Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for February 02, 2025

Junior hatched an evil plan. Trained to harm and kill

Found that slaughter suited him. So much blood to spill.

Sabotage left incomplete. The missing bomb he found

Father backed the Two Fox deal. He’ll burn it to the ground.

Consternation. Detonation threatened by the fiend

Sees Tracy as puerile. No insights shall be gleaned

From talking sense to a sick mind. Lee stealthily approaches

Wiring here on the ground. On sick plot she encroaches.

and here we go with the villain rant…

He made a “killing” by reading archival accounts of “holocaustic” proportions.

Good morning™, everyone!

Tracy is being jejune, but Totten Junior has become addicted to killing people. It’s not even a political move for him. It’s a pretty elaborate process to get his dad to invest in the project, just so Junior could find the unexploded bomb.

Good morning™, Psycho Killers !

This guy’s got a whole suspension bridge worth of bolts loose to the point of falling out. P.3. Tracy looks radioactive. The way Junior is talking there wont be a suicide but I loathe to think where that bomb winds up.

crazy nutjob look in panel three… nice… conveys the animal crackers mentality of Jun….

save the state the expense of putting this scumbag on trial, as he might walk out a free man through the most outrageous and ridiculous of means…

Jun is enjoying his rant too much…

who is that lurking in the shadows behind Dick?…

The “talking killer” trope!

Suspense! Will she disconnect the switch cable at that junction box? Probably not.

Looks like Lee might save the day, which is good because Junior evidently is a kill-crazy lunatic.

Also nice of Junior to confirm my theory about the terrorist getting terminated for not keeping a low profile.

What’s the shelf life of xylon anyway?

To parahrase the immortal Tuco …l If you’re going to explode a bomb, explode a bomb. Don’t talk!

Last panel is awesome!

Art is impressive, today. Writing is indeed better too. Notice the very last panel, well done expression of a psychopath

I’ve said before it requires a special personality to actually /enjoy/ killing, causing pain and suffering. (sighs) It’d be nice if there was a way to cull this, out of the human species, but it requires geniuses to develop that too, and I’m just this dumb hillbilly gal-child.

Why does Dick wears yellow coat and hat? they attract attention and detectives are not supposed to attract attention to stay safe.

Of course one of the characteristics about Xylon is that it is highly unstable. Not unstable in the manner of nitroglycerine that can easily go off, unstable in the way it evaporates / dissipates. The bomb would have lost all explosive power decades ago…

Jr. obviously didn’t test it to see if it still worked.

Looks like Lee is pointing out that it’s not plugged in

You forgots the BWA HA HA HA HA at the end.

So that big torpedo is sitting out there in plain sight, but the state police bomb experts didn’t think there was anything unusual about it. “This cylinder is obviously part of the building’s HVAC system. Nothing suspicious here.”

“Which wire would you cut, Colonel Klink?”

Who’s the guy in the striped tie, just a business associate extra continuing this arc’s parade of nameless nonentities?

Yeah, Tracy. Stop being so jejune while I look that up.

Tracy: “That not exactly what ‘jejune’ means. If you’re going to try and impress me with your vocabulary, you’ll have to do better.”

Totten: (kills Tracy)

this guy has lost his mind… :{

You got him monologuing…

Tuco, Tuco, Tuco…. somewhere beyond the last roundup Eli Wallach is smiling!

I think Toten is trying to bluff Tracy and crew about the dead-man’s switch. It looks to me like the controller from his old slot car track. BTW: In the final panel, is he holding the button in, or is he preparing to press it?

Remember when the Chief told the MCU to carry 44 Hoglegs for MAXIMUM PROTECTION and Tracy said it would spoil the lines of his ensemble and Lizz said her Ban Roll-On already afforded her maximum protection and Sam said he couldn’t because “Hoglegs” weren’t kosher and Lee said they were too “phallic” and that she’d sooner go look at the Washington Monument or a Space-X launch as to carry one of those?

Remember?

When the state troopers investigated the clocktower earlier, did none of them notice the gigantic xylon bomb propped up on sawhorses?

“I started as a mere child, holding the little goldfish’s heads underwater!” (giggle)

“And you see that rocket in my expository flashback? Our world is DOOOOOOOMED! DOOOOOMED,I say! I shall send my infink son SweePee away in it. To some distant, safe planet. The Spinach People seem rather tame! Arf-arrfarrf!”

Lee – “Do I cut the red wire or the white wire”?:)

1- FRED SENIOR speaking: So, one day Junior read his personnel file and saw that his grandpa was really WALTHER and not PAUL because I had entered that truth in the file for some reason…

2 – : Grandpa Walther/Paul was still alive then and Junior confronted him on how he’d switched places with his less murderous but still dead brother.

3- LEE: Hmmm. Someone forgot to plug this in. I’ll fix it – might be important…

4- FRED SENIOR (still disguised as Junior): AND that got me thinking about switching places with Junior and blowing HIM up along with the Governor and the Hot Dog Vendor!!! DT: I can’t arrest you without a motive, Fred Senior. So… WHY?

5- FRED SENIOR (still disguised as Junior – in case you’d forgotten): Because it was about TIME somebody put a permanent end to that dammed clock that represented Dad’s only failure in life! It mocked him every day of his life as “Paul” and I promised him I’d deal with it! DT: As contractor for this project, you could a just dismantled it.

FRED SENIOR: What? Oh. Hmmm. Ok. No harm, no foul then. Let me just put this Dead Switch down then. I had disconnected it anyway…

KAAAA …. (Tune in tomorrow for the end to this cliff hanging episode!)

The third guy in the panel where Totten Sr is signing papers agreeing to build Two Foxes Plaza appears to be the inspector friend of Tracy from November 17-19. He seems to be just as fooled as Senior.

I agree that it appeared sometime back that Junior just figured out the bomb himself without Sprengy. If he had just had more confidence in himself, the bomb would have been a complete surprise to everyone.

A World War II bomb frozen in time ? Captain America did that first . This is a rip off .

Achtung Vengey ! Here’s some great material for a VengeyTale .

Oh, we’re kookoo for killing, aren’t we Junior?

Is it jejune in the jejunum? Can we be jejune when we have a jejunum? Snark!

What happened to my goat commercial story?

OT: Narrators of the world, listen. If you are auditioning to read a new book for audio, it’s best not to inform the author what he WILL do if you accept the job.

Also, other narrators? Please don’t deliver a sample which sounds to have been read in an echo chamber.

I am having one crapshoot of a day. Minus the shoot.

This off hand reference to Xyklon B, poison used to kill millions of Jews is disgraceful.

Maybe someone can remind me: wasn’t Junior’s Nazi great-uncle German and tried as a war criminal in Germany after the war, or something like that? So who build the bomb and left it in Two Fox Plaza? And what was the plan? What we see is clearly meant to be dropped from above. So it wasn’t meant by the builder to be exploded in place?

Good thing we don’t have a real-life narcissistic psychopath planting a real one on the entire stock market and America as a whole. Oh wait… Hope you all sold your stock last week.

Like in the 60’s cartoon,the noon gong will go off and deafen everybody//////