Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for March 28, 2021

Aquarius grew dangerous once Dollar Bill did fall

Fearing he was next in line, misunderstanding all.

Pouch is silent as the grave. There’s nada he will share

Tiger draws the peace sign hoping cops will treat him fair.

The Pierview so luxurious yet all inside not well

Bellum puts the pressure on, but Peggy shall not sell.

Oscar brings a Trojan horse. The flowers hide a bug

Wears the mask of a good pal. Deceitful is his hug.

Kelly likes the high life. Let others fix the meals

Menu most extensive. Room service comes on wheels.

Auntie’s hair now streaked with white. The car crash laid her low

Yet 1312 her home sweet home. To Bellum she says, “No.”

Uh oh, maybe Oscar has been skimming the allowance.

Good morning™, recorded family secrets !

The look on Oscar’s face tells me he is doing this from a law enforcement angle. …Waiting for Stephan to reveal some real criminal bits so that Bellum Industries can go into “warranted” investigation. If he is some kind of police then I can see his disgust at the drug activity of Cheesecake but is to ignore it like it was nothing.

Peggy looks tired in P.2 but with iron resolve.

Well, what do you know? We get to see Peggy.

WOW! We finally get our first look at Aunie Bellum and she’s totally on the ball. Sharp as a nail! Not what I was expecting. This woman is awesome! I know this is gonna cause a lot of controversy but I’ll say it anyway- as far as I’m concerned, I think Stephan is more of a villain than Aqaurius. Just because what Stephan does is legal doesn’t make it less evil than what Aquarius does.

Stephan deserves to have his precious industrial park project blow up in his face. He’s been a modern-day Mr. Potter, swooping in like a vulture after Peggy’s accident to take control for his own self-interest. But the worst part is that he put off the management of his own sister’s affairs to a subordinate employee instead of giving them the direct attention they deserved. What a dastardly scoundrel!

Never trust anyone with a double chin, that’s all I have to say!

So you can take that industrial complex and,,,

SIUYA!

“I love you, Peggy Sue”

LOL!

Good strip today.

Good morning™, everyone!

You’d almost wonder if Oscar was expecting to get kicked out when he planted that bug.

Kind of reminds me of Luann, a couple years ago, when they finally showed us Tom, the father of Tiffany. Somehow, the reveal just isn’t all that big…

In the meantime, given Aquarius’ nefarious activities, for all we know, maybe she is getting a good allowance.

Aquarius can be a bad person, but this guy is a horrible person. Poor Peggy ♡, what a family.

Someone here is not telling the whole truth. I wonder if Oscar and Aquarius are in it together, knowing the principals never talk to one another…

Okay – why was the face of this perfectly normal looking woman kept hidden?

This is Tracy, where we had a character whose head looked like the moon. But this is the one they kept hidden?

I like the way Stephan is characterized: a totally horrible human being convinced that he’s somehow righteous (as totally horrible human beings usually are). “Your allowance is more than generous!” Why should she have an allowance of her own money at all?

I don’t know what I was expecting Auntie Bellum’s face to look like, but certainly not that. Why have they hidden her face until now? Uh oh… I’d say from the look on Oscar’s face he might have “borrowed” just a wee bit from the so-called allowance.

Holy crap, it’s a whole new story……on ward!

So, the big ‘surprise’ in the reveal of Peggy’s current appearance, after months of increasingly labored (and now quite pointless) teasing…. is that she looks pretty decent for a person of her age and condition! I was so astounded I nearly dozed off.

The big reveal is more than just her face. For the first time we see her true personality. We see her assert herself and the story takes its next step. Very cool.

Guest appearance by Cruella de Vil…

Mike has made a drug dealer (Aquarius of course) more sympathetic than the big capitalist success (Mr. Bellum). Very interesting turn given his denigration of “hippies” up to this point.

Maybe it’s time for them both to bust Aquarius.

1-AUNTIE: You’ve put on a lot of weight since I last saw you. MR. BIGG: Yes. It’s expected of capitalists pigs. Now let’s get down to business. Even though I control every aspect of your financial life I need your approval to sell your house.

2-AUNTIE: You’ll remember that when I first moved there, I had to live in a tent by the lake…

3- …then Mom and Dad died and left us a fortune so I spent my share on a big house while you wasted yours building an empire!

4- …so huff and puff all you want, you’ll not blow my house down!

5-MR. BIGG: Yeah well, it wasn’t me who KILLED MOM AND DAD just to get my share of their dough!

AUNTIE: GULP! I mean, you know I had nothing to do with the neat round holes in that rowboat they used to cross the lake to visit me in my tent! And the police could never prove that it was me who had loaded the life vests with beach sand! And in spite of what you’ve always believed, I’M PROBABLY NOT FAKING THIS DISABILITY JUST SO I COULD LOOK SYMPATHETIC TO THE JURY AND LATER, TO GET SPECIAL TREATMENT FROM YOUR SON FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE!

Thank you for the great Rememberances of our safety officers!

The most interesting part of today’s entry is the guy saving the wheel chair bound invalid’s life. Something tells me the “boys” couldn’t decide, after 2-3 months what they’d have “Auntie” Bellum looked like, so they settled on an angry Mary Worth. I can hardly wait to see if Attitude Plenty ends up looking like Rex Morgan. Really creative guys

Nice to see Maude making a guest appearance.

Mr. Stephan Bellum doesn’t want to “sell the property”. He wants to tear down the house so that along with adjacent properties he can build a project. Peggy objects to projects, particularly those that Stephan likes to build..One direction this could go is for the government to seize the property because it’s been used for illegal drugs, and Stephan then buys it from the government. Probably cost more than he would have otherwise paid if sister Peggy had been agreeable…

I’m sure the drug dealing part of the story fits in somewhere…..and Pouches blue balloon….

Currently in the news: ex-Mpls. Officer Derek Chauvin goes on trial. Do you think the Tracy team will ever do a story where a bull-head of a cop shoots-kills a black man and riots ensue? Issues with the policeman’s union protecting Officer Bull-head, and the city government being afraid of #BLM.

This strip has not made any sense to me in weeks. Awful storytelling.

We seem to have stumbled into a confusing family affair

cue the dark ambient music with discordant overtones

Today’s strip is full of surprises, and it advances the story considerably, too!

For the first time, we get see Auntie Peggy Bellum, and she turns out to look quite normal, even well for a woman who has been invalided by a horrendous automobile accident (which has laid a heavy guilt trip on nephew Alex “Aquarius” Bellum). The suspense over what she would look like if we ever got to see her lends not only to the crescendo of the story arc but also to the sense of mystery surrounding her. She is, it turns out, lucid and in full control of her mental faculties, as long as her endurance and strength allow. Her arguments against turning over the 1312 Bedwell property to her brother, Stephan “Big” Bellum, are quite viable.

Less clear but equally interesting is the part taken by Unctuous Oscar (yesterday, Obsequious Oscar), who has planted a bug in the flowers in Auntie’s room and is listening in on the conversation that Peggy and Stephan assume to be private. Why is he doing so? For self-protection, in the event that he is skimming off Auntie’s “allowance” from Stephan, as several have suggested? —But see the caveat by Lawrence.S in his reply to Ray Toler in the thread under Brian, above: we don’t yet know, really, what Oscar’s motivation is.

We have multiple villains, to one degree or another; Paul Pouch, Tiger Lilly, Aquarius, Ty, “Big” Bellum, and the mysterious client for the Blue Balloon who shot Pouch. Maybe Oscar. As for Cheesecake Kelly, other than being addicted to cocaine, she seems fairly decent (so far), and probably not so dumb as the blonde hair might make her seem; her future part in the story is yet to be determined….

Somebody’s a ass-clown.

All along I had the impression the commune site was a building (or large house) in an urban run-down section of town. Today’s strip makes it look like Walden pond.

Joe & Mike should either have ended this storyline several weeks, before introducing this plot line, or else make the whole family real estate wheeling-dealing the main focus early on, instead of spending so much time on drug dealers & messages hidden inside balloons.