Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for September 04, 2016

Kadaver shadowed, sneaked and sliced when Dick and Tess did roamDrizzle, Drazzle, Druzzle, Drome; Time for Tracy to come home.Rescued from the riverbank, brought here to convalesceBy a Holmes enthusiast. Whoever would have guessed?Tracy regains consciousness. The drugs begin to fadeTracy coming back to life, while Abner’s in the shade.No body found. He may have drowned, bones shattered one and allHis ego said he would not lose. Pride goes before a fall.Lytton loads another bowl, the smoke swirls ‘round his headTracy wise to play along, so grateful he’s not dead.Spies bound volumes of The Strand among the doctor’s booksFirst to publish A. C. Doyle, distinctive they still look.Heartfelt request for honored guest, please sign before you leavePrized possessions: first editions. Please put fresh ink to sleeves.Tracy glad to play along, his host not quite all thereNow to find his darling Tess, end sorrow she can’t bear.

Okay, so we get Tracy back to civilization, once he’s done a bit of autographing. Meanwhile, no signs of Kadaver have been seen. He’s a slippery one. It’s hard to say if “He may have drowned, bones shattered one and all” as Pequod’s poem suggests.

Once we get Europe squared away, we can get back to Rikki. How will she react? Will she just give up now? I don’t think so. That’s not Rikki’s way.

I will say that Kadaver is plastered under the falls like a picture postcard smashed into a wall. At least that is how I picture it.

Hmmm…..interesting wrap up. One does wonder where Kadaver is. If Tracy was found then Kadaver should show up eventually one way or another.

No Harvey for Team Tracy this year. Bloom County took the award this year. :(

I’m really curious if Tracy will write his name or Holmes’ name. But either way, isn’t he lowering the value of the first editions? Or would a Tracy autograph somehow enhance them?

Umm… I think the good doctor’s a few pills shy of a full prescription…

Note to Lt Reimer: Current thinking in the security game is that mandatory password changes every 90 days is counterproductive. See Wired 03.10.16.

So the books are still by Conan Doyle, and not by Watson?

I can’t believe it’ll be this easy, though.

Dr. Lytton seems harmlessly daffy, at this point. But, while I do not expect it, a reversal is still possible before Tracy is safely out of the chalet-clinic. For example, what if that pen is loaded with some sort of contact poison, to which the doctor has built up an immunity? (So, maybe I’ve read too many Cold War spy novels and actual news reports. It could happen!)Thinking positively, however, Tracy is all but back on the clock. Now recovered enough to set out, he must re-unite with Tess and reassure her, then do what he can to find Kadaver, while also getting back in touch with MCU headquarters. It’s a tall order for a big detective!

Ok, what the hell happened here. Who is this guy? How did Tracy know his name?

.Good morning fellow DT fans!.Excellent, Pequod! .A bit disappointed that DT did not win the Harvey Awards this year.

Careful with that pen there… Holmes.

How come the date sig in between panels says “9/11”? I don’t think it has to do with the upcoming 9/11 does it?

AHA! So this is all a ploy by the good doctor to up his book collection’s value on EBay!regarding the past 4 days,,,,,ZZZZZzzzzzzz,,,,,,

Is Sherlock Holmes a real detective in the world of this comic, or still a fictional one?Because if he’s a real one, Tracy may be about to commit forgery.

I’m not sure I would be able to remember Lt. Reimer’s password for very long without LastPass for Firefox.

I thought the hats were found below the falls???

The Holmes connection was good fun, although quite a shift from Tracy and Kadaver’s fierce battle. The 9/11 date on today’s strip suggests a week of the story may have been…dropped. The lack of gritty aftermath is puzzling, as morbid curiosity demands we see evidence of Abner’s demise. Abner survived the cement pool, so this was to be his farewell. Or was it? I imagine Tracy making it to shore, badly injured (and with a spare hat in his coat pocket), while Kadaver sinks, swept away by the river’s current. Too grim for the newspaper these days? Hard to see how. Could some grittier content be saved for the eventual second volume of the Calling Dick Tracy! e-book? Time will tell.

Thanks to Gweedo, Neil Wick, Night-Gaunt49, Scott Coons, Josh Lyons, Vista Bill, Ray Toler, Chris Sherlock and Dsnerker for the kind words. Very much appreciated!

Number four was not to beNot every year can be Harvey.And yet again this year do weCheer for the great Team Tracy!I’ll pen a rhyme most every weekThis comic strip makes my pen leakIn admiration of the stripI’ll praise, applaud, create and quip.Give it up now for the TeamHoot and Howl and Dance and Scream.

If Tracy signs the books, this guy might recognize the handwriting as not being Mr. Holmes. Could be trouble for Tracy.

With all of the fine poets on this board, I think it would be fun for Mike to bring back the character of Ogden (sidekick to Spots), who spoke in poetry and fake quotes from classical poets. Ogden is probably still occupying the cell he went to after the Spots tale.

BTW, Ogden’s appearance was a caricature of Gould himself.

Could it be that the folks at Go Comics ran this Sunday out of sequence by accident? Maybe there was a week of other stuff supposed to happen before this Sunday edition.

I can’t believe that this character was given so much build-up just to say “Bye now, take care!”. Either something more is about to happen or this is one heck of a big, red herring!

Yeah, the hat was a good catch as that was a continuity error since we’d already seen the hat in police custody. I am confused about signing the books. You’d want the author’s signature, right? Or is the guy so nuts that he think Holmes was the actual writer with Doyle being a pseudonym? Maybe Tracy can say that he took the deception so strongly that his writing was different as Holmes and Doyle?

And if anyone was going to dethrone Dick Tracy, Bloom County would be my pick. Time for the creation of a new Tracy villain though since it is all Trump’s fault for the loss. Since BB said that his Presidential run is the reason he restarted the iconic strip.

Hey, guys.The humor site Cracked.com today published an article that talked about the cliffhanger ending of Annie’s strip and how it got resolved in Tracy. The author express shock that Tracy’s still around “(which, holy crap, is still going)”, and gets a few minor details wrong. Mainly, he posts a link to Axel’s demise and misidentifies him as “The Butcher of the Balkans”. In the comments, I correct the errors and do my part to talk up Tracy. You can read it here:http://www.cracked.com/article_24239_6-beloved-kids-characters-who-received-baffling-reboots.htmlI wish I knew how Neil Wick and others are able to post hyperlinks in the comments.

Wasn’t it established by Mike Curtis that in the Tracy universe, Sherlock Holmes was a real person, and not a work of fiction? I thought at the start of this story arc, it was said that all the literary stories, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Phantom of the Opera, etc., were all true in the Tracy universe.

Is Abner Cadaver another room?

Ha-ha. And now the first editions will be worthless!