Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for March 12, 2018

Good morning™ to all who are still alive!

The van seems to be spinning sideways on the steep mountain road (last frame) and that is never a good thing. Ghost, I wouldn’t be too sure just who might not live to tell about this!

I know that Avenger09 is going to complain that the trailer hitch disappeared and the license plate went blank in the last frame, but you really do have to add less detail in a wide shot. Personally, though, I would have put the trailer hitch in, since it is so salient to the story.

What really puts Ghost Pepper’s look over is the bow tie and jacket. ✨

And Tracy is still firing at Ghost Pepper’s truck in the third panel…

I keep predicting a Sweatbox ending to this story – and if Ghost goes over the edge, we should have just that! The question is if, as Bellawhiskers said last week, that we have two or three weeks of this left, just what is it going to be? Popeye ’s revenge?

Will Ghost suffer a fiery demise…..? Stay tuned…….

Hm… the one thing I can’t wait for, is the motive. Why did Ghost kill Stagg? And what’s Mayor Armstrong’s real connection here? Here’s hoping all will be revealed in the coming weeks.

Bracy shot out the LEFT REAR TIRE of Ghost’s catering truck, and in panel 3 he is seen to the RIGHT of the truck which is where he SHOULD be, unfortunately he is ALSO shown still shooting at the truck. This causes some problems.

1) To begin with, I don’t care how far away from the truck Macy rolled, with Ghost stepping on the gas in reverse I HIGHLY DOUBT Bracy would have been able to get a shot off, ESPECIALLY not since he had just been dragged for quite a while and by all rights should be disoriented

2) if you shoot out the LEFT REAR tire, the truck WOULDNT go off the road the way it is in the third panel. For it to be in the position its in it would HAVE to have made at LEAST a 360 spin as it went off the road, and even THEN it more than likely would have rolled over instead of spun out

3) Ghost’s truck was ABSOLUTELY close enough to Stacy that it would have dealt SOME type of damage to Tracy, like I said before, he had just been dragged for quite a distance and isn’t in “fighting condition” by any means, and a wildly careening truck at point blank range would not have been able to dodge him or vice versa

4) and this one is for the nitpickers club and I am fairly certain its been mentioned but I don’t read the strip or comments on weekends but… where did the “lever” go on Lacy’s snubnose? Every handgun of that type that I’ve seen (both here in the strip itself.. Lizz used to carry one all the time.. and on television) has whatever that ‘cocking mechanism’ is on the back of the gun right above the handle.

Gweedo says,

Pepper’s line reminds me of …

“My God! I can’t move my veels!”

Might we be about to see a roasted Pepper?

I’m liking this story; it’s one of the most Gould-style stories Joe and Mike have done. So I hate to be critical, but I don’t understand what that van is doing in the last panel. If Tracy shot out the left rear tire, which he clearly did, and Ghost is trying to back up, which was clearly implied yesterday and today, wouldn’t the van naturally tilt toward the left rear? But instead, it’s tilting toward the right rear, which , by the way looks as if it might fall on Tracy, which wouldn’t be good.

Maybe, after shooting out the left rear tire, Tracy rolled right as the van just missed him, and now the tilt in the opposite direction is due to Ghost’s loosing his steering, coupled with ice and snow. That might explain it.

I don’t understand the physics of this situation. Didn’t this start out with the van completely stopped? What was the distance between Tracy and the van? How quickly was the van able to accelerate, in that distance, enough for the Ghost to totally lose control of it? I’m not even sure any more which direction the van is heading. The Ghost should have been able to just kinda hop out. Instead, tomorrow we’ll see the van flip over several times and explode.

But I have to admit, that is some great looking art. Screw the physics.

From the moment I first read a Tracy strip, he has always been known to fire a single shot to bring down the bad guys. I wonder why just shoot out the left rear tire and not the right rear tire as well? Ghost is too hung up on eliminating Tracy rather than just exiting the van and making his get-a-way. Hold up, wait a minute, the last panel has it looking like Tracy also shot out the front passenger tire… which could explain the sudden steering challenges Ghost is encountering.

I think we must agree to “screw the physics” here, because the van was stopped for the deer in the headlights and Tracy had just slipped the cuffs. If the van backed up at all, there was no way realistically Tracy, so near the rear of the van, could have avoided being struck by it. So, ditch realistic and go for artistic. In today’s panel 2 Tracy seems to have miraculously got into some kind of ditch or depression to the left of the van and further back from it than he was yesterday, while in panel 3 he is even further away from and to the right of the skidding van, while still shooting (maybe not a prudent choice, given the limited ammo, 5 or 6 shots, of his back-up piece). That van has the moves of a drunken ballet dancer!

Unless what we’re seeing is a few seconds later as Ghost’s van slides out of control backwards and Tracy is directly under the van between the wheels?

It’s a comic folks, physics doesn’t always apply. I mean folks fly in comics, come back from the dead. I just hope that Ghost doesn’t expire early, he’s one of the better bad guys lately and maybe should get more than just fifteen minutes of “infame”

If Ghost doesn’t watch it, he’s about to be pureed!

“Pardon me boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo-Choo?”

Nope, just the Sweatbox ending

Actually this could be WORSE than a Sweatbox Ending because theres SO MANY THINGS we don’t know about Ghost and we are not likely to EVER find out, like his TRUE MOTIVATION for offing Simon or the reason why he a 5 year stretch in the joint

WHAT?! You mean there’s finally some real honest-to- by- God action here?!! I cannot remember the last time I saw Tracy fired a shot in anger.

If Ghost is a very lucky person, he will soon have a reunion with his former cellmates in prison :)

“Tracy’s loose! I’ll run him over!”

Three days later he still hasn’t backed up 6 feet? And he lost control and ran off the hill without hitting Tracy?

I don’t think we have to forget the physics, but maybe stretch it a bit.

I’m too tired to draw a diagram tonight, but here’s a brief summary the way I see it. I might do a diagram tomorrow.

The road winds back and forth down the mountain. As it gets farther from the summit, there is room for longer straight sections. The deer appeared at the beginning of the first longer one. The van was traveling on a section where the top of the mountain was towards the passenger’s side.

Once Tracy was free of the handcuff he moved towards to driver’s side to tell Ghost he was under arrest. At the same time, Ghost leaned out the window to check on Tracy and Tracy fired a shot at him.

Ghost decided to run over Tracy as the deer ran away. The motion lines in Sunday seem to suggest that Ghost may have pulled forward to take a run at Tracy, but this is not clear. As Ghost drove backwards, Tracy shot out the left rear tire.

Ghost may have steered left as he backed up to get a better hit on Tracy who was on the driver’s side now. In any case the van spun out, clockwise as viewed from above and we see the back of the van near the edge of the embankment today. It is clearly backing up as it spins, as indicated by the motion lines. Tracy is still in the same position as before but the van has spin around 90 degrees as Tracy continues to fire.

I see Sam coming on the scene…