Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for September 01, 2023

Good morning™, everyone!

A vintage autographed murder weapon! Impressive!

Good morning™, gruesome discoveries !

I shoulda known that a guy with a name ‘like’ StillDaMan would be the killer. Do we really need a whole two weeks to finish THIS one ?

Dick is so proud or constipated in P3.

The evidence bag must have been left over from a prostitution sting operation by Dick !

now THAT’S an evidence bag…

Now we know the story of Vitamin Flintheart’s disgraced uncle.

He is da-man it seems!

So disgraced, his old team, the Blue Sox, are no longer in the league.

Who ISN’T a fan of disgraced players? Put Pete in the Hall!!!

He should be in a special hall of fame as well for all the illegitimate children that he fathered along with Dennis Rodman. Even at his own family amusement center Rose was rude and charged for his autograph!!!

Labeling Ed as merely ‘disgraced’ in panel 2 is far too euphemistic— and who’s making that disembodied statement anyway, the manager or Tracy?

Ok, at the beginning I pointed out that the blunt force trauma was caused by a lefty (check), and that a baseball bat was the murder weapon (check)… so far, I’m betting .1000

I see! So a prized piece of sports memorabilia that was owned by guy we were told had beef with Vernon but not actually told about the beef? Could someone be dropping breadcrumbs?! Ooooh! :3

Nuremoh kind of looks like Vitamin without the rictus.

FRAMED! FRAMED! He was framed by the ghost of Flattop!

Sam looks shook by the mention of Nuremoh, depsite the fact that Tess’ husband had been killed off before he moved to the City to join the police there.

Well…this MM has gone batty…along with Dick’s chin. Three strikes…you’re out.

Ok, I DON’T think it’s Demain, since the evidence so obviously points to him, and it IS a comic strip.

So Nuremoh played for the “New York Blue Sox”? The name combines the town for which Babe Ruth and others played for the Yankees and (then) New York Giants with Ruth’ original major league team, the Boston Red Sox.

“Bang,bang, the baseball bat came down on his head… Bang,bang the baseball bat made sure he was dead…”Apologies to the Beatles…

The victim had wounds to the right side of his head, so the killer was likely left-handed, which means it was either Phil Demain (“our lefty closer”) or Oscar Watt (shown with a glove on his left hand).

The hats are looking much better today.

….maybe it’s a fake.

If you Phil Demain it backs up.

1-SAM: You can’t mean…

2-… TED TURNER – OWNER OF THE BRAVES?!?

3-DT: EXACTLY, SAM! I surmise that Ted tried to “call-up” Vern from Single A ball to the Braves but Vern refused to go! Ted couldn’t accept the rejection and killed Vern using this bat in an attempt to frame Demain for it. Ted got the idea from one of the movies he shows on his Turner Classic Movies network. Pick him up, Sam.

SAM: Maybe Liz and Lee can handle it – he seems kind of dangerous for an 84 year old…

Mr. Moustache look surprised.

That bat in the last panel looks more like a fungo bat than a regular baseball bat.

These character names remind me that back in the day my buddy Jeff who would swear that the Atlanta Braves mascot was called Chief Home-A-Runna instead of the correct Chief Noc-A-Homa…

Well, we had a good story last week.

I see the guest writer is following the old Chester Gould convention of giving a strange-sounding last name that turns out to be a reverse description of the bearer of the name. In this case, “Nuremoh” is “homerun” backwards.

That’s the guy who almost took Tess away from Dick Tracy long ago!

Notice how, even when Mike is not the writer, the story still revolves around memorabilia?

So no mention of Tess’ role in the previous case yet – probably a good idea. It was at least 25 years ago, Tracy-time…

Uh-huh. The disgraced Edward Nuremoh of the New York Blue Sox. So many intertwined allusions here! Disgraced: Chicago “Black Sox” scandal of 1919 https://tinyurl.Com/mrr3726e including the probably innocent dupe, star hitter/outfielder Shoeless Joe Jackson; the “hanging judge”/MLB Commissioner Kenesaw Landis (who banned all eight accused White Sox from baseball for life); Red Sox, White Sox, Blue Sox; NY Yankees and Babe Ruth, star pitcher for the Boston Red Sox transformed into slugging outfielder mainly for the Yankees; etc.

To date, evidence points to left-handed closer Phil Demain, whose higher-paying rôle irritating reliever Vernon Simpson may have coveted and mouthed off about. Demain worshipped Nuremoh and would have been the most likely owner of the souvenir bat Tracy (panel 3) identifies as the murder weapon. We’ve already noted that the killer was probably a left-hander.