Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for August 03, 2013

Oh, yes she will!

Good morning fellow DT fans…

MM/Mysta certainly can help! I hope Hy Pressure is standing in a pool of water when MM/Mysta cranks up the voltage!

Get busy, Mysta!

Good morning, VB!

Relax Nellie, the good guys are here!

Go get ’im, Mysta!

Did I miss something? Why do they need to sell the farm, too?

Because, Neil, fracking will poison their ground water.

Pop caved pretty readily. Clone-Moon Maid will intervene, but I think the outcome may be mixed….

That’s Sailor Moon.

Dude just will not go to the police!

Grrrr! Get’em, Mysta!

“There must be a way I can help them.” Think of it soon, Mysta. He’s about to sign the papers! Methinks he may have to change his name to “Hy Voltage.”

Fry that scumbag Hy Pressure, Mysta!

Pop knows he can’t keep his family safe, but then he doesn’t know who his allies are, Mysta and Sparkle both.

Phony Moon Maid seems to be a tad schizoid. Vicious and vindictive one minute and kind and caring the next.

@Flight Suit, or at least Mr. Wheaton thinks the fracking will poison the groundwater…or perhaps Pressure grabbed for more once he had Pop on the ropes. Being too greedy is a common killing flaw among Dick Tracy villains.

But Pappy, maybe that weirdo standing outside the room with a purple scarf over her head can help. Or maybe you can call the police. Or maybe you can man up finally! LOL!!!

S.I.T.O.A.N.M.I.

I figgure when Mysta (or whoever she is) gets through with Mr. Hy Pressure, he will be the one who is fracked.

GO MOON MAID!!!!

Wheaton is some kind of dumb! “Fracking rights”?

Farmer Wheaton obviously believes in self sufficiency and has a high mis-trust of government or authorities. He is rolling over because he believes he is protecting Nellie. I believe in fierce independence but in this case, he needs help whatever he decides to do. If he doesn’t want to sell, he needs to report the intimidation he is experiencing to the police (not likely since he didn’t call the police about Sparkle’s amnesia). If he sells out he needs a lawyer to get the best deal and make sure he is not being swindled (fracking rights could make him a lot of money). I am doubting that an honest attorney would let him agree to a swindle (of course, Wheaton might be too afraid to tell the attorney or the police of the extortion).

Actually, I believe what is happening here is that Hy Pressure, working for the Apparatus is trying to buy all of the local farms so that when the mineral company begins buying up the mineral rights, the Apparatus will be the only benefactor. The Apparatus coerces the property from the local farmers for a low price and sells to the mineral company for a high price.

The point of this story is the extortion. The amount of money involved in the selling of fracking rights is the plot device used to instigate the extortion. The premise of the extortion in this story would work just as well if the story were set in the 1800s but instead of fracking, perhaps the crooks knew that a railroad would be coming through and tried to extort the farmers out of their land in order to sell at a higher price to the railroad company. This is basically the old scenario of the city slicfker versus the country bumpkin. What we have in this story arc is the same old scheme brought up to date. The pros or cons of fracking are not the issue here.

In an honest deal, Wheaton would probably be able to sell the mineral rights, become wealthy, and still be able to farm his land. However, it has become obvious that the deal offered by Hy Pressure is anything but an honest one.

This is a surprise. Why does he have to sell? What happened?

Moon Maid looks somewhat like Raven of Teen Titans with the hood over her head. Raven can zap people with her magic.