Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for May 30, 2023

Oh, “Boomhauer” is just a voice in his head. Oooookay.

Yup, new story.

Unbelievable.

Life in Tracyville is definitely crazy.

The above is a complaint, not a hate!

lovely… the supervisor is a looney tune… guess Mike’s gotta have a crossover with them, as well…

Good morning™, all!

Well, at least our villain has a name, even if we still don’t see his face, so that was pretty quick.

I guess his name, “Audie,” is a reference to “auditory schizophrenia.” So, that’s actually a thing: “Auditory hallucinations, or “hearing voices,” is one of the most prevalent symptoms of schizophrenia, reported by as many as 75% of patients,” it says on https://www.psychiatryadvisor.com/home/schizophrenia-advisor/auditory-hallucinations-in-schizophrenia-dysfunction/. I mostly see those people wandering along the sidewalks in big cities. I guess I’m glad I never had one for a boss.

New employee doesn’t seem to have a name, so I guess he’s not important, but “Sabrina” does, so we’ll probably see more of her.

Shelley’s artwork the past two days has been pedestrian at best.

She can and usually does much better.

Oh, so much hate! LOL!

Mike should have stayed with the Nitrates. Switching stories killed any momentum he got.

Don’t know where Mike is going with this story, but I sure hope he isn’t going to criminalize mental illness.

Good morning™, aggravating auditory anomalies !

As long as it’s just between him, himself and he, no real harm done and like Sabrina says, “it’s just the normal noises”.

I think the Nitrate inset interlude may have been a passing thing but then we “should” get follow up at the book singing. Here’s hoping…

This should be interesting to see what happens……

Imaginary voices speak to him..the next thing I expect to read is Joan of Arc being in his family tree.

Wow, their boss must be a handful especially when he answers these voices in the grocery store.

Working for someone who has auditory schizophrenia, are they sure this guy won’t shortchange them on pay day or foul up their evaluations? I trust that somebody in this work group had the foresight to keep a doctor on speed dial.

Never known a boss that listened to his own advice…..

or.

The voices in my head may be imaginary but darn, they have some good ideas…..

Eh do he look like Bezos?

So, replying to boboscar’s comment to me from yesterday (which he said he wouldn’t reply to, somewhere goes) he said I’ve been trashing Mike from nearly the beginning which…unless he read 13+ years of comments in a matter of mere minutes…is highly unlikely. I havent been here since the beginning of Mike’s run and like I’ve stated numerous times before, I came on board when Abner Kadaver had tracy tied to a table with a pendulum swinging above him…no idea how far into Mike’s run that was….I’ve ALSO stated that one of the last stories I ever read in the newspapers was around the Torcher era…and I’ve ALSO said that I’m a “GOULD/FLETCHER/COLLINS GUY” so I have pretty high standards when it comes to the artwork and storytelling of the strip. In the beginning, I was just happy to see that tracy wasnt cancelled like I had thought, and I was thrilled that I could still read his adventures…however, a few years after I started reading, the quality of Mike’s scripts went to hell in a handbasket rather quickly (I think the first salvo on his war with logic came with the sweatbox story) and from then on, it’s just spiralled downward…these days, 99.99999% of his stories are misses instead of hits, and voicing my displeasure with the shoddy handling of a once great strip is NOT the same as trashing it…if I trashed it, I’d find nothing redeemable…and that’s not true. I whole heartedly look forward the the end of the stories…however convoluted and mind numbing they may be

I don’t understand that disease but are the voices telling him to kill ? Or which stocks to buy ?

I have to apologize to Mike – my comment yesterday jumped the gun. I see now that yesterday’s strip was meant as a set up for today’s reveal.

MOVIE QUOTE—-

“In any partnership there is a partner who cheats and a partner who is cheated”

Stewart Granger to George Sanders—MOONFLEET—1955

1-GREG ALLMON: Do you ever wonder why Comcrap hires people who know nothing about the job to do customer service?

2-LILA SHIRT: It’s simple, dummy. For one, they don’t have to pay us for knowledge we don’t have and secondly, calls are never supposed to get to a real person to begin with. Customers are supposed to be lost in an endless loop of Automated Attendant Options.

3-And if you’re still wondering how, of all the High School Dropouts in the country, we’re the ones they hired, you only have to remember the Psych Eval we all took. GREG: What about it?

LILA: It identified our SADISTIC TENDENCIES! Excuse me – a call got through somehow…

Please hold a moment while I look up your account information! OOOOOHH!!! My boyfriend can’t deliver a BIG O as good as that!

The boss hears imaginary noises in his head. In other words,he’s nuts.I’ll bet the voices never tell him to give himself up.

Somebody’s too cheap to spring for cubicles.

Hi Tradewinds. We appear to be reading Comments AT THE EXACT SAME TIME judging from our concurring Likes. Isn’t it nice to know there’s somebody else killing time at the same time?

But I gotta go now. So as Jim Carey said in The Grinch – IT’S ALL YOU MAXIE!

Sounds like a fun job…

You don’t have to be crazy to work here… unless you’re management.

The villainous boss will turn out to be J.P> Dithers.Never did trust that guy……

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PgQV67jx5Y

Audie [calls to mind Audie Murphy this day after Memorial Day; https://tinyurl.com/zoz62ej ] has auditory schizophrenia and hears voices, yet oversees this boiler room, and apparently from what Sabrina says has done so for some time. So my guess yesterday that he was bluetoothing was wrong. Will he morph somehow into the villain of this arc? As yet there is no clear connection between the Nitrate prelude and this call center/boiler room first movement con brio. But Audie seems to be being prepped by Mike for some kind of significant part in the story.

Let’s hope the strands come together soon….