Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for April 08, 2020

Good morning™, nostalgic readers!

“Lettle Sparkle” (shouldn’t that be “leettle”?) isn’t so little anymore, but still might be shocked to hear all the details or that time when her daddy aided a fugitive. I wonder if B.O. will be a character in the movie. I assume he will, so the whole story will be out.

Oy Vey, another boring trip down misery lane!

Could be worse, we could have had Crystal yelling at Shaky on the beam “NO SHOOTING HERE!”

LOL!

A friend of mine from Queens passed away from the dreaded Coronavirus late Saturday. So sad.

Please be careful and safe.

Good morning™, coverup connivers !

Mi’ as well be the first to let those secrets out than wait for the inevitable discovery by the fams.

So, not the real Breathless but an actor, bringing back another dead one.

Now that we can see what aroused BO Plenty’s interest yesterday wasn’t anything to do with the latest Shaky case, it appears we’ve reached the start of a new story. When I’ve decided a new story’s started, I do a list of every Tracy story on GoComics. Unfortunately, soon after I started doing this GC imposed a stupid, asinine character limit of only 2000 characters which includes every letter, space, punctuation, & html, which means I have to do this over several posts. I’ll do my initial introduction in this post and start the list in the next one, because otherwise, I can’t even get past the second year.

My notes are fairly simple. Just my name for the story (usually the name of the main villain or villains, unless they just aren’t the emphasis) followed by the dates the story began and ended. If someone was the main villain for more than one story, I add a “II” and so on to emphasize this. If more than one villain from a past story are in the same story committing major crimes, I include them altogether. Finally, for the 3 cases of more than one villain with the same name (Chameleon, Mr. Crime, Shaky) I add, “The Second” in front of their names.

Minit Mysteries Note: at the request of people who wanted to see these listed here, I’ve decided to make a separate post for them to keep the listing of Mike Curtis stories in as few posts as possible.

At the start of the GoComics archive, the writer was the late Mike Kilian. Personally, I like his work on Tracy and think he’s very underrated. At the very least, he knew how to tell a story in the daily strip format where every day, something happens that moves the story along, a quality his successor sorely lacked. I recommend anyone here who hasn’t read these stories to check them out.

TBC cuz GC decided to suck now

For a wrap-up on Shaky: [ala Stephen Kemble] "Shaky was sentenced to 10 years for armed assault, during which time, he studied to become a lab tech / medical assistant.

Upon completing his sentence and parole Shaky moved to Century Village, Florida when he soon became very popular working in a senior citizen’s gyn clinic."

How is Tess, folks?

Okay!!!………

Breathless eh? Better get her quarantined!

OKay folks, forget about those panels where Tess was shot and might have died, like Bobby Ewing’s death, it was just a dream.

Madonna!

Bob Oscar (B.O.) Plenty, that`s my name, ask me again and I`ll tell you the same…

1-PAPPY O’PLENTY: Glad I still get Variety…

2-…There’s a castin’ call right here in this town and they need a leadin’ man!

3-Some would bet everything they got that I wouldn’t git the part. On the other hand, the guy who sold me this plastic hat never thought anyone would be dumb enough to buy it. Just goes to show…

Is there a story behind the dog bowl hat?

B.O. never told to Gertie about his criminal past? This is interesting.

Dig into the IDW archives It’s all there!

Although he never knew it, Breathless Mahoney was the original Shaky’s step daughter. It seems like Mike is reviving the entire Shaky clan.

Shaky’s wife when he died was Elia Mahoney. Her daughter, Breathless was away at school during most of the marriage and never met her stepfather. When Shaky died, Elia recruited her daughter Breathless to find Shaky’s body. Elia knew about Shaky’s hiding hole. The reason for finding the body was actually to find Shaky’s shoe which contained a key to a safe deposit box full of money he had extorted. Breathless posed as a Journalism student and helped Tracy and the police find the body. Not knowing what it contained, they gave her the shoe as a souvenir of her help.

The story went on with a few side stories along the way (involving BO Plenty in his criminal days before he married Gertie). Breathless was eventually apprehended but caught a disease while in prison and died.

“Almost”?

I’ve about had it with this strip. It seems the stories are limited to 1 violent act, no deaths, and can only run 7-8 weeks. The entire extortion plot made no sense, then we had the shooting, and from there, it went into free fall until the non-violent climax, with Tess totally forgotten. Given the dramatic finish, Shakey could have been wanted for double parking.

There doesn’t seem to be a creative mind left behind this strip. Rehash of stuff from Gould masterful workings. BTW, if this is going to be about BO’s past, let’s also include how GG was introduced, when she nursed and hid the Brow. To reiterate from the above comment..It’s all in the IDW work, reprinting the good old days when they were original and a lot more interesting

Uh oh. Looks like the skeletons are going to begin tumbling out of the Plenty family closet.

Two names: Gertie and the Brow.

who ya talkin’ to Pappy?

Just my opinion, but I continue to think that, the job of writing comics not being highly remunerative, Mike’s slate is overflowing with various projects and he does not and unfortunately cannot give enough time to Dick Tracy to construct well-planned and fully thought-out stories. The pattern has been that he comes up with a hook for an interesting start, but then just wings it the rest of the way, rather heedlessly of how to end. The End Game, as it’s called in chess, is definitely the weakest aspect of his writing. Thank goodness for Joe’s consistently strong art work!

I don’t know why we’re getting this B.O. Plenty interlude when a MinitMystery is scheduled to start Sunday: this IMO is not the way to build interest for a story that won’t truly start for another two weeks-plus….

Too late, B.O.! It’s all in that coffee table book that came out in the 70s.

Madonna’s probably too old to play her now.

“Or at least that I almost got caught that one time.”