Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for October 12, 2017

Cozy!

Good morning guys!

Popcorn’s ready, I see!

Good morning, ‘pop’, Bill !

That stuff looks fresh. One X-tra Large, Please !

How did Silver pay for their tickets? Credit card?

How did he have time to fix up the panic room? I must say he was prepared. But I thought they would have left town by now instead of underground.

Gotta admit, Silver’s good.

By the way, over at The Cardinal (who made an appearance of sort here in the bullying sequence a while back) is being rescued by some heroes of yesteryear, including the original Daredevil, Smilin’ Jack, Joe “Boxer” (Palooka, I believe) and two others I can’t quite identify. http://www.comicssherpa.com/site/feature?uc_comic=csfjg&uc_full_date=20171008

When did Silver have time to do all this? Neil suggests he did it before they went to jail – but then the renovators tore the place apart and rebuilt it, and they never noticed a secret room all fixed up with furniture and a microwave, etc.?

Anyway, the smells coming from their room will give them away. The minute they try cooking any kind of food in that microwave – not to mention the stench from Silver’s ever-present cigarette!

Silver’s pretty dumb with that cigarette anyway – he’ trying to blend in with the crowd as they enter the place, and Sprocket buys a popcorn to act like one of the patrons, yet he smokes in a crowded theater. Don’t tell me no one noticed him. Even if no one confronted him, those around him would certainly smell him. He might as well have come into the theater with a giant spotlight on him.

The Lyric was in very good shape, as we saw in the first Nitrates story. The panic room was already built, and preparations to reopen the theatre likely involved little more than some paint and elbow grease. Do the second and third panels take place in the imagination (as the Nitrates walk the street), or are they to be taken literally? What is important is that we now know their hiding place. It is a good location and it is in Tracy’s jurisdiction.

“And we’ll survive on dropped popcorn, milk duds and snow caps!”

2 obvious clues in the mix: the tow truck, ditched in close proximity to their old hideout; Silver’s smoking being detected at some point as air circulates through the theatre.

I’m actually starting to hope Tracy never catches them. After all their crimes are against gullible rich people.

Is Mrs. Thorndike the widow of some rich tycoon ?   She doesn’t seem the type to have built the “empire” herself or maybe she won the Powerball ?

With terrorism like it is, and has been since 9-11, can you see Silver carrying that suitcase into a theater? He’d have as much a chance getting in as if he was wearing a turban and suicide vest with every pocket filled with red road flares.

I agree that panels 2 and 3 are, in effect, Silver’s internal imaginary visual illustrations of his dialogue with Sprocket as they approach the Lyric. And from that dialogue, it would appear to me that the “panic room” lies in a very old underground part of the theatre forgotten and unknown even to the renovators (think Phantom of the Opera), who probably did not crawl through dark, dank old understage tunnels (why bother?) but just dry-walled over their entrances, which Silver can easily and unobtrusively cut through without being noticed for a long time, if ever.

I can see the theater patrons from this point forward: Honey, do you smell cigarette smoke?

Have many of you followed the later Dick Locher strips before the current team Tracy? Im having a hard time with those… the most maddening part is that the Sunday strip is just a recap of the week before and the stories drag because many days simply repeat the same dialog. I have a renewed appreciation of how the current team Tracy has breathed new life into the strip.