Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for November 10, 2023

Good morning™, everyone!

So, there’s the final confirmation that it was Xaviera wanting to hide the former ownership of the book. It’s a good thing that backroom guy has delivered his message because frontroom guy seems to have noticed what backroom guy is up to and there probably will be consequences.

wow, what a ‘surprise’ as to Frau Krautengruber’s criminal involvement…

like we didn’t see that coming a mile away and a month ago…

~ Good morning™, sneaky spotters !

Real smart, ‘booky’. You’ll come back to work all cocky and confident you pulled the old slickeroo on your boss, when he sees you spilling your guts to the fuzz. Soon you will get to spill your guts and quite literally.

You’d think someone like Xaverier Libris, with all her resources & cunning, wouldn’t bring something that is essentially a piece of evidence that could link her to a homicide to a shop in Tracyville, but maybe have the work done overseas, by some discreet specialist who could make it totally untraceable to her. But if this illogical plot point can get the narrative momentum back up & running…

Remember Xaviera Hollander?

“X? Stop on by the shop. Bring your stabby thing.”

Ha. See me tolds you long ago itself that no good Goldilocks is the murdering crook.

Libro means book in Spanish. I would say we found our villain so BOOK’EM DANNO !!!

Paint is starting to flake near the corners of the room…I’m predicting that we will have stoppage soon! The grass, however, hasn’t grown much due to the chilly weather. In related news, the leaves keep falling at a tremendous pace. More on these situations as they develop

Something stinks about all “evidence” pointing to Xavieria Libris,, way too obvious to me.

Unfortunately I think it’s going to a bad (clumsy?) misdirect wrap up at the end. Don’t know why but I do.

Well……now we know who the next victim will be.

Had on his bench, is he judge?!

The funny thing is, since this guy talked to the cops, there is very little that would be more suspicious than killing him now. Bribing or intimidating would be more useful, but I doubt the writer will try represent that in a Dick Tracy comic.

Backroom Guy is thoughtfully holding the bagged bookplate in front of his chin because he can see Lee is getting creeped out by his turbo beard growth….

“DANGIT! Just when I was gonna’ show him this great ‘ZappaYou going skiing at the city dump’ PookaCard, he runs off an’ squeals ta the fuzz!”

I think the squealer just lost his job .

“You think the request to remove the bookplate was deliberate?”

“No, I think she accidentally said ‘Remove this book plate!’”

So he can hear them across the street in a different building?

The person who is looking through the window must be in cahoots with Miss Libris. Chances are he will report back to her. Then they plan their next move.

If the person Lee is meeting with gets stabbed, how will that be explained? Oh he was the victim of a mugging gone wrong.

And again, they can’t spell her name right…don’t they proofread these strips?

UH OH. I didn’t read close enough (a failure that has contributed to many failures in my personal time line). I didn’t see that Xavier requested the new book plate in the first panel. Sooooooo….

1- WEAK STORY

2 – Never mind my mentioning once in Comments above that it was all the Book Binder Boss. Just joking…

You know, if Xaviera were TRULY a criminal mastermind she would have her own book conservator on staff and wouldn’t need to bring in blabbermouths in on the job. She has her own library, with it’s own staff for gosh sakes. She ought to have a workshop in the basement.

1-LEE: So that is evidence that…what? You knew about this all along but failed to do anything about it until I came snooping? MORT: Yes…

2-…and that’s why I kept this and wrote on the back: “I DIDN’T KILL NOBODY!” And I had it notarized.

3-LEE: That’s an air-tight alibi all right. MORT: I think so. Wait. I just got a text… ”YOU ARE A DEAD MAN” Now who would a sent that? And why?

LEE: That’s odd all right. HEY! MORE COFFEE OVER HERE! Lazy waitress…

going off-topic here… I was just thinking about our wayward fellow member, Phantomfire, who hasn’t frequented these parts for awhile now… I know he said that he wanted to step away from here and I get it…

it’s just that I miss his presence and contributory postings and I hope all is well and good with our resident Ghost Postie, the one who I affectionately refer to as the Post Who Walks…

I don’t know about you all, but I miss the Phantoman… like the literary Phantom, that’s what he’s been as of late… a name whispered in the wind…

so from one fire to another, come on back and rejoin the class, Ghostie, and leave your good mark here at the fruitcake factory… you’re missed…

cue the dark ambient music with discordant overtones which, although broadly tonal, is inflected with chromatic and polytonal passages representing the archetypal example of a florid, melodramatic style without being interpreted as an overly heavy-handed metaphor within the context of the thematic material a bit on the frenetic and frantic side with interesting rhythmic devices which seem to counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor utilizing a novel imaging technique known as positron emission tomography

Ah-HAH! (Cue the dramatic organ music)

GASP! What a surprise!

OT: So, tomorrow I’m attending a murder/pizza luncheon. I’ve always wanted to attend a murder dinner or murder train ride but never had the chance until now. I can now hone my Armchair Detective skills while stuffing my face with pizza. I can’t wait. (The butler did it dag-nabbit!)

We’ll overlook the transposition-misspelling of Xaviera, since what today’s reveal gives us is pretty much the clincher that Ms. Icey-Cold Libris is in fact the guilty person, minimally for one of the series of murders, probably for all of them. Her motivation is likely to be her obsessive need to accumulate the “biggest and best” private library ever. Being a former fencing champion, she has a predilection for bladed, or at least sharp and pointy, weapons—such as letter-openers. We don’’t have her full story yet, but as the pieces fall into place Tracy and the MCU should in due course draw it out.

Still in question is how her tale will end. She could be arrested by Tracy and then never seen or heard of again (satisfying the PC zeitgeist), or confronted and killed by Tracy and/or any other MCU officer (which would be Old School, but not to today’s feckless tastes), or as seen sometimes lately self-annihilated in some ironic twist (e.g., falling and impaling herself on a letter-opener).

The End is near! Repent!

Oh no, I see trouble coming!