Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for January 14, 2025

The polls are closed. Issues with hanging chads resolved. All the votes from Morrow, Sidney and Vista Bill have been dismissed. All the legit votes are counted.

It was a bigger rout than the last presidential election.

By an over 3 to 1 ratio the people have spoken.

YOU WANT ME TO STAY!

Who am I to refuse the will of the people?

Those of you who wanted me gone, you did a terrible job of winning over the undecided voters.

Back to our boring storZZZZZZzzzzz,,,,,

“Shrivel” head.

Firestrike’s bell hasn’t rung in a long time!

Is Sam sniffing Tracy’s butt???

When did Tracy start wearing an oversized, black velvet suit jacket?

When did Tracy develop the shakes? How sad.

Good morning Terrible Targeters !

Will Jr. be fulfilling Pruney’s mission ?

So, I guess Totten is “Pruneface,” now that Tracy has directly called him that, using the present tense. But what version of Pruneface? The original WWII version, a new 21st-century version, a distant relation, an arbitrarily contrived thrown-at-the-last-minute plot-device, or a brilliant literary conceptual version designed to show contempt for the very idea of villains & coherent narrative in a cold, indifferent universe where only fools try to make sense of things?

The only way that I can think of an out for Eric not bringing Pruneface back is if Dick remembers his crime/war history and that’s how he knows Pruneface. Because Eric can’t retcon Pruneface because today Eric just established that Pruneface is connected to WW2 via the last two panels, unless an MC stuff up but I don’t think so.

“Oh Boy!”

He looks his “pruniest” today, doesn’t he?!

When the story demands it Tracy will have never heard of, or seen, a famous building standing in his own town. OTOH he will have depths of knowledge about events from before he was born… His memory will be as vivid as if he was still there.

And the US knowingly letting in a high SS officer who worked on sabotage during the war in addition to war crimes – and boasts about it to the immigration officials – is as historically accurate as having William Howard Taft the President during WW II. (If you were a war criminal trying to get into the US you lied about on your papers and insisted you were in the Resistance.) Not sure why this one bothers me so much, but definitely in my list of five most annoying plot holes for this story-line (and the competition is pretty fierce).

Oh, for the love of…! THAT’S where all this is going???

I guess “Boche” is Pruneface’s real name. But why didn’t Sam pick up on that?

“Jerry Colonna. He always hated that voice. Or, it could be Snagglepuss. Or maybe Emo Phillips. He had a fine=tuned ear!”

MOVIE QUOTE

“I always talk loud. I’m a Sheriff”.

W.C. Fields—SIX OF A KIND—1934

1- SAM: See? Elaborately – nay, brilliantly detailed plans for the murder of Springsprong signed by Fred Jr. DT: It’s just not enough to convince 12 Jurors, Sam. Not 12 Tracyville Jurors anyway…

2- : …Remember when 12 of them let Pruneface go free after he either blew up or tried to blow up The Seilla Co? Just because they felt sorry for the way he looked…

3- : …I’ve no doubt the Jurors would have pity on Fred Jr for having a Nazi grandpa. They’d blame the murder on “Unfortunate Genetic Material” or something. We need something stronger. We need to catch him in the act! SAM: How?

DT: We’ll catch him when he tries to murder YOU! SAM: Okey Doke.

BIG fans like me recognize Panel 2 as a perfect reproduction of one from the original 1942 Pruneface story.And a glorious one it is.

2.)if Totenz was part of the original “ring”,how does that explain “Number 20”,the guy who was introduced in 1942 as Pruneface’s superior officer in the ring?(Pruneface shot him dead ).

3.)We know Tracy has this “peculiar effect” on bad guys.In the Killian story, Pruneface had feigned senility for years when in Israeli captivity. But when Tracy walked into the room, he blew his stack and gave himself away—-and didn’t even realize he’d done it.

WILDLY OT: In one of my Eclipse (pre-WWII Chicago-set masked vigilante) — one of my neo-pulp series) books, I had a killer whose MO was leaving an eye (traced in a patch of sand, etc.) and then another at the scenes of murders. They finally figured out he was ‘building a face.’ One of the most oddball gimmicks out there.

The chief suspect was a university professor who had met with a professor in Vienna, then vanished. Turned out he was a wanted German scientist who had vanished at the conclusion of WWI after perfecting a death ray, Now, he was testing it to tie up loose ends and preparing to export it to Germany.

In the meantime, he was blowing up buildings in what the police incorrectly assumed was a power struggle between underworld bosses. The chief victim was a gang lord who had killed his own boss in the previous book. The destruction pf the penthouse floor of his highly guarded lair being taken out was a ruse to pull the police force there, which a series of strategic robberies took place.

In actuality, this was a means of drawing the police to the scene, leaving selected upper-end jewelry stores and the like open for strategically planned robberies, in order to fund the building additional rays.

Plan being to place two or three of these in widely separated major cities, in order to create the impression that a full-scale invasion within the U.S. was already underway.

The scientist’s actual name was German for ’Face." Which, of course, ONLY the Eclipse and his reporter pal (who was briefly a red herring as to who was the masked man in the initial adventure) figured out.

Yeah, sue me. I grew up on pulp reprints. Three series resulted before I shifted to P.I. writing.

The third panel the wall map looks like Chicago.

Prune face has not aged at all………….

Pruneface….crummy dog killer

I first learned of him from DT fan Mr. Furley on “Three’s Company”.