Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for February 24, 2021

This is the most pro-active we’ve seen Pouch in quite some time. ✨

Cheesecake will light the stove just as Pouch releases the gas. I smell a ‘splosion comin’.

Good morning™, watchers!

A good variety of viewpoints: Aquarius and Thug #1 at the front entrance to the yard, Pouch watching from across the street, and Cheesecake inside the house. She is put in a position of responsibility and her first priority is to take a hot of cocaine! We shall see how she deals with the situation as Pouch pushes the trigger on releasing the gas. It may be that the remote control in his hand today was the thing that looked like a cell phone in the strip where he was approaching the house. Whatever that thing was that he inserted into the open window likely responds to this device in his hand, but I’m still not too sure exactly what that was.

Good morning™, simultaneous events !

The men are on their way to “meet Pouch”. Pouch is ready to set off stink or smoke bombs and our girl is looking confident and cocky as she contemplates the joy her pre dinner pick me up will bring.

Looks like that device Pouch lowered in through the basement window was indeed a remote-controlled sprayer/fogger. The “stink” could be anything but it makes the most sense with Pouch’s disguise for it to be the “rotten-egg” additive mixed with otherwise odorless natural gas for safety reasons.

Nifty little plan well executed by Pouch — except I think panel 3 might be foreshadowing that Cheesecake’s sense of smell has been wiped out by her “nose candy” habit. If she doesn’t react to the stink, Auntie Bellum will likely be left upstairs while others evacuate. What then?? The clockwork precision expected by Pouch goes up in fumes…

This story is spinning out of control so fast even the Tidy Bowl man is getting nauseous!

Next panel: *SNIFF… “Phew, I was wrong. Auntie Bellum needs her adult diaper changed. I’ll bet that’s why Aquarius left the house.”

I wonder if Tracy will be talking to the cops who patrol the park while looking for Pouch when Aquarius shows up. “We haven’t seen Pouch, but there’s the guy who was arguing with him!”Unless Tiger Lily gets out out of the cellar and flattens him first.

A cliffhanger is coming.

Boom!

As was said yesterday Cheesecake is less than reliable!

Not entirely sure why Pouch is convinced Aquarius must have kept the blue balloon. It was a 15¢ balloon. Aquarius had offered more, but Pouch knew he didn’t really want the balloon, he wanted information. Pouch tells Aquarius where to stick it. Argument begins. Cops tell them to break it up. To cool down the cops Aquarius offers to buy all the balloons and Pouch feels cops will be suspicious if he doesn’t sell. Tiger did report it going into the old house, but Aquarius didn’t know there was anything special about the blue balloon until the miraculous coincidence of the black light. Aquarius could have let it go out a window, or stuck a pin in it and threw it out. If Pouch wrote the information on the blue balloon it would be a heck of a lot easier to rewrite it on a new balloon. If Pouch didn’t write it… Maybe that’s the next story arc.

(sighs) I was hoping that Cheesecake was more sweet than sour.

Hmmm, I though pouch was in the basement of the house….guess not!

1-MEL: Hmmm. That guy with Narky “don’t fit in” with the rest of the housemates…

2-…Well, time to blow up the house and everyone in it. click, click, click &%$# it to &* SON OF A #^#@IN PIECE OF #&*!!!!!!

3-POWDER: checking herself in the mirror LOVELY! Those balloons make for big bazongas! The blue one might be a tad bigger than the red one though…

_ A reference to Don Fittinn’s name in case anyone missed it yesterday. Whadaya mean it was an “eyeroller”??? I worked all morning on that! That does it! I’m off to ‘That Is Priceless where I’m appreciated! Well, tolerated might be more appropriate._

I am suddenly reminded of the “fun” we had in high school breaking those little glass vials known as “stink bombs” in respectable places: y’know, the grocery store, school, auditorium during an assembly, dance recital, etc. (no one, it seemed then, had the “hair” to try this in church….). The “fun” was in the anger and consternation on the part of the “gassed” and how they’d be at a loss to finger and then collar the guilty culprit. What Pouch lowered into that window the other day looked like a quartet of them, with a receiver from Pouch’s remote that would break the vials all on a sent signal………..

Poor auntie Bellum.

Jeez, I read Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and it had fewer side avenues than this meandering opus. Please wind this up.

“…but he doesn’t still have the balloon with him 24 hours later…”

stinkbombs? I LOVE IT!!

did he really think he’d be walking around carrying the blue balloon? Captain Inconspicuous!!

I agree with those who are calling this one of the better plotted Tracy stories we’ve seen in a while .. if it seems slow & sluggish to some maybe that’s because we’re become used to the stories that get wrapped up before they even get started. I do wish we did know what exactly the MacGuffin here is — that is, the actual message on the balloon. It does make for a better story if the reader knows what the real stakes involved are.

If the house does blow up, will it cause the root cellar to collapse, trapping and / or killing Tiger Lily?

The game’s afoot! The pace of the story is picking up, and a lot is about to go down—or up!

Going up: Pouch’s gas-like stinkbomb (as , I think, best described by orbenjawell above); maybe the Famous Blue Balloon, if coked-up Cheesecake gets careless with the currently-tethered balloon.

Going down: all kinds of action, as collated in Neil’s reply to avenger09 above, with many possible “ships passing in the night,” or as Stephen Leacock wrote in Gertrude the Governess; or, Simply Seventeen, “Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”

Will Auntie Bellum fall into the hands of Pouch as a bargaining chip/hostage, thanks to Cheesecake’s “sniffing”? And will Pouch recover the balloon? If so, then what will happen next?

This is a good story….