Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for October 10, 2014

Photo of all that lasts of Axel! A lot less gruesome than when the Brush died! And, speaking of gruesome…!

Or, I should say, Gruesome!

Axel lives! Clean handcuffs. Fritzy looks creepy in panel 3.

Hey, Good Morning avenger09!

Dead fish & wagging tongues! Now, THAT’S appetizing!

Good morning all!Good to see some of the loose ends are getting tied up.And that they thought to remove loose body parts from the cuffs before bagging them. (The body parts will probably be in the morgue, if anyone’s interested…)

I guess that strip with Daddy and Annie flying to Limbo Lake was printed out of sequence.

Axel lives.And Avenger09, cpalmeresq, and others….The thing that bugs me is that, are cuffs so valuable that you’d want to retrieve them from a corpse, especially one as badly damaged as this one ought to have been?

If Axel lives, which has already been widely speculated, then he has effectively transferred from the Annie-verse to the Tracy-verse! Is this a good thing?

Last, and certainly least:.Many comments yesterday about how Team Tracy has revived this previously moribund strip. One fly in the ointment:.However well done (or not, in some of our opinions), what audience did they attract? I, for one, am 62 going on 63. I think not that I am the future readership of comic strips in general. I ask those who were more favorably impressed with this crossover (than I was), did this really do anything to position this strip with the next generation(s) of fans?

No Wrist Wizards for the feds, eh?

Good luck with the kitten, Avenger! Keep us posted.

Good mornng felow DT and Annie fans!*

I enjoyed the DT?Annie crossover. Even if Annie is never published again, it placed a happier ending to Annie’s life than the horrible existence she had. Annie is happily rejoined with Daddy and Sandy.

NightShade09 said, about 11 hours ago

And you must be the only one who wouldn’t want to see Flattop again.^^Wrong, dead villains need to stay dead, so DT can fight new original evil peeps

@davidf42

The possibility of his return is another indication that there will be a revived Annie strip, with Axel being Annie’s chief nemesis.^^I think it unlikely, but, never having been a big fan of LOA (Drawn when I was a kid by Leonard Starr); it makes no big diff to me, either way.

Tracy’s “home” but has his sleeves rolled up; Sam has bagged the cuffs which may or may not have been attached to the remains of Axel’s hands (as Fritzie seems to have implied by her remarks when she found them), though it would follow that no significant trace of the rest of him was found. Daddy and Annie appear to have come back to TracyTown from wherever the Warbucks jet was a few days ago (when they were shown in flight). Maybe a few more sequences of exposition will tie up this arc nicely….

Agree with above, I suspect Axel is alive with only handcuffs (notice one is open) but also as above question why Fritz didn’t want Annie over. Perhaps we will see a one armed Axel latter.

Good morning DT and Annie fans. A new adventure is about to begin!

Axel lives, ? Please you guys, he was a few feet away from a bomb that went off & leveled the whole island !!!

I find it a stretch to believe Axel made it out alive. I guess it all hinges on what Fritz Ann was looking at. Remember, Axel was after the notes. But a stretch of the imagination isn’t anything unusual in Tracyville. I sent some goat cheese to you, SDM, and don’t eat it yourself! It’s for Kitty.

Everyone was clamoring for neat wrap-ups with no loose ends.And we’re told Axel is definitely dead.And now we have readers who refuse to accept it.So we’re creating our own loose ends.I guess it’s just the old law of supply and demand…

Just reading and wondering… Is it possible that Team Tracy could also become Team Annie? Two separate strips?Just thinking….

Ghosts, I wonder if Tracy every had to deal with ghosts.Come to think of it…where has Casper gotten off to? Maybe Tracy needs to get on that!

One question about this whole story: How does Annie goes from being 14 years old to being 7 years old again? She was 14 when we left Annie with the Butcher.

Other than that I LOVED this story! Nice break from the normal Dick Tracy story. But bring on the bad guys now!

Any chance of bringing back Little Orphan Annie in her own strip? The time is right for it…

It’d be nice to see Dick Tracy merchandise and a general revival.(Isn’t that “Infinity” game tied to Disney products? Yeah, Disney owns Marvel Comics, too.)-—Yes, Tracy could benefit from an accurate film or TV series.And the last thing we need is another Warren Beatty ego trip or another hack comedy like Dork Shadows.Unfortunately, it seems that when somebody makes a movie based on a TV/radio series, all they can do is dumb it down. I’ve seen few that were any good, and then it’s because the production team actually (gasp!) liked the original material.I’d like to see Tracy in something like the Batman animated series of the 90’s made by Bruce Timm and company.The writing was so good, DC stole – uh, borrowed – their plots and characters and incorporated them into the comics.’

(FYI: Over on YouTube is a new video short (in black and white) by Timm of Batman, circa 1939, as a special 75th Anniversary piece. Very true to Batman’s early adventures.)

On Tuesday Fritzy stated that she found Axel’s handcuffs. If his hands were blown off his body I’d think she would have said she found Axel or what remained of him. Perhaps she didn’t want Annie to know that he might have somehow survived. Don’t assume that the explosion occurred the second after Axel looked in the lab on Sunday. A whole lot of time can pass between panels. Kitty Tracy is doing a little better. Goat milk can cure anything!

Axel is dead. Fritz Ann said, “Don’t let Annie come over here.” She would not have said this if the handcuffs were all there was to see. She is also making a sly response to Tracy’s remark, “Just imagine if this kind of power were in Axel’s hands.” Axel is powerless, having been killed by Kenyon’s unstable explosive concoction. Axel is as dead as a doornail..Though I was wrong about the Nitrates…

Unfortunately all the films are just rehash the musical. Not a real Annie adventure.

True, but people are not even familiar with the pseudo-Annie anymore, let alone the real Annie.

I see Annie in a version not unlike Jonny Quest. It just didn’t interest enough people. They lost interest. I still have it but that is hardly enough to bring it back.

Yes, they lost interest, and to a great enough degree that TMS was willing to kill one of their most iconic properties. Nobody is expanding their comics section. For a newspaper to make room for a revived Annie strip, they’d have to kill one of their current strips. Any cancellation is met with reader disdain. Read about the fury that erupted when The Toronto Star cancelled Get Fuzzy five years ago.

Has it occurred to you that Mike and/or Joe might be Annie fans from way back and were bothered by the very hanging thread !?!?

I think you nailed it exactly. I couldn’t have put it better, myself.