Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for March 25, 2024

Good morning™, all!

So they have a whole plan for how to pick Annie up again afterwards. It seems complicated, but I guess it would work. Does Annie still have that locket, I wonder.

Why not just use a pawn shop?

Great – Now Mike is pulling ideas from other media – The whole “Locket” thing was original to the 1977 Musical, not from the comic strip. (and oddly enough, the locket looks exactly like the one Avon put out to tie into the 1982 movie!)

an extra-added detail is now inserted into the Annie mythos…

more of Mike’s retcon interference…

If Harold was brilliant, or smart, they wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.

Wow, it’s a good thing these two Brainiac’s weren’t in Annie’s life or they would have killed her before she turned one. What a couple of Bozo’s!

Annie is giving the; "Live Long and Prosper " hand sign. There’s Vulcan blood in her!

Good morning™, Identifying Tokens !

The witch may want to toss the locket, or try to pawn it for it’s precious metal content if it has one.

THE GOOD NEWS: is Annie will have the locket and Bob will have the broken off piece. Happiness all around. :-D

Harold kinda looks like Gumby in the first panel. Too much upper body.

Calm down, Chuckie. Less is more!

Excellent artwork today……

It’s a wonder there weren’t crooks waiting to snatch abandoned babies off the steps of orphan asylums. Well, the criminal mind was not that devious.

“It was a great idea to send the other half to Bob Smith”

“Yes, so he can lose it for years in his garage.”

Or:

“It was a great idea to send the other half to Bob Smith”

“What did you say in the note you sent with it?”

“Note I sent? You were supposed to write the note!.”

Talk about planning to fail.

They have so little faith in themselves, in the other agents of the FBI, in Dick Tracy, in Warbucks, and the Warbucks’ security team that they are leaving Annie at the orphanage so Boris and his remaining henchmen won’t be able to take revenge after Boris and his remaining henchmen defeat every defender of the law in the civilized world. “Hey, idiots, if Boris has already killed you he won’t be looking for Annie for further revenge!”

And if Boris is omniscient, and will know if Annie is left with any friend, relative, or neighbor, he will know that Bob Smith knows Annie’s location. (But the truth is, you dim-bulbs, ol’ Sirob doesn’t give a d@mn. You’re just abandoning your kid.)

Annie looks absolutely adorable, today!

Shades of Harry Potter ?

OF COURSE there’s no “safe drop” area for abandoned babies as Missouri and some other states have instituted, and which I already mentioned a couple of weeks back.

So cartoonist and LOA creator Harold Gray never intended to use something like a locket, because he apparently didn’t want to use someone claiming to be the real parents as a plot device, as was done in Gasoline Alley and Popeye. (In 2022, early in Randy Milholland’s run on Popeye, it was established that Swee’pea’s real mom is apparently still out there.)

Halves of a broken locket is a much more reliable identifier than official papers or something like that.

How does Sirob know Annie has been born? Why would he be looking for an infant? I thought Warbucks was his target. This is a clown show.

We need Sam Catchem to slap these jokers around a little bit .

Wow. They are just dropping it and running. I guess they don’t want dinner to get cold while filling out important forms. Guess how this scenario would’ve a changed had it been 40 below 0 – NOT ONE BIT. Well, the kid would’ve been Popsicle Annie instead of Little Orphan Annie maybe…

It must feel a little odd for Charles to be starting his regular gig here with a story that features none of the main Tracy characters except Tracy (and not that much of him either).

I dunno….this seems to give away a big chunk of the story. We all know that she was never claimed, so the parents must have been killed in the plot. Maybe we can just skip the next six weeks now that we know. It would be okay with me.

SMART? Oh ha ha ha ha haw haw haw haw har har har har!!! Now that’s a good one.

Well, now that there is no mystery left for Little Orphan Annie—make that Big, Rich, Adopted, Toenail Painting Annie, there is no reason to ever hear from her again. Her story has been told.

Right. Leaving her outside all by herself was the safest thing. Why not knock, and tell the person you’ll be right back? Even though we know they won’t…

1-HAROLD: I think we should take the bassinet and blanket. We paid good money for those!

2-WINNIE: Nah. Goodwill always has them cheap. We’ll take that locket your mother sent her though!

3-HAROLD: CRAP! IT BROKE! ANNIE: WAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH! WINNIE: YOU IDIOT! WHY’D YOU HAVE TO YANK IT SO HARD??? HAROLD: LIGHTS! BEAT IT!

MOVIE QUOTE—-“He has the pleasing personality of a hyena with boils”

Narrator—-Robert Youngson’s DAYS OF THRILLS AND LAUGHTER—1961

If you call customer service of the VERMONT COUNTRY STORE—Rutland,vermont 1-800-211-4741

If you’re on h old you hear old radio commercials—-and one of them is for Little Orphan Annie and Ovaltine

tHE BEST LAID PLANS OF MICE AND MEN GO AFT AGLEY…..

Annie is so darned cute and innocent in Panel 2—-no idea that from now on her life will be one big roller coaster ride.

And too bad nobody did a background check on what KIND of orphanage that is….

Is Dicko on one of them there “Administrative Leaves?”

Meh. O.K. Done here.

Is this actually cannon for Annie? or are all the cameos in Dick Tracy non-cannon?

I’m sorry to say it, but the plan is so clever that it goes around and becomes the opposite of clever.

As has been pointed out, the “broken token” trope is much much older than Broadway musicals or comic strips—it was a common feature of lots of British ballads (and probably other nationalities too).

Many years at the Winnipeg Folk Music Festival I enjoyed a folk singer who had a bit of a twist on it: The girl was a cobbler, told her fiancé to leave his boots behind, and gave him a receipt to take with him on his travels. He goes off to fight the cruel war in High Germany or something, and returns many years later. She doesn’t recognize him, of course, until he produces the receipt to identify himself. She replies, “They’ll be ready Thursday.”