Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for March 26, 2016

.Good morning fellow DT fans!

Wunbrow’s boss can now confirm that it’s a terror strike.I don’t think Specs and Spicy went out with a bang…It is very likely that Specs found a way out….

Well, there’s the the Earth-shattering kaboom… and it looks like the Casino Estrella is now the ex-Casino Estrella. As we watch the cop cars and bits of the sign fly through the air, I imagine that some of the content of the casino are also heading sky-high.

It blowed up REAL good!

… or bits & pieces thereof.

The safe’s been cracked…and so has the safe-cracker.

I was contemplating a weekly “state of the Dick Tracy world” piece. I think I want to post it Saturdays, but I don’t have it ready yet for today, what with Good Friday and such. Maybe I’ll post it later today. Otherwise, it looks like this current story is quickly coming to an explosive conclusion, so I’ll definitely try to get that going before the next story starts.

Yes, Spicy got the brains but then Specs got the specs. When the blowtorch guy said Madre de Dios (a fitting remark for Good Friday) he might have seen the danger and quickly found a good place to keep themselves safe. If Ivanov and Wunbrowgot out of the rockslide with hardly a scratch, I believe that Specs and Spicy will go through this OK with a little drama to boot.The blowtorch guy is a sure addition to the DT death list and DJ is also a good candidate. DJ was after the money and his greed would have brought him nearer the safe when the hole was opened. The least that will happen to him is that he is buried under a pile of debris. He is a big man though….

Can decades old Dynamite still explode?

An explosion took out the clubSurvive can any of these poor schlubs?For S&S to be freeOff the island they should beTo stop will incur a drub

My hope is Spicy & Specs were behind DJ and survived the blast …

I agree that having the bomb work since the Cuban revolution is a bit of a stretch. Anyway, Specs might have seen it. If he was smart, he could have taken the opportunity to take cover just in time, to get away from this whole thing. Of course, “smart” has not been a good description of Specs until now.

I do kinda feel bad for all the old cars that must have been wrecked in the explosion. :-)

Google “Sweating Dynamite” – there are several articles confirming the idea to be true science, along with photos of what an old stick looks like.

Casino go BOOM!.\\//_

Cracking safes late in the nightThe bad guys found some dynamite!Curiosity never paysIt rained bad guys seven days…

The Big BOOM seems to have taken out the front entrance way of the late Casino Estrella, but much of the rest of the structure seems to have suffered much less, even minor, damage, such as the concussed-out windows. Also, at least one of the two Policia squads conveniently present has been flipped. Was Wunbrow about to conduct an “anti-terrorism” operation (in keeping with his chief’s directive)? Were any of the cops killed or seriously injured? How many casualties inside, and who are they (I would guess the unlucky safecracker, for one)? What indeed of Specs and Spicy; have they flown the coop? And what, meanwhile, are Tracy and Ivanov doing; just sitting in their hotel room, watching TV and sipping warm cerveza?

@ M.Mitchell Marmel- Farmer Film Report!

I an guessing specs knew his and spicy;s goose was cooked, on the 2oth’s panel he gave them an exact circle, yet knew the whole dimensions, I am guessing he hightailed it out of there, he’s dum but not a dum dum…

Another excellent execution of the single-panel strip. The bank is truly broken. Who lived? Who died? Who laughed? Who cried? Tune in tomorrow…

Whoa nellie. It’s hard to see how anyone will survive that blast.

Loved the pictures, in the posting yesterday, of the Gold and Silver certificates.

“Think you used enough dynamite there Butch?”

This is from the Wikipedia summary for “Exodus”, the 2-hour season 1 finale of “Lost”:

“Old mining equipment is also found, including the dynamite [they were searching for]. At least two cases of highly-volatile sticks are present inside the ship’s hold. Jack and Locke haul one of the cases out of the ship. While attempting to handle some of the volatile dynamite carefully, the unfortunate [science teacher Dr. Leslie] Arzt triggers one of the sticks and blows himself up.”

@SisyphosWas Wunbrow about to conduct an “anti-terrorism” operation (in keeping with his chief’s directive)?

Maybe not Wunbrow himself. The last we saw, he was personally driving Tracy and Ivanov to their hotel. It could be that others in the police force were conducting (or about to conduct?) an anti-terrorism operation.

I see DJ as a disposable baddie.

In any case, he’s a Cuba baddie, so anything that happens to him is largely irrelevant to Tracy unless he ends up in the U.S. (There was a hint that he could get extradited to the U.S. if relations further normalize, but he intended to take evasive action if that happened.)

Looks like some of the bad guys have cashed in their chips…Now, does that include DJ, Specs and Spicy?

Isn’t that what Pequod’s Sunday does ?

I hadn’t really thought about that, but Pequod’s usual Sunday contribution doesn’t have a lot of overlap with what I’m thinking about. Pequod usually concentrates on summarizing and commenting on the events of the last week. What I have in mind is more about the “big picture.” Where are we in the narrative structure? How is the story developing? This is often difficult to determine in the middle of a story, but I would like to try because readers sometimes get lost and might benefit from a road map. As for the current story, today’s explosive scene seems to be the climactic moment, with everything to follow being tying up of some loose ends. On the other hand, there were some storylines recently with two climaxes…

Someone made a statement yesterday about TNT being unstable when in fact it is a more safe formulation for explosives than Nitroglycerin.

I was confusing dynamite and TNT, as it they were two words for the same thing. It may be that what was in the safe was actually dynamite?

Somebody cut the red wire… Never cut the red wire!

Well, Gee !!! Thanx for the “link” !There were so many items that I didn’t know which one would be best to link to – decided to just mention it, so others could see for themselves.

I think we were All on that page !

Except for whoever said it was TNT (might have been me). It’s not TNT — it’s dynamite.

Unlike real-life bombings, toon bombings tend to be less destructive. If you remember the explosion at the theater in this strip recently, there were no serious injuries despite an apparently large explosion.

Since these stories are written well in advance and then distributed to the newspapers at least 2 to 3 weeks in advance of the publication date, the bombing in Brussels really couldn’t have been foreseen, anyway.

I hope Specs did not buy the farm in the explosion. I have actually grown to like him as a character. He is so stupid that he makes BO Plenty look like a genius and he gave me quite a few chuckles during this arc. I wouldn’t want a steady diet of him but I really wouldn’t mind if he stuck around a while in the strip.

You should be ashamed of yourself. But, you’re not.

And BOOM goes the dynamite!

FINALLY!

This is an ending worth its weight in “Gould”!____________________

Ouch!

Thinking about it, among several cliffhangers which – to date – remain unresolved, “TWIN PEAKS” included a quite similar one involving the explosion of a booby-trapped safe deposit box inside a bank vault.

And I believe there was also a similar “Death Trap” on an episode of “BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES.”

A quick stab at Haiku …

“Starry” Cuban InnHidden vault proves explosive!Who lives and who dies?

I’m still five weeks behind on my story analysis. I’ll post whenever I get caught up. I have to go to bed now to get to church for Easter breakfast in the morning. Happy Easter to all.