Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for December 31, 2013

A brawl coming up. I’m glad I have my popcorn and iced tea!

So Tracy fires off a cement bullet and it looks as if Abner is going to be flipped over into the pit. Will Tracy save him or will this be the end of Abner?

Good morning everyone…

Abner has nothing to lose. If he dies, he will probably re-emerge as a vampire… Count Kadaver.

Very nice art work that tells the action.

I hope the fight is over by New Year!

LMAO! Yeah but I don’t see Granny making soap or Ellie Mae trying to teach Skipper how to swim by this “cee-ment pond”.

And also Good Morning to VistaBill!

The tension and excitement are too much! I’m going to hold off reading this strip the rest of the year!

This is great, the real Dick Tracy :D Way to go Staton team

I see Abner is about to become a statue. Mrs. Flattop, Meilies and Venus will be so disappointed.

Sam is gonna shot Kadaver and he will fall into the cement

Kadaver’s about to become a stiff stiff.

Kadaver has really let a lot of folks down here! They (we) gave him credit for being a wee bit smarter than your average run-of-the-mill baddie….. But no; it turns out he is as dumb as the rest of them. He can’t even carry out a simple contract. He blows a fortune with these elaborate schemes when a simple bullet would do. Instead of wasting BB Eyes, like he was paid to do, he gets him to fill out an employment app. He’s as dumb as a box of rocks in my book!

Oh, well…blew my theory. It was Tracy that shot.

Tracy just swam through the cement and is still alive…Abner takes the cement splash, but survives says the smart money

Tracy and Kadaver are about to CEMENT their foe-ship! ;-)

“No, that shot wasn’t lucky…I was aiming for your head.”

He may die Dick Tracey…but was he born Richard Tracey?

Flashold said “I hope the fight is over by New Year!”

Of which year?

OK. Is it me or is anyone else curious why on earth a morbid hired killer would have a pool of cement poured to get DT? Having recently cemented fence posts, the amount of cement needed would require a truck backing up and pouring it in. This was a room accessible via a door, there’s no way a cement truck could have accessed it.Secondly, cement dries quickly. We are expected to believe Skeleton Kadaver timed it that perfectly for the poured cement?Lastly, why cement! It’s not like its quicksand. You’re not going to drown in cement. I agree with the above comments, Abner is hired to kill DT, just shoot him and get it over with already. This convoluted storyline was kind of unnecessary.

Good old Dick Tracy action! There is one thing, though. With Tracy standing there with a huge gun in his hand, how in the world did he ever allow Kadaver to get close enough to get his hands around Tracy’s throat?

I, too, was wrong about who fired that rather extraordinary shot (c’mon, really? Shooting the cane out of Abner’s hand without even wounding him? Only in old B-western movies!), thinking it came from a direction left of Tracy. And at least in a general way I have agree with morrow that Kadaver has been something of a dud, flashy but utterly ineffective. I expect to see him being flipped into the concrete bath in a day or two (=a minute or two of Tracyverse time)….

Maybe Abner and Rikki will end up back in Arkham for 2014

Josh Lyons: Your postage stamp reminds me of an early HD radio – are you an HD radio buff? Is HD radio active in your area?.Guess that kind of summarizes my interest in the current arc – I’m more interested in people’s postage stamps!.Ray Toler: I fully agree with you, suspension of disbelief and all. But I still think the story would have been edgier if someone other than Richard were in the deathtraps. That way, their survival would have been far less guaranteed!

“Whereupon I took a generous handful of the deadly gray cement crystals and rubbed it all into his beady little eyes — with a vigorous circular motion hitherto unknown to people in this area, but destined to take the place of the Mudshark in your mythology…” (from “The Memoirs of Dick Tracy”)

Oh good. I’d hoped they hadn’t been spelling it wrong all these years.

Great googley moogley!

Happy New Year to all the Tracy team and the Tracy fans.

Lot’s of snow in Chicago tonight. Stay safe everyone.

SDM, you let the secret out! I KNEW you were Polish when I first met you at the comics meet-up last year; the bowling shirt gave you away! Happy New Year! and, don’t drive after you’ve been drinking! Get a friend or a cab to drive you back to the bridge. That is, unless you are hosting the party yourself!

I call Tracy, Ippon by Tomoe Nage!

I love Kadaver! I’d hate to see his demise!

Here’s Mud in your eye, …. Oh, Here’s cement in your eye !