Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for June 18, 2023

He runs amok but have no fear: short is the duration

Gertie’s phone rang off the hook. A phone scam complication.

Sparkle’s hands already full. Trey keeps her occupied

Attitude more bold than rude. He moves like rough rip tide.

Still Sparkle sees some changes. Less apt to run afoul

Sometimes he stops to look and learn with his friend, Walt the Owl

Whose vision is binocular. Sharp talons. Silent flight

Binaural hearing vexes prey. Walter hunts at night.

And yet he is crepuscular; he’s active night and day

When Attitude and he explore it is rambunctious play.

Note to self. Don’t get punched by Lizz. That’s quite a fist!

Good morning™, all!

I love the way the Plenty’s turn off the ringer on their old-fashioned phone! Lizz and the MCU are on the ball, though, and they’ll soon get the non-stop calls stopped.

’Tis time to admit

Even if it causes a fit

In a game of miss or hit

This story is a zit

Gotta luv big words poetry! LOL!

A wasted Sunday, yet again. The information obtained to “advance” this mess of a story could have been done in 2 or 3 panels.

While it’s nice to see Lizz being featured for a change, it’s a shame she’s been given mopup messenger work. You might ad well show her delivering food as a side gig.

Gweedo, Sunny Dale does look like a nice place for the goats to visit!

Good morning™, tele tap takers !

It’s a good thing she identified herself or I wouldn’t have known who it was. Lizzy don’t look like Lizzy but starts to resemble her old self in P.5.

f course, if Gertie really wanted to stop having the Plenty family’s peace & quiet from being interrupted morning noon & nite from scammers she’d ditch the landline & switch to a cellphone instead. Even if this wiretap device allows the MCU to track down Audie’s operation, the other scammers will keep on coming, as long as the scammers know her number is active. I know, I know, the Plentys are a logic-free zone, & an opportunity for Mike to write the kind of cornpone humor that went out for most people when Hee-Haw got canceled.

Surely the call center would not be contacting Gertie at all hours, maybe an unknown secret admirer is doing this to her.

Lizz has an unmarked police car. It is high time that Tracy and Sam get with the program. Unless they have a siren fetish.

I really the contrast between the two drawn characters, I think it’s because of the light background that makes it not turn out “ugly”.

Do you think Gertie has had enough caffeine already ?

I guess Trey had to share a room with his Uncle Attitude. They should be close enough in age.

I like today’s somewhat upbeat strip! Very well drawn!

z z z z z z z z z z z . . . .

Good to see Lizz finally doing something.

I don’t understand why the calls have increased so much. That first call that almost fooled Gertie was just random, wasn’t it? But the implication here is that now the scammers are somehow concentrating on the Plentys.

Happy Father’s Day to every dad in Tracyville!

Did it bother anyone else how Lizz and Gertie are drawn in totally different art styles?

From The Comic Curmudgeon:

Dick Tracy is, indeed, a rich tapestry: one of its supporting characters, Diet Smith, is a wealthy scientist whose inventions have conquered both space and time, which led to sci-fi adventures on the Moon (whose people are now hiding in Antarctica), but the strip’s world also has room for comical rustics like the Plenty family with their old-timey phones and in-home poultry. These two storylines have collided both in Dick’s family, because his son married Moon Maid, the Moon Governor’s daughter, who later got blown up by car bomb, and then he married Sparkle Plenty, Gertie and B.O.’s daughter, but then Moon Maid came back and everyone got uncomfortable for a while until it turned out she was just a gangster’s girlfriend modified with moon DNA and forbidden science. Whew! That’s quite enough Dick Tracy backstory for the moment, so we’ll have to leave for another time the questions of whether the Moon Governor is aware that he’s named a new space coup after his dead daughter’s widower’s second wife, or why he uses “M.G.” as his initials. (Is “Moon Governor” his name?)

1-LIZ moonlighting as a repo man: OPEN UP! I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE YA DEADBEATS!

2- …You put your furniture up as collateral for that loan that you never paid so either gimme some money or some furniture. GERTIE: YAWN! Hep yourself to the furniture.

3-LIZ: Well. OK. Let’s see what you got in the kitchen.

4-GERTIE: I hope you ain’t thinking about takin’ the combination stove-water heater-furnace! LIZ: Yeah – like I wanna hernia???

5-GERTIE: Oh praise be! Say – why don’t you take the washtub? It’s don’t weigh nothin’ and we never use it anyway. LIZ: OK. And I’ll take your last lump of stove coal too!

GERTIE: It’ll be nice to be out from under that derned loan we never paid on! Ima celebrate! Care for a hit on the pipe? LIZ: Pass – IT OVER TO ME GIRLFRIEND!

Lizz looks like she just stepped out of “Rex Morgan, MD”

..you’d think she’d have called ahead to see of anyone would be expecting her at the door, instead of her having to knock on the door (who REALLY does THAT, these days?….) and calling their names……cheeze-whizz, what a waste of perfectly good ink……..

Four different angles for Lizz’s face! And all looking great! This is a big part of why I love DT so much more than all of those copy/paste newspaper comic strips out there.

At High Noon, Lizz says Good Night to Gertie, who is exhausted by the phone scammers and desperately seeking some sleep-time. The pillow over the old wall phone apparently didn’t help much, but it does show Plenty of desperation, as also the sending of Attitude to Sparkle and Junior"s place (one hopes they come out none the worse for the experience). But what will Lizz and the MCU forensic technicians be able to extract from the phone tap? Or will it simply be held “in reserve” as evidence for the eventual prosecution?

Back to the boiler room story. I’ve said it before and the observation is stark here. Shelley blends styles well. Liz and Gertie are two completely different drawing styles and it somehow works here.

Love the “opening” panel.I believe it—-some of these scam calls are set on “permanent redial” that doesn’t shut off until you give up and listen to the whole pitch

Sparkle Plenty and Junior Tracy’s home totally destroyed.

Small,fuzzy “Bigfoot” seen running from scene.

Nobody’s commented on the “Crimestopper” Panel, so I’ll mention that in 1943 comedian Lou Costello’s todler son escaped his backyard crib and drowned in the family pool