Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for October 26, 2010

Panel 3:

The silhouettes: WHERE IN HELL DID EVERYONE ELSE GO? Did all those undercover agents take off when they saw the gun? Isn’t that Thick Spacey’s MO?

Where’d everybody go??

Didn’t the Feds get the memo? When a gun is drawn, Thick is supposed to run away!

And has Thick noticed the Feds abandoned him? What’s he going to think when he discovers there’s no “team” in “we?”

Does Locher think he’s doing the storyboard for a Z-budget movie? “We can’t afford a crowd for this shot, so let’s forget about the Feds who had D-cubed in custody and were flashing their badges.”

There’s an implied explanation in Pistol Packin’ Penny’s words. What are the odds that Locher will remember them for tomorrow’s strip?

Remember, most of this story arc is only taking place in Dick’s feverish imagination. Those federal agents were just hallucinations.

Such A large head, and such a tiny hand…

Panel 3:

Does Thick have a gun in his hand, raised and aimed at Mrs. D’B?

I’m assuming that she’s standing in the middle. How did she pop in there between Thick and her hubbie? Teleportation? Did she beam away everyone else ala Star Trek?

It’s pretty bad when an artist is too lazy to add a few more tiny ink blots to represent people in a long shot. Lazy.

And where’s the traffic on the street? No cars? It seems to be a decent part of town. And didn’t Thick just call PD HQ. Shouldn’t panda cars be on the way? Don’t the feds have back-ups in cars?

And here’s the most important question: WHY SHOULD ANYONE GIVE A FLYING EF ABOUT ANY OF THIS CRAP?

Why is Thick making that Black Power gesture? Is that really likely to calm the armed widow-to-be of a billionaire? Or has he so immersed himself in the role of Che Guacamole that he has scattered the running-dog lackeys of fascist capitalism with a flick of his wrist?

Good point, Flight Suit. But is that Thick’s head or Locher’s head? This is not a case where two heads are better than none!

The world is going insane.

Dick Tracy subscribers at GoComics:

10/9/10 - 22896

10/15/10 - 22908

10/26/10 - 22931

Panel-Panner, I think this scene is supposed to be late at night, if those speckles around the lamps are meant to be light-rays. The real question is, what are those strange squiggles on that building? Is it–could it be–NEON NOODLE! He’s behind it all!

Panel-Panner, they come to read the comments.

Tormented and torn, the romantic fool Thick Spacy decides to end it all. He begs his newfound love to give him the peashooter so he can blow his brains out. But her rage shows that she loves him and blames her estranged husband for the twisted fate which has kept her and Thick apart. Thick, heartened by her passion, decides against suicide and assures the love of his life that they can work it out. He’ll be Trilby to her Svengali, salt to her peter, Mortimer Snerd to her Edgar Bergen.

Tomorrow, we find out how Locher has come up with something even crazier and dumber than one of my guesses, same batty-time, same batty-station!

In for a pound, in for a Penny Does this strip make sense? I can’t see any. Agents vanish lickedy-split While all the readers throw a fit. Who the heck’s she aiming at? Is it the scheming charity rat? Tracy stands idily by Grab the gun? He wouldn’t dare try. The fake beard must terribly itch. He’d better move fast and tackle that (BLEEP) The story continues at a snail’s pace. Didn’t Tracy even consider carrying mace? How the heck did she find these guys? Especially with Tracy’s brilliant disguise? But still we read, and hope for the best. Ye gods, this story’s a freaking mess.

Today, she’s Lady MacBeth and D-cubed is the Thane of Cawdor.

Tomorrow, she’s Judas Iscariot and he’s the Messiah.

The next day, she’s Nell and he’s Snidely Whiplash.

Thick will always be thick.

Right now it looks like Sydney Phillips got it right. We’re getting some wacky version of George Soros and Bill Clinton, in which case Butterfly McCorpse is based on the lunatic Vince Foster conspiracy theories. Will the explanations, if any, make sense? Was Butterfly McCorpse some prominent businessman whose disappearance went unnoticed by all the local newspapers? Will Thick reveal that he knew it all along, whatever it was, and he didn’t have time for explanations?

And then there was three…

My comic strip number 30:

http://shockdom.com/open/carl/2010/10/26/striscia-30/

RE: # of subscribers. Many subscribe thinking “Great-just like the old days-I can get Dick Tracy, except it’s online now. I was wondering why it isn’t in any of the papers anymore” Then after subscribing-they find out why

VanDork - That’s what happened to me. Then I got hooked on the comments!

Panel-Panner said (first comment), … Isn’t that Thick Spacey’s MO?

Panel-Panner, if you’re going to use fancy complicated police terms like “MO”, please remember to add an asterisk and a popup box explaining the term to us dimwits. Thanks.

:D

Realllly nice lettering in panel 2. cough

She sounds like she was in on it from the beginning and now she is mad because he messed it up by giving money away.

LIke a magician, D-cubed will disappear in a puff of $1,000 bills!

what did 3D blow?

The 800 pound gorilla in the room is the election. Hence, political weirdness from Locher. Which is sad, because even if he could deliver a coherent message, “Dick Tracy influenced my vote” is very low on the list of exit-poll responses.

I really hope Locher explains how and what D-cubed blew, no matter how much it upsets the Net Nanny. Maybe he “blew it” for her by refusing to get killed when Butterfly McCorpse, her illegitimate offspring, attacked him. Maybe he sat in with the Glen Miller Orchestra back in 1938, blew a mean trumpet but didn’t pay the rental fee on his instrument and the interest charges on the unpaid bill have bankrupted his company. Maybe he personally overinflated the Hindenburg, causing it to rise so rapidly that it collided with Penny’s mom and knocked her off her broom. But even as I babble Locher’s staff of trained howler monkeys are pounding away at their typewriters in a race to meet the deadline for the next strip’s dialog.

He blew “it?” Of course! Sue Doko is a robot and we’re seeing Thick as he delves into his first modern sex crime!

Interesting ‘readership numbers’ Panel-Panner - for Dick Tracy on this board ( 22 to 23 thousand per day) … a strong Locher supporter told me that Locher estimates that he* has *23 million readers, including the internet ?

And on just 50 newspapers …

Who’s hallucinating ?

margueritem said : “Such a large head, such a tiny hand”

Like the mark of Zorro, that’s the MARK of Locher !

23 million readers? Does he include parakeets and fish heads in that count?

“IT’S OVER”

We can only hope.

With any luck Penny shoots D-cubed (Wednesday), Thick opens his eyes in shock (Thursday), D-cubed staggers down the street (Friday), across town (Saturday) and into the graveyard to fall dead on his own grave (Sunday)–which would be a Halloween treat for all 23 million of us.

Wow! I’m one of 23 million!

What became of the many agents? Locher misplaced the panels in which James Bond issued the ancient and royal military command: “Run away! Run away!” And thus did they hasten to join Locher’s Missing Majority.

Well now, who was the bog man with the tatt?

Tigger, have you seen evidence that there is any sort of mind behind all this? Share what you have!

I was going to suggest that the Federal agents were projections, created through D-cubed’s 3-D movie technology and used to camouflage his presence and cover his escape, but that’s absurd. We saw them grab and restrain both Thick and D-cubed. It is a physical impossibility for projected images to do that. (And if Locher is going to say “But I saw it done on Star Trek,” he needs to make a serious reality check.)

Locher can have Thick claim he spent so much time with the widow because she made him suspicious with the contradictory statements she made from 1 August through 7 August–her husband hated Washington and politicians, he had many friends in Congress, he had only enemies, blahblahblah. He can say his suspicion deepened when the ME failed to identify Butterfly McCorpse or find a cause of death–he suspected that someone bribed the ME. But he never showed Thick display a hint of suspicion.

Count me as one who could care less about the story but looks in only for the comments. Loved BT’s comment “…there’s no” team” in “we.”

I see only three figures on the sidewalk now… Tracy, Mrs. 3D, and 3D. Where did the federal agents go?