Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for September 02, 2014

The “Accident”, eh?!

Good morning fellow fans!

The only word I can trust Axel to be honest about is “excellent.”-Something is definitely wrong with the art. I wonder if Joe or Shelley wasn’t well when these were produced.Hope they’re okay now.

Has Kenyon somehow tapped into Diet Smith’s experiments?

Remember Hot Rize, Flakey Biscuit’s murderous assistant? Today I discovered a veteran bluegrass band named – Hot Rize. Given Mike’s interest in music, I wasn’t at all surprised.

For all of you who thought the time travel thing was gone, it looks like it’s back. It seems that all the inhabitants of Simmons Corners (and I’m thinking, the buildings, too) were transported from 1944 into the present day.

As for the accident, there are two possible events I can think of that it could refer to. I’m assuming that Diet Smith’s experiment would be the only logical source, but there was also an accident on the island back in 1944. Perhaps the 1944 accident opened a sort of “wormhole” into the future which was activated by whatever Smith Industries was trying to do.

Of course, “we can all go home again” doesn’t mean that “we can all go back to 1944” but the possibility is still alive.

Annie doesn’t trust him farther than she can throw him, but I wouldn’t either. A major thing that we still don’t have the answer to is why he has Annie there in the first place. Maybe he intends to use her to get a ransom? Even if Prof. Kenyon has figure out how to reverse the accident, it may be expensive to finance this plan and he may need financial resources from Warbucks.

This is cool. It seems to me that Dick Tracy was created at a time when the big villains were “Big Al” Capone and “Big Al” Hitler. My father hated these men. They were the bullies and the terrorists of the day. I’m a big fan of Milton Caniff and William Overgard. These guys had their fingers on the pulse of what was happening in the world of Funny Pages in that time period for sure. Kudos to Joe and Mike for bringing back these memories…Dick Tracy is the best there is…

I’ll admit I was concerned over how all these characters, apparently from Annie’s past, had jumped forward to the present day without realising it. Of course, there is the time distortion inherent in the comics (Annie is still very young, while the Tracy family have aged to some extent), and we have the Belinda-mind-control-thingummy. So I’m unsure whether there really was any time travel involved. We still have the question of how all these people were transported to the island in the first place, and whether their homes and businesses (and landscape) came too, or were merely reproduced on site. Could the “accident” have caused mass-amnesia that gave Axel his chance to reprogram people? Was Annie so critical to Kenyon’s state of mind that she had to be brought along too, to keep him in the illusion?And what is the REAL government reason for closing the island? That sort of thing costs money and is quite visible (e.g. having a no-fly-zone imposed, which would have to be on all the aviation charts) so it attracts attention. There must be some serious reason for continuing it.

This is confusing. There are things to indicate that time travel really is involved, and there are other things that tell us that it’s all a hoax.

Time travel is real:- Diet Smith brought it up.- The extent of it all, right back to the archaic postage stamps.- The year 1944 also came up as the time of the alleged accident when Thunder Island was evacuated.- Annie said that she thought it was 1944, even when she was alone with Tracy, he’d snapped out of his hypnosis, and there was no reason to keep up the pretense.

Time travel is a hoax:- There is clearly regular communication with the outside world, through the letters.- The calendar where the weekdays were wrong for 1944 (though it wouldn’t be the first time a writer got that wrong).- Did Hotshot Charlie fly in and out of a time vortex without noticing anything?- The need for brainwashing to keep up the story.- Really? Time travel? In Dick Tracy?

I’ve identified the guy with the hat in the strips for Aug 24 and Aug 31. He must be Leopold, Axel’s assistant. Axel probably sends him to observe things and see if everything is going according to plan.

If I were Sam, I’d do one last thing at the end of this story: fire a bullet into the Blue Window equipment.

Just love the stance Annie takes in panel two. I can just hear her saying, “Oh no you DIDn’t…” with perhaps a little finger wave.

I wonder why Leopold doesn’t know Annie’s name. He just calls her the Red Haired Girl.

I think Axel has (at least) two hoaxes going on. His whole Potemkin Corners situation where the townsfolk think it’s 1944 is not for Prof. Kenyon’s benefit, as I thought, but for Annie’s. He’s tricked Annie into thinking that he and she (and maybe a couple of Axel’s trusted minions) have been accidentally thrust back into the past.

This is why he’s never seemed worried about whether Annie is getting brainwashed with everyone else; he WANTS her to remember the “present” so that when they “get back” she can remember being in the “past”

And Annie was clearly believing it - for a while. But I think talking to Tracy has revealed some holes in the story. She’s looking pretty skeptical in today’s strip.

ALEX’S Eyes . . . ? ?

Not sure if anyone’s noted, or mentioned it here . . .

Seems STRANGE that Alex is the only ‘crossover’ character among the Annie cast - that’s come designed and equipped, with ‘visible’ PUPILS in the sockets ! (?)

Can’t recall the ‘originals’ appearance from the earlier Annie strips I’ve read

Annie thinks Axel is a big liar. I trust Annie’s instincts. Is Axel’s lie that there has been a reversible accident? Is Axel’s lie also about the nature of Kenyon’s work? Further, is Axel’s lie about Annie ever being returned safely to Warbucks? Did Axel just tell three lies in one speech bubble?

If Tracy has been there four months, I wonder what he thinks of his pay cut.

Good morning Tracy fans. Maybe tomorrow’s panels will give us more info.

Interesting; while I totally agree with NS09 that something is off-kilter with the appearance of the strip today I really enjoyed the dialogue between Annie & Axel. Very intense and reveling. Contrary to popular belief I don’t need to see someone bashed over the head to enjoy the strip! LOL!!!

Did you say BLUE?

Say, here’s a question I dont think I’ve seen anyone ask since this whole nightmare of an undending storyline began…. HOW EXACTLY did annie know the coordiantes of Thunder Island to begin with anyway?!?

It ain’t lile Axel said “By the way Annie, I’ll be taking you to a remote location named thunder island that is supposedly abandoned by the government and leased by me under an assumed corporation name.. and in case you were wondering, the exact coordinates are 87 longitude and 45 latitude.. but just dont go sneaking any postage due letters with root beer candies out of my office or i’ll be really really upset with you!”

Shades of LOST – Island inhabitants referring to “the accident”, possible time travel elements, certain people who are able to come and go off the island, but the rest of the population cannot.

I still think the man in the hat is Henrik. He is in August 16, also.

Mr A. is what makes the art look strange, he is devilish looking to say the least, and I think Annie is right on with her thinking.

[Arrgh! Lost the whole laboriously composed Comment to the double-delete of the self-doubed Submit (I did not hit the Submit button twice!). I’ll try to reconstruct it….]

I have speculated before that this Annie/Tracy crossover seemed like an audition strip to revive the LOA strip in its original time period. The time travel angle would allow that to happen.

Neil Wick has raised an interesting angle on the Time Travel question. We have been thinking for the most part that Tracy, Annie, and others may (or may not) have been transported somehow back to 1944. But what if, instead, Axel, Kenyon, and most of Simmons Corners have been transported by “the accident” from 1944 into the present? This would clarify a number of ancillary issues. Daddy Warbucks said earlier in this arc that Diet Smith was not the only one working on time travel, implying that he or someone he knew also was doing so. Maybe the reason Axel is holding Annie, after acquiring her from the Butcher, is to be able to continue to extort ransom money from Warbucks to support Kenyon’s research into reversing the effect of “the accident.” Daddy need not have known initially that his investment into Kenyon’s research into time travel would evolve into continuing demands for more based on Axel’s use of Annie as his pawn for extortion/ransom demands. The U.S. Government may be partially complicit in so far as it has declared Thunder Island off limits while scientists attempt to deal with “the accident” that keeps 1944 Simmons Corners present in a kind of time stasis (without being aware of the criminal aspects of Axel’s involvement?). [This scenario would suggest that the erroneous 1944 calendar was simply a mistake by Team Tracy.]

psst.. gweedo i said almost the same exact thing a couple days ago that this crossover was ike and joes audition to write/draw annie. and someone ELSE said it months ago as well

I do “copy” on a post before launching it, ‘specially the ’windy’ ones.

I do that quite often, too, especially if it’s long or has something error-prone like links or pictures.

Gweedo, when I find boogers, I try to sweep them off the desk before they become lodged in the keyboard.

Who knows? Maybe Joe & Mike might be doing a LOL strip (like they had the time). They could sub out the Tracy thing to Mattie (he’d love that!)

I heard Joe and Mike are considering a strip called Percy The Texas Long Horned Goat. Should be a blast!!