Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for May 13, 2023

The time bomb it is tossed aloft. There’s danger in the air

Citizens are placed at risk at the antique gamers’ fair.

The bomb it charts a deadly path, heads straight for Ms. De-Lite

Chick Tracy knows just what to do, she instantly takes flight.

Not to hatch the deadly globe, Chick knows what she must do

Defuse the time bomb with skilled beak. Held fast as the crowd flew.

Chick Tracy is a heroine. No chicken in the pot

Nor pâté nor braised filet. A star is what we’ve got.

“The Po-Po sunk my battleship!” Gameboy is led away

Old adage it rings true again. We know crime does not pay.

Why show non-action when you can talk about non-action?

End of this sequence, hoping in a more interesting one that does not feature chickens and fake bombs. The real BOMB was this story

Good morning™, all!

Well, Gameboy has met his end. I seems that the bomb was not a real bomb after all and the game that Gameboy took before Tracy tackled him was a decoy, not the real game. So, Tracy and the MCU had it all set up in advance. They knew that Gameboy was likely to want to steal the WWII Monopoly game, so the Waddington’s people were in on the whole thing. At least the MCU was proactive in this arrest and didn’t just wait for the criminal to deliver himself to them.

WHOA, WAIT A MINUTE…..what the heck???

Now I see why so many people complain about stuff being skipped over.

One is going to assume the bomb was a dud?

It is good they used a fake game to nail GameBoy….too bad he didn’t really get nailed into a pine box.

Good morning™, bomber burnouts !

That bomb wasn’t the only “dud”. Those two must be family as they have the same head shape and hair color. Nicely done car and Tracy’s pose and expression look just a bit threatening. Corny last panel line. :-p

So he’s well and truly clucked……

pretty sneaky, sis

The bad guy gets the last word?

Since Avenger09 ain’t here yet, I’ll do it"

BOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

By now, Tracy has discovered, through great detective skill, that Gameboy’s real name is Nick.

Maybe we could see Tracy on the stand at the trial.

“So, tell us about this bomb, Detective.”

“Ha ha, he said it was full of C-4 and threw it to me. But I ducked and let it bounce over to the BO Plenty family.”

“If it were real, they’d have been killed!”

“It turned out to be fake, darn the luck.”

Had to look twice

Outcome not very nice

Assumed it was a misprint

But I’ll give you all a hint

This truly is the end

Better wear a depend

The manure’s sure to flow

With a radioactive glow

As we dissect this JHS frog

DOA stiff as a log

To try and figure out why

The author doesn’t seem to try

To serve a nutritional meal

Instead of a drive thru deal

But we’re the ones to blame

Our acceptance of the same

Empty calories galore

We keep coming back for more

So Gameboy went from late teens, early twenties at the start of all this to mid thirties in the last panel.

“Well played!”

Rats. No chicken dinner tonight eh.

“IT ALL SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED OFF PANEL!”

Well, although the story wasn’t the best. It had one unexpected benefit. It showed a side of WWII I was unaware of, and I’ve shared this strip. As well as the info I found about that game, with some Monolopy collectors at the store. They were thrilled!

Aw, the letdown! Love the last panel though, took the wind out of his sails in a matter of speaking!

Buck KAW!

so the game was just as fake as the bomb… well, that surprised me a little bit. guess that’s why Dick Tracy didn’t seemed too worried about the bomb then. :}

I’m guessing Gould’s spirit is laughing and crying simultaneously. That sad saga was straight from Barf City!

Are these two being put in the back of squad car related to each other? Their choice of attire colors was just a coincidence.

Will Tracy and MCU be able to retrieve the stolen bank money? Yes or no. Chances are one who pulled the job wants reduced prison time and a slap on the wrist.

Hold the phone somebody, those were mock World War II monopoly games just to lure Gameboy? The plan worked. Chick n’ delites for everybody.

“That bomb hoax was your last move. Game over, Nick”. Who’s Nick? Did MCU have a file on him all this time? Mike and Shelley, you all pulled the okey doke on me. Yes, I know the name Gameboy is not on his birth certificate. If a clue about an actual name was given, doggone I missed it.

I like this strip. I do; I read it every day. But it’s difficult not to acknowledge that “Video Village” and “Boom or Bust” references aside, this has been a very disappointing storyline. There was very little to it, and regardless of the menace of the fake “Time Bomb” bomb, not much suspense. This felt very mechanical and uninspired. I remain a reader, and even a faithful one, but the strip hasn’t been involving for a while.

So who is the guy to the left of the police car that looks a lot like Nick? And isn’t that police car a tad small??

Just caught on TCM Nesbitt’s Passing Parade, “People on Pare” featuring all the old comic artists, including Chester Gould and many more

Waddingtons is a big antique auctioneer in Canada – the kind that would have rare games and toys to offer.

Chicken now has a future with the bomb squad….

Great final line!

Well,that’s “the Game of Life”, Nick.

Chick Tracy ends up a hero , which makes Game Boy the dumb cluck. (lame villain deserves a lame pun)

I made the “Battleship” remark several days ago. I’d ask Mike for recompense if I wasn’t so embarrassed at how he used it to end this story. Shekky Curtis should leave the jokes in his notepad – and then burn the notepad.

1-JOHNNY WADDington: Thanks I guess. I don’t know why I’m here. Take me back to my garage, boy. DT: Can I have your autograph? I’ve seen all your movies! BRAD: Come on Gramps – let’s get that diaper changed.

2-DT: Attempted Game Theft! That’s worth a long 60 days in County Jail. Your dad, Nick Fury Sr. would be so disappointed.

3-NICK FURY JR (aka Gameboy): I guess its Howlin’ Time. Sigh…

ka-checkmate

I was looking forward to some blasted chicken!!!

Never thought I’d say this, but I miss Dick Locher. When Locher put a bomb in a Tracy strip, it was a Stradivarius packed with plastic explosive, which ultimately detonated inside a fancy hotel’s reflecting pool and launched a few tons of water into the air with a mighty (and I quote) “FLOOOOM!”

Ah, those were the days…

So, which would you rather? The current DT stories or a rerun of Locher’s strip from his final years?

Very clever, but too abrupt—all those loose ends glibly tied up in a single day’s strip. I enjoyed the story, and the art (especially the orange glow around the Time Bomb as it flew around) was wonderful. But it would have been a more emotionally freighted ending—both scarier and funnier—if the bomb were real and the chicken had actually managed to defuse it. As it is, the denouement seems a bit lightweight compared to the buildup.

Once you have a great setup, milk it for all it’s worth!

It could have been played out for another week of tension: retime the Tuesday, May 9 strip (Nick flinging the bomb) to land on Thursday, May 11; on Friday, we see the bomb sailing through the air, then two panels of panicked reaction shots. On Saturday more of the same, but in the last panel Tracy reaches up and nabs it. Spend a Sunday strip with Tracy running around the convention floor, looking for a safe place to ditch the bomb, and in the last panel he looks straight at the reader and remarks, “Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb!” On Monday, he tries to fling it out the door—but it takes a bad bounce toward the Plenty clan. Tuesday, (the actual May 11 strip); the chicken defuses it on Wednesday (what we actually saw on May 12); Thursday, a holding of breath, then tentative happy reaction shots and Sam calls for the bomb squad; Friday, the bomb squad says “Yep, that was C4 in there—good work, chicken”; then today’s Saturday strip, but presented on May 20 rather than May 13, and with the words “bomb hoax” replaced by “time bomb”—and Bob’s your uncle.

Okay, I’ve used up my year’s supply of Monday morning quarterbacking. We now return you to your regularly scheduled comic.

I’m trying to stay positive, so I’m hoping the next storyline will feature the return of 99, the best character Mike has come up in recent times. At least we know it won’t be another Annie story.

Soooo – Chick Tracy II was an irrelevant story element after all. At least we’re put out of our misery sooner rather than later and don’t have to put up with more of that.

Welp, on to the next road filled with plot holes and dead ends. At least the scenery is nice and the company is interesting.

..AND!! He was first to get “home” in the Mousetrap game: so he’s the loser! Now, as “The Humungous” once said: NO MORE GAMES!!

So, it’s Grandpa and Brad Waddington. Of course, it was Waddingtons of Leeds in England that produced the POW Monopoly games in WW II. So, I suppose we can infer that Gramps is one of the very Waddington family and had secretly saved one of the special games for himself, thus explaining how the officially “no longer existent” game came to survive in his possession. And we see the MCU crew loading Nick “Gameboy” and his lookalike decoy runner-in-the-snakeeyes-mask being hustled into that rather tiny-looking police car (rather oddly colored, too, purple with yellow lettering “POLICE” logo). We further learn from Tracy in panel 2 that the “bomb” was indeed a hoax—no explosion, no victims, no dismembered smart-hen—intended to distract and delay. Disheveled Nick in panel 3 gets the Last Word in this clumsy tale.

I could tolerate the non sequiturs, continuity gaps, private hobby horses of Mike, and the chicken humor of this story. But I find it ludicrous that the entire guts of the story, after weeks of stringing us along, is spilled in its last three panels! All the vital facts are finally—very finally—revealed here; we were given no chance to know along the way that the game vendors were of the Waddington family, nor that Tracy was wily enough to set them up with a phony Monopoly game display to lure the thieves, nor that Gameboy’s name was NIck (which just randomly appears here). What a rush! (And not in the good old wrestling Legion of Doom sense.)

Can’t wait for Bobocar’s recap on this.

I can see it now…Chick Tracy will be making her appearance on the Dot and Tonsil show. Also, she is going to appear on the front page of the newspaper. Please, Mike and Shelley don’t have the mayor trying to give her a key to the city.

Wow, this story sucked!!! If only Chester was still alive, we’d have interesting stories. What is this, Funky Winkerbean?

aww I was really hoping for some crispy chicken

Hey,I said “battleship” in this forum weeks ago!!

Gameboy learns too late that Dick Tracy has a MONOPOLY on catching crooks in his town.

That Gameboy fella was about as sharp as a bowling ball.Pay attention,boy!!

This is, admittedly, one of Curtis’ sillier tales. It’s so silly, it’s invited comparison with the silliness of Dick Locher’s run as writer from 2006-11.

But even if you didn’t like this tale, at least it was brief, just a little over a month long. If Locher were telling this tale (and it’s the sort of tale he’d tell) it’d last 4 months without being any better and quite a bit worse. It’d be 4 months of endless, literal repetition. BO Plenty’d have some trite catchphrase like, “Chick Tracy plays football!” he’d repeat every. Single. Day. for half the tale (so every single day for 2 months). The climax would be stretched out for 3 weeks. As Gameboy tosses the bomb at Tracy, Tracy would cowardly dive into some bushes, and in the interminable days that would follow, he’d say things like, “Yi!”, “We’re doomed!”, “We’re all gonna die!” (All actual quotes Locher had Tracy say). Then Chick Tracy II would singlehandedly defuse Gameboy’s very real bomb then peck Gameboy until he surrendered. Then, without a hint of irony or intentional humor, everyone would congratulate Dick Tracy on the great job he did capturing Gameboy.

tbc