Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for October 05, 2019

Now Lizz is smoking a cigarette sideways!!! just kidding :-D

Tracy being uncharacteristically nosy here. ✨

Good morning™, confused readers!

A lot of people were speculating about whether there was any significance to the unusual appearance of the cigarettes in this story, so I started to wonder if they were anything new. I figured that if the line was just a line, it would have appeared on previous depictions of cigarettes in this strip.

The first thing I did was to look back through some of the recent strips, but I found out that cigars are the most common thing that Tracy characters smoke, followed by pipes. The most recent example I found of a cigarette with a line on it was that of Posie Ermine in this January 20, 2018, strip: https://www.gocomics.com/dicktracy/2018/01/20

Given that Sam regularly appeared with a cigarette in his mouth for a couple of years after the current creator team took over, I decided to start looking in 2012 for examples, since so few characters smoke cigarettes.

Most GoComics colorists have left the cigarettes entirely white, even when a line appeared. Here are a few examples of what I found. Until the current story, this line that often appeared somewhere along the length of the cigarette went unnoticed by those who write comments here, because there wasn’t anything unusual about it. The boxed clips in the middle of my collection are the only ones where a filter appears to be visible on daily strips.

http://worldofdt.info/img/dt_cigarettes.png

The last one, in particular, looks much like the cigarette in the picture I posted a couple of days ago:

https://shawglobalnews.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/cigarettes.jpg?quality=100&strip=all

I suspect it was just meant to be a decorative line on the cigarette and it didn’t matter much where it was placed until the current colorist decided to colour the lit end of the cigarettes like it was the filter end.

Good morning™, wistful lost children !

Lizz is scared but also ready for the possible prospect of a tearful reunion.

Whew! For once, I thought that was a strangely placed cigarette in her mouth!

Lizz is depicted well, today! I hope her reunion with her mother goes well. It would be a scary thing after all these years have past!

Could it possibly be that Lizz and Frisk have the same mother, and could be half-sisters?

Lizz appears to have aged

Significantly today

albeit quite lovely

I definitely have to say.

1- WOOF! WOOF!

2- DT: For pete’s sakes Doll. You been at the Evidence Room again? I’m not playing fetch with you!

3- DOLL: I’m sorry Tracy. Let’s go outside. Maybe some fresh air will clear my head.

DT: Good idea.

DOLL: Great! I’ll get my leash!

TRACY: Lizz, what’s your favorite flavor of pencil? ;-)

How many shots of bourbon to get that courage up ?

Lizz’s trepidation regarding meeting her biological mother has its real life counterpart…

Imagine meeting a total stranger who was your birth mother… How would you introduce yourself and what would you say ? What if your birth mother gets upset ? Why were you “adopted out” ? Does she want to relive everything that led to it ?

There are many reasons and questions for Lizz to be concerned about…

Neil needs a job

Panel 2 shows Lizz writing on paper (perhaps information that she has just retrieved by computer), so the pencil held in her mouth in panel 1 was clearly enough just so held as a brief expedient while she typed on the computer. Her trepidation expressed in panel 3 seems very normal under the circumstances.

The question is, what if any impact will Lizz’s attempt to contact her birth-mother have on the Howell babies case? Will Lizz become embroiled in Clair Howell’s plot to use Detective Frisk’s birth-mother against her?

At first I thought they drew her with a cigarette in her mouth. ;P