Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for October 21, 2013

Phase One of our plan worked perfectly! Phase Two…needs some work.

Good morning all…

Pleased to see that Melies is still active.

And you’ll never hear from them again.

Good morning, VB! I wouldn’t count the apparatus out just yet.

Good morning, DT fans!I wonder who this “Venus” is. Love the name “Black Hearts”, reminiscent of the 52 gang! And who is Melies, the joker?LOL!

Venus is Joan Jett???

I still think Melies looks like Mr. Maelard from Regular Show

Police snitches tend to be frequent rub out targets…..wonder if…..naw, no one good ever gets killed off nowadays….and I’m still hoping Ghote & company return. But the best part of this story hasn’t escaped from prison yet…..go get em Abner!!!

Egad! Méliès is a dead-ringer for John Hillerman (Higgins on Magnum PI)!

And the story continues… I am glad to see these two in the strip today. Can’t wait to see Venus’ face. This kind of reminds me of The Painted Lady sequences. Hope she is as beautiful as the Painted Lady was.

The Black Hearts may be a shout out to the Venture Brothers, who are second in my heart to Dick Tracy.

I left a couple of very late comments on yesterday’s strip, but there wasn’t much to say about it. Today, however, I have a few observations. It seems to me like Venus and Méliès are on a first-name basis with each other. I had thought that Venus was the boss of Méliès, but now I’m not so sure.

Another thing I noticed is that Lee Ebony and Dick Tracy in panel one with their mugs of coffee are mirror imaged by Méliès and Venus in panel 3 with their teacups and saucers. I also notice her choice of words (or choice of contractions) in “We’ve not heard from them” rather than “We haven’t heard from them.” “We’ve not” is typically British, rather than American, as is the tea-drinking, so that makes me wonder if there might be a connection from the U.K. Besides that, “Black Hearts” makes he think of “blaggards” or more properly “blackguards,” another Britishism. I may be just making stuff up, but those things occur to me.

Venus is evidently somewhat upper class (contrasting also with the smoke-filled room that characterizes Apparatus HQ). We observe once again the shiny thing on her shoe strap. It actually looks too irregular in shape to me to be a jewel. I think it might be gold, as the colorist from GoComics has depicted it today. Whatever it is, it’s noticeably shiny.

Any chance Venus is an alias for Stiletta Jones?

Interesting. So, how exactly does the Consortium relate to the Black Hearts (which, be it noted, decorate Venus’s screen)? And since the Space Coupe is gone but decidedly not forgotten, somehow, it seems, it will continue to have some part in the continuing, evolving story….

Still looking like Venus is the leader of this new Blackhearts gang. Already a very interesting character, and we’ve only seen her legs.

Despite the wonderful drawing by Joe and Shelley’s great inking, the colorist just can’t seem to read the obvious leads they leave him/her. In panel two Tracy’s face was supposed to be shadowed on his left (our right) side … or perhaps it was supposed to have reflected light? Either way, the colorist missed it completely.

One “loose end” that seems too egregious to just put on the back burner, with the hope it will be dealt with later:Diet told Tracy the Space Coupe blew away in the storm. Now, if that really did happen, it couldn’t be very far away, and Diet’s team, plus the Police, would all be out looking for it. And Tracy already expressed his doubts to Sam, because Tracy remembers riding in the SC during a cyclone, specifically to demonstrate how stable the Coupe is in the worst of weather. I understand that some things happen “off screen”, but the only people who seem the least bit concerned with finding the SC are the villains.

Nice to see Otto gets a nod. It’s overdue!

RightWingOtto? That wasn’t very nice. Did someone blow the troll whistle this morning? Yes, I remember Otto; he was a good poster until someone drove him off the site. I guess being a Sherpa gives one an edge over others here. Of course, being an ex-Sherpa might have the opposite effect.

If the Apparatus is the Mafia, who are the Consortium “The Black Hearts”?

Those “hoodlums” better call Saul!

6. Méliès’ face is more of a “full-moon” color rather than all gray.

Hmm, Melies has a moon motif, Venus of the Black Hearts—wonder if the rest of the group will also relate to celestial objects?

The grotesque, speaking to a mostly unseen femme fatale; that is Gouldian style at it’s best… Hopefully, she will turn out to be have a sensuous body, but a face so homely that she hides it at all times, which would make the Gould connection even stronger.

Sorry for those who are not, but I am really loving this strip, its direction, and most recently its new grotesques. When Abner materialized, I thought here is a character with limited shelf-life, imagine what he would look like in jail. HA! I thought Mysta would be a clone and it would be over. I thought the space coup would have a single appearance in a dusty warehouse, then that it would be over with no moon colony. Now it has not only alluded to Ms Chin Chillar (I did call that one) as a future story, but there was a wink to all the “let’s steal the space coup” stories that clogged up the late 60s…and made it better!

I always thought Gould cheated himself by not imaging all the connections between all the stories he had told and when I call this a fan service it is in no negative connotation. The only thing missing has been inexplicable weirdness. Can we have that with the Internet instead of a daily paper that does not talk back? Probably not, but this month’s strips take me back to when I was part of a story much bigger than I understood clipping strips from random old newspapers.

I still like my theory that Venus is Notta Chin Chillar!

@AKHenderson

Any chance Venus is an alias for Stiletta Jones?

I theorized that the first time Venus appeared^^Me too, since she was prominent in the short arc before MM2 took over for most of the summer