Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for July 14, 2019

Day is done. Packs holstered gun

Walks out in the rain.

Head home to Tess. Break from the mess

Criminals bring pain.

Cool night air makes evening fair

Bathed in soft moonlight.

Slim the smile, all the while

There hidden out of sight

A gunman waits. Broods and hates

At Tracy he takes aim.

Shots ring out. No cry or shout

Things are not the same.

Good morning™, target audience!

… and Doc (note the flies) gets things started with a bang. I hope Tracy is not badly hurt.

Yesterday was my birthday and I just relaxed, so I didn’t accomplish what i wanted to with the previous story, but I’ll keep working in it because I intend to present a few other “leftovers” when I have them ready.

Ouch. ✨

We get the idea, Oliver! You don’t discuss your wives or marriages! Sheesh!

My weekly check in on Little Orphan Annie.

From the looks of it, Tracy may be moving on…

Well it looks like the new story is on. I hope the killer doesn’t know about the Kevlar coat Tracy’s wearing. Or he will come in for a head shot.

Good morning™, downed officers !

I wonder if Dick is sporting the latest in Kevlar underwear and that all we are seeing is him collapsing from the force/shock of all the impacts ?

Really? A brazen attack right on the front steps of Police HQ? Not going to go unnoticed, Tracy will get attended to right away, Flyperson (whoever he is) will have to have a fleeting vehicle at the ready.

A small pocket pistol, about the size of my Kahr CM9, but the wrong configuration for that. All the 9mm pocket pistols I’ve seen are basically flat at the muzzle, not stepped like this one. Anyone know what it’s supposed to be? Or is it just a generic cartoon gun?

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! In the back… COWARDS!

We’re off to an exciting start, for sure. One thing about the art, though – it’s just like the TV Gunsmoke episodes, where someone would get shot, and drop in the street, with nary a spot of blood showing, nor even any holes in their clothes. (With a very few notable exceptions,)

A Peter Sellers Movie? “A shot in the Dark”

Whoever shot Tracy is left handed, so that’s the first clue.

“BANG BANG…. HE SHOT ME DOWN… BANG BANG…THAT AWFUL SOUND… BANG BANG…. AND I HIT THE GROUND… BANG BANG…MY BABY SHOT ME DOWN!”

Well, too bad. I recently began reading this strip and it ended its run by killing its protagonist. Oh well, back to see who Rat is beating up today.

A good denouement yesterday to the previous story arc, and now a dramatic start to the next one. Excellent use of coloring— limited to blues and grays for a wet, moody street scene with yellow and orange to draw our attention to the police headquarters, muzzle flash and of course the iconic hat and jacket.

One hell of a way to start a new week in the strip.

Why??!

What, again? OK, we know he’s going to survive this (unless Stanton and Curtis are going “all in” for a reboot of Annie ), so I suppose the action is going to be in the investigation and apprehension of the perp.

are we at the start of a new story? is this tied to the exploding books we were teased with or was this from the BB eyes/warbucks story? Part of me is going all “robot turkey” on this and pretending it’;s annie shooting “’cvuase you up set pop”

4- TRACY: Man this town is drearier than Gotham. I’ve had it! I’m turning in my badge and moving to the Keys first thing tomor… 5- ASSASSIN: What better place to murder someone than outside the police station? BLAM BLAM BLAM 6- TRACY: Not again! I just replaced this coat… 7- …well the bullet proof vest saved me from BB’s shotgun blast… 8- …wait. Am I wearing it now? I forget…

This isn’t a new arc. This is just what happens when you press Oliver Warbucks too hard for personal information.

Well, I guess this is like the John Darling strip, where the lead character gets killed on the last day. j/k!!!!!!

So Tracy’s hair isn’t long enough, so that must be blood trickling out from his face! Amnesia storyline?

didn’t even have time to cue the ominous music

Last panel Tracy breaks out into his Gene Kelly “Singing In The Rain” routine !!!!!

Those are bees flying around behind the gun.

That’s not Tracy getting shot.

That’s…that’s…J. Straightedge Trustworthy! Yeah, that’s the ticket! d;o)

Well, we are (hopefully) done with Annie, and on to another character retread. Good start, great art, but I wonder how the guys will make this story dull.

Why hasn’t anybody commented about panel 3, a rather heavy-handed signal that the shooter is Flyface’s nephew “Doc” (or maybe some other member of his clan)?

Eeeek!

NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

Just read today’s strip.

THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT!

Is this the end of another fedora?

Beautifully atmospheric art today! Very dramatic. A great start to the new story.

Nah, Tracy’s O.K.! He’s only lying face down in a puddle, not moving, kissing concrete. He didn’t take that many bullets! The guy’s a rock!

(Somewhere in town) Sollozzo: He’s still alive. They hit’em with five shots, and he’s still alive! Well that’s bad luck for me, and bad luck for you if you don’t make that deal!

Geez, Warbucks – all right! I’ll stop asking about Trixie!

Oh, no! Tracy’s down! Backshot by some dirty little coward!

Trenchcoat’s lyin’ in the rain.

Did anyone in HQ hear or see anything?

Wonder if this is gonna start a story where Dick Tracy becomes for a short while just like Robert Ironside?

OMG, Tracy got shot! Now, we know he couldn’t have been fatally wounded, but his injuries could slow down the man! We can’t have that!!!

Greetings, future readers of past strips and comments! (Whomever you might be)

If you’ve been reading the DT strips and comments of the past 4 years, you’d know that this would normally be the time when I post my updated list of all the DT stories available on GoComics, and that I normally do this near the top, so you might wonder why it isn’t here. The answer is I did post my list near the top at the time, but it has since been erased. This has happened twice since then. I was unhappy about this and contacted the Moderating team, requesting that these lists be restored. They wrote back that once a message is removed, it can’t be restored due to the limitations of their system.

However, they didn’t give any reason for why this erasure happened, so I’m assuming that there is no reason for it, that this is just some innocent, unintentional blunder on their part that just keeps happening. And if GC is unable to fix their own blunder, I’m more than able and willing to fix it for them. So I’ll be recreating this list in the replies below.

Sadly, what I can’t do, since I didn’t know that this blunder was going to happen or keep on happening, is recreate the record of the number of likes these comments got at the time, the lists of the people who liked them, or any of the replies from other people these comments got at the time. However, I will be keeping track of these things, just in case this happens again. There are two more lists of mine in the future that got erased, a total of 3 erased lists. Hopefully, there won’t be a fourth, but if there is, I will be able to recreate the original likes and replies along with my comments.