020

Mid-November started a tale that brought Steve Roper and Mike Nomad from their remembered, cancelled action-adventure comic strip. Tulza Tuzon, also known as Haf-and-Haf and also known as Splitface, tried to car-bomb them. Roper and Nomad told us why Splitface wanted them dead. They’d been investigating his carnival midway scams and pickpocketing. This lead to his disfigurement in a tanker of acid. Yeah, but he used crows to lift purses, so it’s fair.

Roper, Nomad, Dick Tracy, and Sam Catchem count it as good luck that Tuzon’s car bomb didn’t kill any of them. Tuzon and his partner, Clybourne, see it as bad luck; they don’t have the cash for another bomb. Tuzon makes some calls, though. He knows of some friends, Measles and Wormy, whom Sam Catchem busted before they could use their crime props. Why not use their gear?

Clybourne calls Roper and Nomad. He claims to be an armored car driver who saw something relevant to the bomb. He sets up a meeting at Ambush Parking Garage, and they agree to fall for this. Clybourne went to so much trouble bringing knockout gas it would be rude if they didn’t. Meanwhile Tuzon calls Dick Tracy, claiming he wants to turn himself in. He’ll meet Tracy and Catchem at the Big Cat House, at the zoo. Tracy and Catchem fall for this, too. Clybourne and Tuzon drag all four of them into the alligator pit. The ex-circus alligator Lorenzo is to get them.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 20th of December, 2019. Dick Tracy knows stronger oaths, of course, but he can’t be that worked up about just another alligator come to eat him. I mean … what do you all guess is the number of times Dick Tracy’s been menaced by an alligator, crocodile, or gharial? I’m going to say this is at minimum his eighth.

Tracy wakes up moments ahead of Lorenzo getting to them, and rallies everyone. They call for help and … well, it’s able to get to them with plenty of time. Tuzon didn’t grab their wrist-radios or stick around to watch the alligator eat them because, you know. He had urgent business: getting to the aviary so he could free the original Clybourne, the crow he’d trained to pick pockets on the midway. Mike Nomad divines this is Tuzon’s plan, chases after him, and catches the guy. And, on the 28th of December, Steve Roper and Mike Nomad fly back for home, wrapping up the story.

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The new story — one just recently wrapped up — started the 29th of December, 2019. This with a guy assembling a bunch of guns and a metallic face mask. He leads the robbery of Thermopolis Payroll, introducing himself as Mister Roboto. This isn’t his first robbery, but it’s the first big enough to make it grand larceny and be worthy of Dick Tracy’s attention. Mr Roboto’s gang also wears masks, “not as elaborate” in the words of the police chief, but, you know, you gotta do something.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 17th of January, 2020. Honestly? I know fanboys. For Mister Roboto the real payoff to this escapade was dropping that line while being confident Dick Tracy does not appreciate how aptly he’s embodying the lyric.

Which seems to be Mister Roboto’s point. After splitting the payroll heist, Roboto dismisses his henchmen until next week. He resigns himself to his boring warehouse job.

Meanwhile — in a story foreshadowed the 9th and 10th of December — the new Vitamin Flintheart play assembles. They’re doing a stage version of Metropolis. Starring as the Robotrix and False Maria? Mysta Chimera, who — just a second. I need to warm up before describing all this. OK. Mysta Chimera has the appearance and some of the powers of the Lunarians, much like Honeymoon Tracy has. But she’s not from the moon. She’s a surgically modified, amnesiac mobster’s daughter who’d been mentally programmed to think she was the Moon Maiden, Junior Tracy’s murdered wife. Chimera has learned where she really came from, and has given up on her whole past identity to hang around with Dick Tracy’s gang. Bonding with Honeymoon Tracy over having, you know, Moon Powers and those cool antennas and all that. Junior Tracy has taken all this with a sangfroid I’m not sure I could manage in the circumstance.

Mr Roboto pulls another robbery and gets into a shootout with Dick Tracy. It has a couple delightful moments in it. First, the cashier blurting out “domo arigato, Mister Roboto”, which endears her to Roboto. He declares that she can keep the money. Second, though, during the shootout Roboto declares, “Hey, Tracy! It’s a cold war!” Which confuses his underlings. Also, everyone who read the strip because the thing that defines a “cold war” is not shooting directly at the enemy. What’s going on here is that “Cold War” is one of the other songs on the album with “Mister Roboto”. So the implication here is that yes, Mr Roboto is trying to build his villain’sona around a Styx thing, but that he … doesn’t … really … have exactly the material to do it with. Or didn’t have the command of the material to do the patter smoothly. I accept this as a funny, awkward moment in the training of a young supervillain.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 17th of January, 2020. Honestly? I know fanboys. For Mister Roboto the real payoff to this escapade was dropping that line while being confident Dick Tracy does not appreciate how aptly he’s embodying the lyric.

They get out of the shootout, though. Mr Roboto has one of his henchmen lose his costume and fake being a hostage, for safe passage. He won’t be able to use that henchman again, but, that’s better than their getting killed or arrested. And they’ll have to lay low a while, but he was thinking to do that anyway. Roboto had noticed the ads for Metropolis, after all.

And the play is just his thing. The 19th of January — the first time we see Mr Roboto’s face unmasked — he’s gazing at Mysta Chimera, and even better, Mysty Chimera as a robot. It’s an explosive mix. He’s barely left the theater when he’s worked out how he’s going to kidnap her and be with her forever until she loves him. It’s the pretext of a magazine interview, in costume as the robot, of course, handcuffed to a chair, the usual.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 30th of January, 2020. Hang on, Roboto has to have broken into the zoo to steal some Moon Snail to make a “special dinner” for her before he’d kidnapped her. But then he also didn’t plan on kidnapping her sometime he wouldn’t have to run right back out for another robbery? I grant that Roboto has thrown this whole plan together at the last minute but he maybe would have done better if he’d taken a second day to work on it. Also if he’d hooked up with the local cosplay scene to see if there’s someone who does robots and is willing to talk to him when not held hostage?

He has to run to a bank job. So he leaves her some Moon Snail, fresh-poached from the city zoo, which is having a heck of a winter with the baddies breaking in. Once he leaves, she moon-zaps her handcuffs off and calls Dick Tracy. Mr Roboto and his gang get back to the lair — well, a two-level house in the suburbs — only for Mysta to moon-zap them, and then Dick Tracy arrives. Roboto and crew surrender, asking only to not be repeatedly shot. And that, the 8th of February, wraps up the Mister Roboto storyline.

I’m assuming we’ll see Mister Roboto again, since he’s got this fun goofball air while still doing actual crimes. I have no idea what anyone from Styx thinks of inspiring a Dick Tracy villain. But I am absolutely on board for this summer’s villain of “hardcore Atari 2600 Swordquest adventure games fanboy”. Also, nobody has yet added this storyline to the “Uses in Media” section of Wikipedia’s page about the song. Just observing.

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The new and current story started the 9th of February, with someone baking a birthday cake for Shaky, whose gimmick is that he’s always trembling. Then, some flashbacks to explain his deal. He was shaking constantly from infancy, rather like his uncle Shaky. He parleyed this in his youth to being the schoolyard bully. Then to selling exam papers and book reports. Then to blackmail, forgery, that sort of thing. And today? Today, he’s looking for revenge on Dick Tracy.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 21st of February, 2020. The threatened divorce was in a storyline from the first half of 1994. It made some news back then. I don’t know why this strip — and several others this week — have been in black-and-white when most of them are in color. But there is literally nothing about the colorization of daily comic strips that anyone understands.

Shaky’s plan get Tracy is to go through Tess Tracy. Her detective agency provided most of the evidence used to convict James McQueen of aggravated backstory. Shaky claims he can prove McQueen’s innocence, and that he’s willing to sit on that evidence, for a fee. And if she doesn’t pay, he explains, he’ll tell the press how Dick Tracy’s wife is suppressing evidence. Think of the scandal, since in the Tracy universe there are still scandals with consequences. Think how her husband will react.

Me, I would think “obscure relative of a killed antagonist is blackmailing me to get revenge on you” would be easy to explain to Dick Tracy. Heck, it’s happened so much they have to discuss it when something doesn’t have to do with a relative of someone Tracy’s killed looking for revenge. There’ve been like over two hundred relatives of Flattop alone trying to get revenge on Dick Tracy. Tossing in another Shaky shouldn’t strain the super-scientific detective’s belief in her. But we’ll see. For now, this is where the story’s gotten.

Next Week!

What’s going on in Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley? Aw, what ever is going on in Gasoline Alley, anyway? I expect a healthy bunch of jokes about the leap year, if nothing else. That’s in seven days, unless events demand special attention first. And in the meantime, my other blog looks at comic strips with mathematical content. You might enjoy reading that. Thanks for trying.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? What’s Detective Frisk doing not being dead? September – November 2019

Evening, everyone wondering what’s going on in Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. If you’re reading this after February 2020 there’s probably a more up-to-date plot recap at this link, which also holds older Dick Tracy recaps. Thanks for reading.

Dick Tracy.

8 September – 30 November 2019.

Dick Tracy had just wrapped up a story when I last checked in. They were moving into two weeks of a Minit Mystery, solving a poisoning. That started the 1st of September and ran through the 15th. Makes things very neat for me. It featured characters from the Friday Foster comic strip of the early 70s.

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The story opens with Detective Frieda Frisk. She’s been busy the last few years, ever since she died in the line of duty. She explains to Dick Tracy that yeah, back in a 2004 adventure Sal Monella drowned in the river. But you all just thought she drowned too. And since she was reported dead at work, she figured she might as well not come in anymore. Before you ask whether this makes sense please consider that Sal Monella had previously been crushed in a trash compactor. He turned up alive, albeit more cubical than before, and a legit concert promoter. Again, if you aren’t regularly going “wait, what?” you aren’t reading the real Dick Tracy.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 22nd of September, 2019. I do not know whether we’re meant to take it that Frisk saw Monella drowned, or whether she’s just supposing someone who seemed to have drowned, and hasn’t made contact with any of the people he knew for a decade and a half now, must be dead. Anyway, Monella’s thing when he was a concert promoter was set-decorating a venue with real actual garbage, and somehow this was a major hit, netting like nine million bucks before Frisk decided he needed to be not so alive. Monella’s original scheme, when he was first a villain in the comic, was selling recycled garbage as discount airline snacks, which gave Dick Tracy a case of amnesia, causing him not to wonder why a discount airline has snacks. I don’t know, I’m just telling you what’s on the Dick Tracy Wiki.

Anyway, Frisk’s new job is providing family information to Howell Babies. These are the children sold, for decades, by Clair Howell’s for-profit adoption agency. Which Frisk notes is not against the law, merely wrong. Frisk gets back in touch with Tracy because she shot an extra named Edward Delacroix. But she was going contact him anyway. She’s discovered that Officer Lizz Worthington-Grove, who’s been in the strip since the 50s, was also one of Howell’s sold babies. Tracy has questions. Frisk says she doesn’t know why Delacroix was shooting her. She also won’t reveal how she’s getting the Howell’s adoption records.

The Howells would like to know that too. Their plan of sending Edward Delacroix to shoot the information out of her didn’t work. They think long about what motivates people besides bullets, and hit on the idea of money. It turns out Frisk herself is a Howell Baby. They take the chance that Frisk’s birth mother, Lily Seven, would take money in exchange for setting up a trap. So she would.

Seven contacts Frisk, claiming to have only recently found out about her from Howell. Frisk and Tracy grant Seven might be working with Howell. But she’s interested in where this is going. It goes to dinner, and a movie, and before long, going to see Vitamin Flintheart in Our Town. They’re having a great relationship except for how Seven is only in it as long as Howell’s bankroll holds up.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 10th of October, 2019. Really genuinely curious what the small talk between Seven and Frisk is like. “So, uh, when you decided to just go along with the people who decided you were dead, uh … like … did that get the student loan people off your back? Because if plunging into the icy rivers of Tracy City and then never returning to your workplace or apartment is what it takes, I can think of some people who’d figure that’s worth it.”

Seven and Frisk go to Our Town again, I’m assuming because The Best Man was sold out. At the close of the play Seven jabs a hypodermic into Frisk’s neck. Seven and the Howells, who’ve been lurking around the show, drag her away.

They have a great plan to kill Frisk only slowly and uncertainly. They drag her to the abandoned building district, and to the roof of the Crow-Infested Building Hotel. There they tie her to the Roof Machinery and leave her in the rain-turning-to-snow. There’s only one possible way that she might escape. And that is if her Wrist Geenee, the souped-up version of the Dick Tracy Wrist-Radio that they were using in the early 2000s, was not in fact destroyed when she wrestled with Sal Monella in 2004, but instead fell into the lining of her jacket where it has rested ever since, waiting for the random motions of Frisk trying to break the zip ties binding her arms to her legs to activate its distress signal mode on a frequency still monitored by contemporary Dick Tracy Wrist Wizard technology, which it has retained enough battery power to do for fifteen years. And what do you know but — ! So Tracy’s able to rescue Frisk before she would plummet to her death.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 3rd of November, 2019. Not denying that it’s a normal and realistic and human thing to say, but: Dick Tracy yelling at Frisk to stop falling off the roof makes me so happy. Really great stuff there. (They spelled Frisk’s device as the Wrist Genii here, although back in the early 2000s it was called the Wrist Geenee. I do not know what significance this change in spelling has and would not rule out that Genii is easier to letter.)

The Howells hear about this on the news and just. Can. Not. I sympathize. They make a break for it as cops converge on their house. The Howells spot one cop car, T-bone it, and keep going. But that’s damaged their own car, and when its tire blows the car careens off a bridge into the river below. Tracy calls for an ambulance and divers, but there’s not much to do. When you’ve witnessed two people get dumped into the cold waters and not come up you have to accept them as dead. Tracy asks Frisk about her plans.

She figures to carry on contacting Howell Babies and offering them information on how to contact their birth parents. Oh, and she’ll definitely stop back in when Lily Seven’s trial comes up.

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So that, the 14th of November, closed out the story that’s dominated the last couple months. It also introduces the new, currently-running story. It opens at Wertham Woods Psychiatric Facility (motto: “Get it? Eh? EH?”). We know it as the facility holding Tulza Tuzon. Tuzon’s half-handsome, half-monstrous face earned him the performing and crime name Haf-and-Haf. He contracted a case of Soap Opera Multiple Personality Disorder. If that’s the sort of subject matter you do not want in your casual entertainment, you may want to drop Dick Tracy from your reading the next couple months. So far Tuzon hasn’t done very much in the story that any old villain looking for revenge wouldn’t be doing anyway.

The person we see on screen might be acting in the character of Tulza Tuzon, or as Haf-and-Haf, or as the particularly villainous Splitface. Which gets even more confusing than usual, because there was another, earlier Splitface in the Dick Tracy universe. I think that this Splitface has taken his name in tribute to the older one. But, gads, they aren’t making it easy for me. Haf-and-Haf was a character Chester Gould created in the mid-60s by Totally I Swear Not Having Heard Of Two-Face Over In Batman.

Last time I dealt with Tuzon/Haf-and-Haf/Splitface, they were kidnapping Zelda, Tuzon’s ex-wife. Along the way they picked up a sidekick, a homeless guy name of Clybourne Mayfair. The kidnapping plan didn’t work, but Splitface orders Clybourne to escape before the cops finally close in.

Anyway, Clybourne’s popped in again, pretending to be a statue delivery guy to Wertham Woods so he can sneak Tuzon/Haf/Splitface out. He’s not out to kill Zelda this time and anyway she’s out of the country. Instead he’s got a car bomb project. A two-car bomb, that he sets off outside the Hotel Siam when Dick Tracy’s car pulls up. You’ll remember the Hotel Siam as the place where Oliver and Annie Warbucks stayed while they were most recently in the strip. The bomb doesn’t kill Tracy or Sam Catchem.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 25th of November, 2019. “Sam, did I mention I’ve been learning how to throw my voice? … … … I’ve been learning how to throw my voice.” Anyway, did you know that Steve Roper and Mike Nomad was written by Allen Saunders, who also wrote Mary Worth for like six hundred years back in the mid-20th century? And, yes, the strip started out as a joke strip titled Big Chief Wahoo, and changed. So it did the Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy thing of changing genre, and the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith or Robotman/Monty thing of getting a new cast and dropping the old. Comic strips used to be even weirder.

It does reveal this story’s special guest stars, Steve Roper and Mike Nomad. From the remembered comic strip Steve Roper and Mike Nomad. When that comic was last seen, in December 2004, Steve Roper was the editor of Proof Magazine. Mike Nomad was a private eye. Together they’d have action-adventure stories that I never read. I mean, c’mon, who was doing story-comic snark blogging in 2004?

Roper’s car was completely destroyed by the bomb. Roper and Nomad were in town, by a great stroke of luck, investigating Tulza Tuzon. Nomad explains they knew Haf-and-Haf, from an investigation they ran ages ago into carnival cons. The one they could pin on Haf-and-Haf: the old purse-snatching-crows plan. Which, I read, was part of the original Haf-and-Haf story in 1960s Dick Tracy. They spotted Haf-and-Haf’s scam, called the cops, and Tulza went on the run. He ran all the way into a truck carrying a vat of toxic disfigurement chemicals. So, uh, good job, Proof Magazine, giving some supervillain his Origin Story. I get why Tuzon would be aiming a bomb at them; what I don’t know is why they figured they had to come back into town now and be a target for him.

And that’s where the story has gotten to, as of Saturday.

Next Week!

Will I get to talk about old-time radio? It’s time to explain what’s going on in Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley, so, yes. Catch you in a week, unless something demands the publication slot first.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Seriously, do we not find out whether Daddy Warbucks killed his wife? June – September 2019

No, kind readers. Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy gave us a juicy mystery. Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks’s wife disappeared in circumstances where he’s the only plausible suspect. They do not reveal what happened. But Dick Tracy has adopted the Little Orphan Annie cast. They may reappear and reopen the mystery. If that happens, I’ll share news at this link. That link will also have a more up-to-date plot recap if you’re reading this later than about December 2019, yourselves.

Dick Tracy.

16 June – 8 September 2019

The search was on for Gypsy Gay, the last thread of evidence prosecutors have in trying B-B Eyes for murder. The real evidence, Trixie Tinkle’s sworn statement, has gone missing. So has Tinkle. But it’s thought Tinkle might have described her statement to Gay. Without that, all the State has against B-B Eyes is that his name is B-B Eyes and that the corruption of his body shows the corruption of his morals. B-B Eyes’s lawyer Tim Jackel is racing Dick Tracy to find Gay first.

Oh, did I mention Trixie Tinkle was Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks’s second wife? And that she disappeared while the two were on a world cruise? And Warbucks won’t answer questions about what happened, but will admit how Tinkle was a golddigger with whom he couldn’t make things work? Also, that Annie and Oliver Warbucks are in on this story?

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 20th of June, 2019. Now, it’s hard to believe, but I have heard that there are people in the world who do not remember when Action Comics #1 was posted. Some of them don’t even know why this would be a something they would care to know.

In it to the point of solving things: Annie, Honeymoon Tracy, and Ugly Crystal happen across Gypsy Gay. She works in the hotel where Annie and Oliver Warbucks are staying. Gay’s location and workplace are a slender lead to go on, but Tracy is able to follow it. Not fast enough to keep Gay and Annie from being kidnapped, but, c’mon. It’s Little Orphan Annie. If she weren’t being kidnapped she’d go off and kidnap herself, just to stay in shape.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 23rd of June, 2019. I grant this is not the most important strip of the plot. But I love Annie’s explanation of herself in that final panel. That’s giving you a character in one panel. It’s so good you almost don’t wonder why she brought up tattoos. Like, did B-B Eyes or one of the henchmen have a tattoo we haven’t been paying attention to? Or has she been workshopping this line so long she took the chance to deploy it regardless of whether it perfectly fit?

Turns out Gay actually did witness B-B Eyes killing Officer O’Malley. O’Malley had been sent undercover to … uh … investigate B-B Eyes’s tire-bootlegging gang back in 1942. So, you know, do not cross the Office of Price Administration if you ever want to know peace. Look, if we aren’t going to accept a weird flow of time then we’re in trouble. I’m still hung up on how Trixie Tinkle disappeared twenty years ago, as we get told, yet was someone whom Annie knew. Also that Annie only met Oliver Warbucks because of Warbucks’s first wife. Anyway, B-B Eyes figures his best bet is to kill Gay, and what the heck, Annie too.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 30th of June, 2019. I remember this journey being a lot less sinister when the Pink Panther took it.

Have to agree with his plan. But the cops have followed them, and they’re already holding a shootout. Annie leads Gay to making a break for it. In the hallway they find a magical vortex filled with demons, as will happen. Don’t worry. It’s Punjab, using the mystic powers of the inscrutable Orient to save his master’s ward and also that other person. With the hostages safe, Tracy’s able to move in with a heavier action sequence. And he captures B-B Eyes safe and sound and ready for trial.

There’s some time for calm reflection. Talk of how Warbucks has moved to a quieter town. How he’s finally adopted Annie for real and good. And, no, he’s not going to go answering any nosey police questions about the disappearance of his inconvenient wife. That, the 13th of July, concludes the story.

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The next day Tracy gets gunned down in the rain. And yes, it was exciting to read this and think Warbucks had put out a hit on Tracy after all. It’s rough on Tracy, but he survives, thanks to his bulletproof vest and his latest would-be murderer’s unwillingness to shoot him in the head. His attempted murderer this time: Archie Comics’s Dilton Doiley cosplaying as the lead singer for the Buggles. Call him “Doc”. His participation got teased the 26th and 27th of June, in the midst of the previous gunfight. He’s the nephew of old-time Tracy villain Flyface. This is why there’s flies hanging around him. Flies respect primogeniture.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 19th of July, 2019. Uncle Felixweather, Flyface, had a big collection of law books and was maybe an attorney. In one past storyline Flyface’s law books were coated with a material that produced a noxious gas when burned, which Flyface used to escape jail. This storyline revealed that the books themselves could be used to murder people by poison or as incendiaries or other stuff. And if that all sounds ridiculous please remember this is the comic strip where flappy-skinned balloon seller The Pouch used a popcorn maker to shoot someone dead.

Like many Gen Z’ers, he can’t just go to college. He needs a side hustle. His is trying to get revenge on Tracy for (I assume) killing his uncle Flyface. That’s failed, which disappoints him. Now he’ll probably only get three stars on Smuglr, the crime-sharing app that’s disrupting the traditional black markets. Anyway, he can get back to his main job, being floor manager at the Patterson Playhouse.

The Patterson Playhouse is doing a production of Our Town, with Vitamin Flintheart as the Narrator. During rehearsals Mitchell, a Gluyas Williams portrait of Robert Benchley suffering a cold, drops off a thermos of “snow”. Mitchell made two mistakes dropping off this drug shipment. First, what he thought was an equipment bag was the camera bag of Kandikane Lane, Vitamin’s wife. Second, he used a thermos with the licensed brand image of The Scarlet Sting. This is an in-universe comic strip and comic book superhero.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 5th of August, 2019. “I mean, this is a heap of Kraft Parmesan with a street value of easily … like … $2.49.”

So the appearance of a licensed bit of fan merch drew so much attention. Characters wandered over from Funky Winkerbean to admire that hey, here’s something nerds like! And yet it’s for sale just as if superheroes were part of pop culture or something. They look inside, find it’s a great pile of white powder, and call in Dick Tracy.

Dick Tracy does some swift super-detecting work. He’s learned that earlier that day was Mitchell asking to see Doc Limpp. Tracy checks the Dick Tracy Wikia and finds that Flyface — Felixweather Limpp — had a nephew named Little Doc. Somehow this isn’t enough to go on, though, so they set a trap. They return the thermos to the Flinthearts to carry on as if the cocaine wasn’t discovered and replaced with a decoy. (The Flinthearts had unknowingly taken the thermos home before noticing it. This is why Doc didn’t know the police were aware of the thermos.)

Meanwhile Doc and his partner Sally try to figure how to get the cocaine back. Sally goes in disguise as “Kassie Richmond”, reporter for the Daily News, to interview Kandikane. Kandikane takes a quick picture of Sally alongside Jack Magnus. Magnus played J Straightedge Trustworthy, spoof of Dick Tracy, in the musical comedy A Chin To Die For, in-universe spoof of Dick Tracy, earlier. The “interview” happens over the course of a full dress rehearsal, so far as that’s possible, of Our Town.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 20th of August, 2019. I know what you’re thinking: with that last panel we can declare a winner in the Funniest Story Comic Panel Of 2019 contest. I agree this is a strong contender. But let’s please not forget that the current Mary Worth story is about Dawn Weston trying to get a guy who’s incredibly not interested in a lasting relationship to commit to her, and that’s probably not even going to be the last Mary Worth story of the year. You’ll see that here in a couple weeks’ time.

Sally goes snooping around and finds Tracy’s there, which she warns Doc about. She also finds The Bag, and grabs the thermos. Tracy moves in. Sally has an excellent uncover story: “I wear swimsuits!” Tracy arrests her, as Doc enters the building. He sneaks into the rafters or whatever they have up high above stage from a theater and shoots. Then he chuckles at having killed Dick Tracy, because Doc somehow doesn’t know what comic strip he’s in.

Tracy wasn’t shot. Jack Magnus was. He was borrowing Tracy’s hat and coat to give some fans pictures of him as J Straightedge Trustworthy. Tracy’s going after Doc au naturel, wearing nothing but his three-piece suit. Also, I have to read it like this, setting up Magnus to be the unwitting target of Doc’s attempted murder. Magnus pulls through. “It’s just a nick”, the kind that would just screw you up for years in real life but that genre convention is you just kind of walk off. It is good for Magnus, but still … I mean, maybe Tracy didn’t know Doc was going to shoot him right then and there? But he’s got to have seen this as plausible, too.

Tracy arrests Doc. And we learn Doc’s also a cocaine user and Tracy felt kind of bad breaking this to Doc’s grandmother. So the story’s resolved, and it closes with a week of scenes from Our Town.

Oh, also they arrest Mitchell, who surrenders to the cops after eight minutes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans quoting at him.

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And on the 1st of September started a new Minit Mystery. This one is, if I’m reading it right, written by Staton and Curtis. The guest artist is Andrew Pepoy. It starts with a murder at a photo studio. As I write this, on Saturday the 7th, it’s been introducing suspects and motives, so if you want to jump in to solving matters, this is a good chance. It’s a nice story break point for me.

Next Week!

I have seven days to remember exactly what’s going on in
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley. It’s involved Rufus and Joel a good bit, that I’m pretty sure about.

Meanwhile I continue looking at mathematics in comic strips on my other blog. I also have the Fall 2019 A-to-Z Sequence, explaining one concept for each letter of the alphabet, running. You might enjoy that. Thanks for considering it.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Did Daddy Warbucks really kill his wife? March – June 2019

Thanks for wondering about Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. If it’s later than about September 2019, there should be a more up-to-date plot recap at this link. This should get you up to date on what’s happening as of mid-June 2019.

Dick Tracy.

24 March – 16 June 2019.

There was a special guest star in Dick Tracy last time around. Not from another comic strip. Joe Samson, who’d been a character in the late 70s, was back. He’s pursuing a Tacoma serial killer who’s murdering schoolteachers. Schoolteachers who are also basketball coaches and maybe sportswriters. We readers know who it is, and why he changed towns. It’s Barnabas Tar, hit new sports columnist for The Daily. He’s moved because his brother Reggie “Rocks” Tar thought this might stop his brother’s murdering.

Tar’s newest killing makes the papers. And gets him a Serial Killer Headline Name, “Teacher’s Pet”. The Tacoma newspapers called him that too. This outrages the killer. He confronts Wendy Wichel, star crime reporter for The Daily. And threatens death if he calls her anything but The Professor. She writes up the encounter for The Daily. And hasn’t got much more to share with Tracy. The Professor had a disguise. Also one of those voice altering devices that exists in this kind of story.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 31st of March, 2019. Also hey, check that Crimestoppers reference to The Stan Freberg Show. The sixth and eighth episodes included a “Face The Funnies” sketch in which people too smart for their own good talk about such nonsense as … Dick Tracy and … Little … Orphan … Annie. Hm.

The investigation’s short on leads, so the subplots have to pick up the slack. Bonnie Tracy, who turns out to be a schoolteacher, takes the class on a tour of The Daily newsroom. Barnabas Tar is smitten with Bonnie Tracy, and they set a date at Coletta’s Restaurant. And just in time, as Reggie Tar has thought hard about his brother’s serial-killing and decided to call the cops on him. One might complain that once again Tracy gets the solution handed to him, no super-detective work needed. And I admit I’m not the crime podcast listener in the household. But my understanding is “family member turned them in” is one of the top ways serial killers get caught. It’s that and “gets stopped for an expired license plate and somebody checks”. Tracy catches up with Barnabas Tar at the date with Bonnie. Barnabas flees, out the kitchen and into the alley. Cornered in an alley, he tries to shoot Tracy and misses. Tracy tries to shoot Tar and succeeds.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 21st of April, 2019. Not to pick on someone’s dying utterances here but … I’m not clear what the irony is here. I can headcanon this, certainly, fitting it to Barnabas Tar/The Professor here having been proud to make it out of the dumps. And there’s no reason that his dying thoughts have to be anything Tracy would understand. I feel unsatisfied that they’re something we readers don’t quite fully have.

So that covers the Teacher’s Pet killings. The only big loose end is that Bonnie Tracy still has ambiguous feelings for Joe Samson, who’s been less a part of this story than you’d expect. But Samson doesn’t have to leave the strip just yet.

And some other busienss. The 26th and 27th of April, Vitamin and Kandikane Flintheart’s son is born. He’s named Kane Flintheart. Seems cute as kids go, so far as I can tell.

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The 28th of April started another Minit Mystery, a two-week diversion written by Jim Doherty. The framing device is Dick Tracy recounting his time as police chief of Homewood. This for the benefit of Patrick Culhane and Austin Black, history writers. The story’s illustrated in a different style to the modern Dick Tracy usual. And it’s soaked in bits I love from old-time-radio detective stories. Wide-open cities run by gangsters, mayors being elected on a reform slate, protection rackets, insurance fraud.

The mystery featured a lot of text, though, and a lot of plot. When I read this as it came out I felt lost. I trusted that if I read the whole two weeks’ worth of strips at once, it would make better sense. It does. The solution is — well, it’s sensible. I’m not positive that it’s adequately planted by the narrative. But the puzzle would not have taken Dick Tracy so long without all the heavy plotting and heaps of information piled on the reader either. So was it fair? … Yes, I’ll say it was. I hope not only because I can imagine, say, Gerald Mohr reeling off Dick Tracy’s lines here.

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Back to the main continuity. The current story started, more or less, the 13th of May. (There was one day’s strip previewing it before the Minute Mystery.) It features a special guest star. B-B Eyes’s trial for murder has hit a snag, from the prosecutor’s point of view. Its main evidence, the sworn statement of Trixie Tinkle, is missing. So is Tinkle. She was last seen on a cruise with her husband, Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks. Yes, the story is a chance to check in on Dick Tracy‘s foster comic, the orphaned Annie.

Trixie Tinkle’s been missing for twenty years. I have no idea whether this is something from the actual Annie. I’m sorry. GoComics has Annie comics going back to spring of 2001, but I don’t have the kind of research time for that. Tracy’s sent to ask Warbucks about the disappearance of his wife.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 21st of May, 2019. That’s some typically good use of shadowed faces especially in the first panel. Also this strip makes me realize I don’t know the canonical explanation for how Warbucks and Annie ever met. I think like most people of my age cohort I just knew … uh … it was like in the Broadway musical that we never saw either, right? More or less anyway. So I appreciate getting the surprising news that Warbucks had a wife and she did the hard work of making the comic strip happen.

Warbucks doesn’t want to talk about his wives, and being rich and white, doesn’t see much reason he should answer fool questions from a public servant. But he’ll admit eternal gratitude to his first wife for taking in Annie. His second … he calls a golddigger with whom he couldn’t make things work. Like, how could Annie know someone who disappeared twenty years ago? Also, wait, how can B-B Eyes have been waiting twenty years for a trial? (B-B Eyes was thought dead during that time which, yeah, would delay his being brought to trial.) Also wait, Oliver Warbucks hadn’t adopted Annie before … recently? Really? That seems weird, but … I mean, I’m not going to challenge Joe Staton and Mike Curtis on story strip continuity.

It’s not just you, though. Emphasizing that Tinkle’s disappearance was twenty years ago, instead of a vague “years ago”, is weird. I think most comics readers accept this sort of floating timeline continuity. You know, where we don’t bring up that Tracy’s been about the same age since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. Maybe it is going to be important that this was twenty years ago, but as of now, I don’t know why “years ago” wouldn’t suffice.

Meanwhile B-B Eyes thinks he might be able to do something, now that the key evidence against him has vanished. He visits lawyer Tim Jackel, who’d tried years ago to get Tinkle a separation from Oliver Warbucks. Jackel actually says he got “a beating”. I’m not clear if he means in court or with a diamond-crusted mace. You don’t want to think that Oliver Warbucks, one of the protagonists of a long-running story comic, would be a violent and malevolent person. Then you remember he’s not just a billionaire, he’s a munitions manufacturer.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 2nd of June, 2019. I’m very distracted in this side of the plot because I would swear that “Tim Jackel” is the name of somebody I play pinball with. So I keep thinking what the odds would be against him in a head-to-head match on Bad Cats. I like my chances. I can usually grind out the center ramp shot.

Anyway, B-B Eyes knows that Tinkle spoke often with a woman named Gypsy Gay. She might know something that might be admissible. He hires Jackel to track her down. Also searching for Gay: Dick Tracy. All they have to go on is her employer from when Tinkle vanished. And the hopes that that employer maybe knows where she’s gone. Really I would’ve checked Facebook first.

Gypsy Gay turns out to be in the other plot thread. Honeymoon Tracy, Ugly Crystal, and Annie are hanging out at the hotel Siam. It’s Annie and Warbucks’s home for the summer. Annie realizes she doesn’t have a toothbrush so stops in the gift shop where, what do you know, but Gypsy Gay is working. Ugly Crystal makes a note of her name. Why? She says “I collect unusual names,” or as they are known in the Dick Tracy universe, “names”. Jackel, reading the comics as they come out, passes news of Gay’s location on to B-B. But will Honeymoon Tracy ever pass on to her grandfather what she just learned? Guess what happened today, then. I’ll let you know if you’re right in, oh, let’s say September.

Next Week!

With “Buy-Buy” Bertie’s land swindle foiled, what more could be happening in Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley? I should reveal all in seven days.

Revealed today: what syndicated comic strips discussed something mathematical in the past week. I hope you enjoy my blend of pop-mathematics discussion and acknowledging that students don’t like story problems.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Is Marty Moon Going To Get Killed? December 2018 – March 2019

I’m happy to help you catch up on Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. If it’s later than June 2019 when you read this there’s probably a more up-to-date plot recap at this link. That might help you more.

Also my mathematics blog looks at comic strips regularly. Like, it did so earlier today. You might like them. I help the blog out with some of this looking.

And a warning before I get started. The antagonist in the major storyline of the past three months is presented with multiple personalities. If you aren’t comfortable with mental health problems used for comic-strip villainy this way, you are right. Skip the plot recap below the ‘Continue reading’ link, and we’ll catch back up in June.

Dick Tracy.

30 December 2018 – 23 March 2019

I last checked in Dick Tracy during a Minit Mystery. Donnie Pitchford wrote the sequence. He, among other things, draws the Lum and Abner comic strip. The mystery began the 30th of December, and ran each day through the 13th of January. It was not your classic Ellery Queen-style bit of piling up suspects and stories and finding who said something erroneous. It was more a very compressed story of a mad bomber sending poison gas bombs, and Tracy finding them by … well, detective work.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? What is a “Neighborhood Bank” Scam? October – December 2018

If you’re looking for a recap of the plot of Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy, good news! This is a useful spot for that. If you’re reading this after about March 2019 there’s probably a more up-to-date recap. It’ll be at this link.

And while I missed my deadline today, it was for the mathematically-themed comic strips I review at my other blog. But there are many essays in there already, and I hope there’ll be another there tomorrow. You might enjoy that too. Thanks.

Dick Tracy.

7 October – 29 December 2018.

The major storyline when I last checked in regarded Polar Vortex. He’s running drugs, under guise of an ice cream vendor, at Honeymoon Tracy’s school. Henchman Pauly, following Vortex’s direction, grabs Crystal Bribery. And, against Vortex’s direction, also grabs Honeymoon Tracy. And, probably against Vortex’s direction, clobbers Henchwoman “Devil” Devonshire. She’s left behind, for the cops. She stays quiet until threatened with hanging out with new Major Crimes Unit smiley guy Lafayette Austin.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 12th of October, 2018. You know, henchmen wanting to kill Dick Tracy at some other time than what the crime lord wants is rather a recurring theme of this comic strip. They maybe need some task-coordinating software to sort this out. Also, kidnapping Honeymoon Tracy is also a recurring theme. Might want to let the crime lords know that the premise was tried a couple times and it didn’t work the way they wanted.

Polar Vortex and Pauly get to fighting in their hangout. Pauly’s ready to kill Vortex, who’s got the cavalry on the way. He’d taken Honeymoon Tracy’s wrist-wizard communicator out of the ice cream freezer. For some reason Pauly thought this would inactivate it. Tracy and Sam Catchem bust down the door and get into a shootout with Pauly. Pauly lives long enough to say that all this was for his father, Crutch.

… Which you’d think would be a big deal. Or which would be a big deal if it got some attention. Crutch is a character from the very first-ever Dick Tracy storyline. He was the gunman who killed Tess Trueheart’s father. It was the case that brought Dick Tracy into the scientific-detective line. I didn’t recognize this, no, and needed GoComics.com commenters and the Dick Tracy Wikia to guide me. Which all highlights some cool and some bad stuff about Staton and Curtis’s run on the strip. They’re incredibly well-versed in the history of the comic strip and can pull out stuff from about ninety years’ worth of stories. But when they’re doing this isn’t communicated well. To put Dick Tracy up against the son of the first man he gunned down? Good setup. But we didn’t know that was going on until that son was gasping his last breaths. Pauly’s role could be any henchman’s. So, what was the dramatic point made by linking him to the murderer of Tess’s father? In a way that you would never guess without auxiliary material?

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 18th of October, 2018. It’s not me, right? There is something morbidly funny about Pauly’s life here being defined by getting revenge on Dick Tracy, but his being such a marginal figure he’s in like two weeks of strips and gets killed without anyone even really knowing who he is?

Maybe it doesn’t need a point. Life is complicated and messy and has weird links. Maybe Polar Vortex wanted someone who’d try something stupid like this, and summon Dick Tracy’s attention. Tracy does investigate Vortex’s business. I thought he didn’t find anything, but the 18th of November Tracy mentions that Vortex is out on bail after drug-trafficking charges. The kidnapping he seems to get a pass on, even though kidnapping Crystal Plenty was part of the lost plan. Vortex does say he had a plan for killing Tracy, and this was too soon. Maybe Vortex’s plan went wrong. But I’d feel more sure if I were clear on what the plan was.

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Well. The next big plot thread started the 21st of October, with the introduction of the (imaginary) comedy duo Deacon and Miller. They’re getting a revival, with a film festival hosted by Vitamin Flintheart plus a new syndicated newspaper comic strip based on the pair. … Which might be the most implausible premise I’ve seen in this strip. And this is a strip that has telepathic, psychokinetic Moon Men and a guy who used a popcorn maker to shoot someone.

The revival’s funded by a trust set up by Miller, redeemable after 40 years. There’s a bunch of money in it, and Polar Vortex has got himself named trustee. And I’m confused on just how myself. It was described as a “neighborhood bank” plan scam. I’m not sure what this is. It reads like the mark (Dick Miller of the comedy team) was convinced to put money into a fake bank. But the scammer went ahead and actually invested it, and pretty well. And I’m comfortable with that, that far. The scam where it turns out to be easier to go legitimate is a fun premise. I loved it in the movie Larceny, Inc. (Well, the movie circles that premise anyway.)

So then to the present day. Vortex got charge of the money, and went looking for Peter Pitchblende. Pitchblende is the grandson of Miller, and rightful heir to all this money, and the point person for this whole revival. Vortex’s plan seems to be to get Pitchblende to sign over the money to him. There’s something I don’t understand in the phrase “neighborhood bank” scam, but I haven’t been able to work out what from the strip. I would understand embezzlement. I don’t understand why Vortex can’t just take the money without involving Pitchblende. Also it seems like the revival got started before Vortex contacted Pitchblende. But that might be that the revival would have been airy plans until Vortex dropped the promise of money into it.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 19th of November, 2018. Fun activity puzzle challenge: identify a sentence which starts “if you’ll check your copy of our contract” and yet which ends with good news for the person being spoken to. Difficulty level: not in the final scene of a musical comedy where the protagonist is worrying about how he’ll afford to get married when his only asset is that song he sent in to the music publishers.

Well, Vortex’s plan seems to be … being very slow about repaying Pitchblende for out-of-pocket expenses with the Deacon-and-Miller revival. That at least seems like a workable start to a scam. Vortex claims this is a temporary sideline from his drug-dealing at schools. But it’s hard, especially with a small group. And I’m not sure he understands just stealing money. Like, I’m pretty sure even with a drug-oriented racket he could fake Peter Pitchblende’s signature on stuff. Anyway, he feels the personnel shortage. So Vortex hires some guy he sees talking confidently at the coffee shop. The guy’s named “Striker”, or as we know him, Lafayette Austin. (Austin is getting a lot of attention this year, mostly working undercover in foiling various villains.)

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 23rd of November, 2018. So I was workshopping this joke about job-seeking web sites that advertise on podcasts for Evil Masterminds, and I while I might still do that one, I give it freely to any sketch comedy groups in need of a premise. What I’ve got to thinking now is: how in the name of heck did Lafayette Austin figure out to be at this coffee shop at this time, and to start talking about his good customer-handling skills right where Vortex could overhear? And he goes on to talk about his cover story being taken. I’ll grant the cops working out that Vortex goes to this coffee shop regularly and planting Austin there. (It still seems weird to think of crime bosses just going to the coffee shop on the corner though, doesn’t it? I mean, I guess they must, but still?) And I’ll grant Austin overhearing Vortex talking about something he needs and improvising an appealing cover story. Coming up with stories like that on the fly is a decent actor’s challenge and probably a skill you pick up fast if you’re going to be an undercover cop. But this means Austin and his handlers were figuring that Vortex would someday be in the coffee shop, talking to himself about needing someone to do a thing. Why would they figure on that happening?

Austin, working undercover, is able to get at Vortex’s files by the cunning plan of being left alone in the room with them. Vortex likes Striker’s energy. He doesn’t like that of street-level pusher Ballpark, who’s been using the drugs instead of pushing them around some. Vortex sends Ballpark to “the bell tower”, which is a literal bell tower. There’s some setup about the experimental infrasound system being good for … well, it’s got to be killing, doesn’t it?

Start of December. The police sweep up drug dealers around Honeymoon and Crystal’s school. And over the rest of town. The cops close in on Vortex and Devil, up in the bell tower. I’m not sure he did get to killing Ballpark, or ever using this infrasound bell tower death machine. Maybe that’s left for a future villain to use, although I’d hope it gets a fresh introduction and explanation of what it’s supposed to do then. The story’s been one of those with a strong enough line of action that you seem like a spoilsport complaining about key parts of it not explained. It makes my life harder.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 9th of December, 2018. I don’t quibble with Vortex not being able to actually shoot a person, even someone he hopes to kill. There’s a difference between ordering someone killed and doing it yourself and I’ll give Vortex difficulty making that leap.

Vortex tries to, but can’t shoot Tracy. He’s arrested. Austin finds the documents showing that Pitchblende should have the Miller-investment-inheritance. I really don’t understand what the setup of that was. But they turn over the money to Pitchblende and the show can go on. The show features Vitamin Flintheart, playing himself, in a musical based on J Straightedge Trustworthy. This is an in-universe comic strip inspired by and parodying Dick Tracy.

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The 16th of December, I believe, starts a new plot. It opens at the Wertham Woods Psychiatric Facility (get it?) where Tulza Tuzon kills several doctors and escapes during a blackout. Tuzon’s better known to the cops as Haf-and-Haf. He’s got a reputation for breaking out of psychiatric hospitals. Last time he did, he got sprayed with some caustic waste, burning half his head. So since then he calls himself Splitface.

He makes for The City, where high-diving star Zelda The Great is performing. This all gets Tracy’s attention. Tuzon is something of a tribute act. Ages ago Tracy “put away” — I don’t know if he means jailed or killed — a serial killer named Splitface. The original Splitface’s ex-wife is Zelda the Great. Haf-and-Haf is also reported to have developed two alternate personas. That’s a development I’m sure won’t mean that I have to provide a content warning about mental health next time around.

But! That’s on hold for two weeks as the strip does another Minit Mystery. This one written by Donnie Pitchford, who writes and draws the Lum and Abner comic strip. And which makes me finally, about two months late, recognize what “Peter Pitchblende” is a reference to. So, y’know, anyone looking to me for insight please remember that that’s the level I’m working at.

(The Si and Elmer referenced in that strip was a syndicated serial comedy. It’s listed as an attempt at cloning Lum and Abner. I am not sure that both shows aren’t more properly clones of Amos and Andy, with hillbilly rather than blackface comedians. Si and Elmer were elderly small-town residents who decided to go into the detective business. At that point in their own series, Lum and Abner were a justice of the peace and the town sheriff, which makes them almost on-point for a Dick Tracy crossover. I haven’t listened to any of the episodes. Apparently something like 95 of the estimated 130 episodes made survive. That’s an amazing record for early-30s radio. Here are something like 67 of them available for the listening. There might be others elsewhere on archive.org.)

So I don’t know anything about the Minit Mystery besides what you saw in today’s strip. I’ll recap that and whatever this Haf-and-Haf/Splitface plot develops in a couple months’ time.

Next Week!

Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley is a hundred years old! How many of those years did its centennial celebration run? What happened with Peggy Lee? Did Walt Wallet move into the Old Comics Home? Find out here, in seven days, or, y’know, skim through the strip yourself. You’ll probably make a pretty good estimate.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Who Is Ugly Crystal’s Father? July – October 2018

Hi, readers of Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. I do my best here to bring you up to date on the last couple month’s developments. If it’s past about January of 2019 for you, there’s probably a more recent update here. Good luck finding the story you need.

The mathematics you need is over at this link, where I talk about the mathematics last week’s newspaper comics mentioned. I like this stuff. You might too.

Dick Tracy.

16 July – 7 October 2018.

Last time I checked in Dick Tracy was entering a charity bread-making contest so I’m sorry I have to go lie down a bit. All right. Sawtooth hopes to use the chance to kill Tracy; he and his gambling-addict partner Grimm have stolen a bread truck and, saying they were from the charity event, got into the Tracy’s home. They don’t fool Tracy for a second. He used the super-detective work of knowing the restaurant collecting the bread didn’t have a truck to send out. The fight spills out of Tracy’s kitchen, through the glass door. Sawtooth and Grimm flee as cop cars approach.

Joe Staton and Mike Curtis’s Dick Tracy for the 27th of July, 2018. Which, all right, Tracy’s reasoning makes sense — and was correctly foreshadowed — except that if Ernie’s doesn’t have trucks where did Sawtooth and Grimm get an Ernie’s Fine Eats truck from? Did they get it painted themselves? Why not a plain white truck that Tracy could take as something rented for the occasion?

They can’t take a train legitimately. Grimm lost the pair’s money betting on horses. Sawtooth (off-panel) kills him, and hops a freight train to Minot, North Dakota. Dick Tracy knows this thanks to one of the informants recruited by Lafayette Austin. Lafayette Austin’s this faintly Shaggy-esque introduced so prominently during the recent Green Hornet storyline that everyone had to wonder what his deal was. Early August, he explains his deal: He knew Mister Bribery and his sister Ugly Christine back in college. Back before Christine Bribery (?) turned to a life of crime. And then a death of leaping from a magnetic Moon Valley-technology Air Car into a smokestack. But he knew Ugly Christine as a beautiful person. He didn’t know she had a daughter. Ugly Crystal, friend to Honey Moon Tracy. Hold that thought.

Joe Staton and Mike Curtis’s Dick Tracy for the 25th of July, 2018. While we haven’t seen exactly how Sawtooth kills people, it looks awfully likely he just chews their necks open, so I can’t fault them not doing this on-screen.

Sawtooth, in Minot, goes to the Hoagland Cemetery. The grave of one “Private James Wesley Malone, CSA”. The baffling and offensive headstone is a fake. Sawtooth had left $50,000 in cash underneath it. Tracy and Sam Catchem, following the lead of Austin and of Usagi Yojimbo‘s Inspector Ishida, are already there. Sawtooth shoots first. Don’t know whether Tracy or Catchem shoots the bullet that kills him.

Joe Staton and Mike Curtis’s Dick Tracy for the 11th of August, 2018. I don’t talk about the art enough here, so let me just say: great panels here. Particularly the use of silhouettes with one item of clothing in the light for Tracy and Catchem.

And then, starting the 19th of August, was a two-week Minit Mystery, featuring as guest artist Rick Burchett. Burchett’s a two-time Eisner Award-winner, has penciled and inked a lot of comic books, and since 2017 pencils Funky Winkerbean. Anyway, this Minit Mystery is set at the Rogue’s Gallery, where a bunch of cosplayers feign being Dick Tracy characters. Lest you think this is entirely two weeks of self-reference and an excuse to show Flattop (deceased 1944) again, know that the Rogue’s Gallery building was established as 704 Houser. That was Archie Bunker’s address.

Anyway, the mystery is figuring out who killed the Cosplay Dick Tracy. It takes a week just to start collecting clues. The resolution is … well, there’s no information given on-camera that would let you find it. But it does show what the critical clue would be. It’s the old minute-mystery trick of an incriminating note that’s been torn off the sheet of paper, but that you can find by scraping a pencil over to read the impression of what was written there.

Third of September, and the start of the current storyline. A drug pusher by the school gets kicked out by a Sonic-the-Hedgehog-haired woman working for “Polar Vortex”. Polar Vortex seems to be quite fond of the air conditioner and he swears he’s got protection. Get his … guy … within six feet of Dick Tracy and “Poof! No more Tracy!” (I would have written “Vanished, without a Tracy” but I’m not the professional here.)

Back at school, Ugly Crystal and Honey Moon Tracy notice the drug dealer. Honey Moon calls her dad the cop, but the dealer confronts her and she kinda moon-electrocutes him. The dealer’s arrested. Honey Moon gets grounded, which I like as a nice understated joke.

Joe Staton and Mike Curtis’s Dick Tracy for the 2nd of August, 2018. So what is the over/under on it turning out that when you brush the hair out of her face Ugly Crystal looks just fine, or even, you know, pleasant?

Back to Lafayette Austin. He thinks he might be Ugly Crystal’s father. He goes to Mister Bribery, in jail, for information. Bribery won’t talk with him. Tracy intervenes. Bribery is upset Tracy wants help with that “hippie” Lafayette Austin, which is a pretty good insult. It does kind of match Austin’s look, yes. But also if we accept that he was going with Ugly Christine back in the 60s, yeah, maybe we would have been a hippie. Also, rich old white guys have this weird obsession with hippies coming out and grabbing at the women-folk. So it’s possibly true, it’s funny, and it’s in-character.

It’s a bit of a weird embrace of the time-warped nature of a comic strip where characters age erratically, but, eh, so what? Crystal and Honey Moon also make a reference to “Anything Can Happen Day” on The Mickey Mouse Club and I’m not sure this is something people of their purported age cohort would have experienced. But if Honey Moon’s been a teenager for forty years? Why not?

Oh, also, turns out Lafayette’s brother is Adam Austin who writes those “Midnite Mirror” stories about the Mirror-Universe Evil Dick Tracy. And who’s going around with Sprocket Nitrate, of the film-fraud Nitrate siblings, because this crime-adventure comic is still a soap opera.

Tracy presses, though, arguing that Ugly Crystal should have a family if possible. And Bribery admits that, so far as he knew, Ugly Christine never had another serious relationship. They set up a blood test. Also the chance to meet and, for Austin, to talk about Crystal’s mother. The paternity test comes back, oddly enough sent to the Major Case Unit instead of Austin’s or Crystal’s residences. They’re daughter and father.

Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy for the 30th of September, 2018. Is … is putting your address on a key something people do? I’ve seen it on hotel keys with a holder promising postage paid if you drop it in the mailbox, but only in hotels from the 1950s or New Hampshire, not anywhere that real people live.

Meanwhile, Polar Vortex is still trying to I’ll go ahead and call it icing Dick Tracy. His plan relates to dealing drugs at Honey Moon’s school. He’s got an ice cream truck. And someone named Pauly who’s a mechanic and comes from a broken home which somehow makes him “valuable” to Vortex. And somehow this is all supposed to come together to destroying Dick Tracy. We’ll see what happens next.

Next Week!

How has Walt Wallet’s toothpaste conspiracy ranting gone? How is his roast of Little Orphan Annie going? Who is that creepily-realistically-drawn woman trading jokes with the cast? All this and more as we check what’s going on in Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley, all going well.