Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for October 07, 2014

Axel’s handcuffs…Shades o the Brush’s demise!

Good morning fellow fans!

Good Morning, VB! Good to see al the “good guys” are OK!

Good morning, DT fans1 Only the handcuffs found, like with Ugly Christine!

Or even “all” the good guys! LOL (as others say)!

Well, Axel wanted the explosive and off the island….looks like he got both, just not the way he wanted. Scratch another villain off the rolls.

TO: CFinFL……

.. I think you hit it right on with your keene eyes re—yesterdays expolsion etc nice eye

I’m assuming there are still hands (and parts of arms) attached to the handcuffs and that’s why Fritz Ann doesn’t want Annie to see it.

I guess Axel went out with a bang and not a whimper.

Oh come on Fritz, don’t ruin the fun. Give poor Annie a peek at the hands.

Axel was blown back to 1944 by Kenyons unique explosive, & Tracy will have to use Diet Smiths new time machine to retrieve him & arrest him.

As I recall, Brush’s handcuffs were found hanging from a tree’ (with Sam’s initials on them) dripping blood. That’s enough to keep a child away from the scene if Axel’s residue is anything similar!

It’s not the handcuffs – it’s what’s inside them!

I hope this doesn’t mean we now won’t know the answer of why Annie and Axel were on the island and what they were doing and who Axel’s bosses were. After grinding through 6 months of this shaggy dog story, that would really suck.

Yuck! Ptuie! (As B.O. might say.)Spare Annie the gruesome sight of the remains of Axel’s hands (if indeed there is anything left but the handcuffs themselves—an interesting ambiguity, there; maybe censorship wouldn’t even allow Fritz Ann to say just “hands”).

Curious to me is that Annie in panel 1 speaks correct Standard English whilst Punjab does not.

Axel’s cuffs, but no Axel.

From the Amer. Heritage Dict. of the Eng. Lang., 4th Ed.:

Usage Note: Despite the appearance of the form alright in works of such well-known writers as Langston Hughes and James Joyce, the single word spelling has never been accepted as standard. This is peculiar, since similar fusions such as already and altogether have never raised any objections. The difference may lie in the fact that already and altogether became single words back in the Middle Ages, whereas alright has only been around for a little more than a century and was called out by language critics as a misspelling. Consequently, one who uses alright, especially in formal writing, runs the risk that readers may view it as an error or as the willful breaking of convention.

My personal opinion is that alright will be alright in a few more decades. (I am currently reading “Les Miserables” in an 1860’s translation that has as separate words the phrases near by, some one, for ever, and several other examples.)

Where is Daddy Warbucks? He appears to be ‘missing’.

We still have a lot of loose ends that need tying up. Maybe there will be a sequel in a new Little Orphan Annie strip that will explain everything. And my money says Axel got away and that he will resurface as a victim in the aforementioned future Little Orphan Annie strip, should there ever be one.

This reminds me of the good old days when you got to use your imagination at the movies or on TV. Much more fun than most of today’s crap. (Yes, most but not all. Walking Dead fan here.)

Oops! Forgot to read Monday’s panel!

Punjab: “It’s alright, Annie, we’re only bleeding.”

Ok i call cowpies on this one! Axel was too close to the explosion to have ANYTHING remaining let alone the handcuffs.

on top of the fact that keynon’s house was COMPLETELY LEVELLED fritz ann must be some kind of superwoman to be able to navigate her way thru all that debris, move it out of the way, and THEN locate the cuffs axel had on under literally TONS of debris!

do we now get to coin the phrase AN AXEL ENDING* or is it too soon? ;) lol

Good morning DT and Annie fans. A new adventure is just around the corner.

Sounds like Fritz Ann found more than just the empty handcuffs.-I guess Axel won’t be returning after all – unless they do a ghost story.-Good to see that the good guys are all still intact.

His hands were still in the cuffs

Axel’s handcuffs…Axel’s hands included!

Looks like Fritz Ann’s hat is indestructable.

Odd that the explosion caught nothing on fire in the house allowing everyone such quick access to the scene. Yesterday’s explosion looked pretty incendiary yet today they are walking around in the seemingly non-burning ruins.

Its All Good..

I’m hoping that when the crew return to the MCU offices, the chief will have finally gotten the information from the Feds on Thunder Island, and can explain why it was quarantined, who leased it, and what they told the feds they were going to do there.I’d also like some idea of who the mastermind was that was keeping Axel there, and bankrolling this whole scheme.--I hate loose ends, too.

So the explosion blew Axel out of his handcuffs. What a clever, if implausible, way to have him return later.

One must remember that these boys come from comic book world where stories sometimes grind on for months in order to keep you buying one every new installment^^Actually, DT was one of the pioneers in the serial comic strip; Gould’s stories were often 6 months long, but, it he knew how to keep it fresh.

Do you kiss your Mother with that mouth?

Woops! I used the wrong word! I meant to say, earlier:

We still have a lot of loose ends that need tying up. Maybe there will be a sequel in a new Little Orphan Annie strip that will explain everything. And my money says Axel got away and that he will resurface as a villain (not “victim”) in the aforementioned future Little Orphan Annie strip, should there ever be one.

He still lives!

I doubt that Annie would be traumatized at seeing the remains of Axel. I bought two of the collections fron ’37 to ’40. Among her adventures were seeing Daddy and the Asp brutally murdered(brought back to life by AM), she twice thrown into the ocean to drown, beset by a pack of wild dogs, etc.

I have always read Tracy to get English and spelling lessons. Thanks professors. Is it the 10th yet?

I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who remembers the Brush. He’s not mentioned as much as say Flattop. That was one of Chester’s best stories.

Fritz Ann THIS ! ? . . . Fritz Ann THAT ! ? ;- )

Perhaps more meaningfully, she’s showing a little more INITIATIVE these past few days. She’s on Thunder Island as Leader of the Group, but so ‘out-of-sight’, brands her as one that - “Leads from Behind” !

Good to see she is " shaking off " that earlier Hay Seed morning after ’ *look, before the hay-loft, with a smiling Sam C standing behind herShe finaly asserted her authority with Axel - just as Punjab, ‘blanket’ on the ‘ready’ was moving in.Now today, leading the ‘Search Effort’ through the rubble

I comment very seldom on this board. Let me state first that I do enjoy the strip, especially the art work. There are very few continuity strips available and I was raised on Steve Canyon, Rip Kirby, etc. Having said that, I have to agree with “Timmy” on his last post, listing problems A-K. I enjoyed Annie in the 50s and 60s, but this crossover has been a little contrived, in my opinion. I didn’t mind DT searching for Annie, but I didn’t follow the story lines, many of which Timmy has listed. Again, I love the way, in general, the “new” strip looks, but am disappointed somewhat in what it says. It still deserves the Harvey awards.

So I still don’t get one thing…..way back when Tracy boated his way to the island, wouldn’t Axel have known darn well an investigation of the island was underway? Yet he acted as if it was nothing…..

1940’s fashion looks good on Fritz Ann.

Anyways, we won’t get many more answers, as once again we’ve received information from outside the strip, of course……two more days of Annie then two weeks of potpourri……gee, that leaves us 8 whole days for the Halloween story…..unless it involves a killer in a Santa Claus costume or something…..

Honestly surprised no one has yet brought up that Geoffrey Holder, among many other roles Punjab from the ’80s Orphan Annie movie, just passed away. Rest in peace.

bill watterson was also something of a “minimalist”.. he only included in each panel what was NECESSARY

gweedo…they dont belong to the police, theyre Fritz Ann’s cuffs

Why do people call them “Axel’s handcuffs” when they actually belong to the police and he is only borrowing them ?

That’s just the way language works. If I am staying in a hotel overnight, I could speak of “my hotel room” although I don’t actually own the room and I am merely occupying it for a short time.

By the way, alright goes back to 1810. It has become fairly established over the course of more than 200 years.

Timmy, nothing personal – believe me. But this is a comic strip. It isn’t supposed to be based on reality; it is like watching the Broadway play, “Phantom of The Opera”. You know for a fact that no one in the real world goes around singing (at least no one I know). You also know that a Boogieman doesn’t really prowl backstage and have an understage cavern (new meaning of ‘mancave’) in which he abducts aspiring divas. But you sit in the Orchestra Section and clap, enjoying the mind-trip and dodging the swinging chandellier. That is art. Well, this comic strip is art, too. It is supposed to transport your mind to the scenery and the fictional story it represents. I know that Warbucks bribing the Mayor was not legal, but look at the minimum security prisons. They are full of “Mayor Armstrongs”. It happens, Tim. So go along for the ride and let your mind exercise a little. But don’t blame the playwrite or the stage cast if it doesn’t meet your standards of life!

SYDNEY PHILLIPS wrote yesterday:Well, for those engaged in carefully counting bodies and the survivors, it seems no one remembered Jasper and Mason who’d closed their businesses to help out ‘full time’ ?

Presumably, they’d been right there – helping Prof. Kenyon, test tubes and all that . . . ? But they were not seen running along with Sam and the Prof ?

We did see that Jasper and Mason had closed their businesses (temporarily?) to help the Prof full-time, but it seems that they were not actually at his lab 24 hours a day, as there was no evidence of them being present when Sam and Fritz Ann arrived to tell Kenyon they were taking him to somewhere safe.

I’m guessing that they were not actually in the lab during the time when Kenyon waited with Sam for his last batch to finish and that this is the reason they were not seen running away from the imminent explosion. I’m going to assume that they were home at the time of the explosion because it was not regular business hours when it happened.

UNLESS A BODY IS FOUND AND POSITIVELY IDENTIFIED, Axel will be back. Used to watch too many soaps and anytime a villain or hero “died”, if there wasn’t a body, they returned…

Yes, Ben Franklin would have recommended all of these reforms, but Webster seemed to be in a position to successfully influence people on this. Franklin maybe went a little too far as he proposed a new alphabet as well.