Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for August 23, 2016

Is that Sean Connery …?

It’s supposed to be Dr. Watson.

Witness …

… or accomplice?

I don’t get the significance of dog’s head cane guy?-———————————I think he’s just another tourist who’s thinking just what we did on Sunday – yep, into the river, dead meat.-I wonder if we’re trying too hard to connect everybody with a cameo (I know, I used to do it).

Nigel Bruce …?

If it is a descendant of Watson, does he know something we don’t?

I suspect it’s either a Watson & Holmes partner, or even a descendent of James-Moriarty who knows how to survive the falls is to be in the river.

https://goo.gl/images/6Cjw5P gives us a single stick with a Wolf’s head — Auguste Lupa AKA Nero Wolfe is supposedly the great Detective’s son

A new man entersSeems to know more than othersWill he help or hurtKnowledge yes but which to helpSeeing strangers what to do

Dark Shadows’ Barnabas Collins is known to carry a wolf’s head cane …

By the way, here’s a similar trekking pole on amazon.ca: Store Indya Wooden Walking Stick Cane Hand Crafted with Dog Face Shape Handle

perhaps the walking stick from Hound of the Baskervilles: http://www.basilrathbone.net/films/shhound/hb004.jpg

It’s Tracy dead?

I think we’ve resumed our Grand Tour of classic fictional detectives — except now the sleuths have come to Tracy instead of vice-versa. The tourists all speak English — and I suspect both men are Brits. The robed-and-tonsured gent in the first panel looks to me like a man of the cloth, and G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown seems a likely candidate. That in turn suggests at least the possibility that the mustachioed gent is Gideon Fell, an amateur sleuth who specializes in “locked room” mysteries, whom creator John Dickson Carr patterned on the real-life Chesterton.

There’s nothing familiar to me about Louise, but something about her “Yeah” makes me think she’s a yank. Googling a bit turned up no likely fictional characters, but I did come across a description of Louise Rensil, a real-life former film-studio executive who claims she’s discovered the inspiration for two of fiction’s greatest gumshoes, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, in the person of one Sam Marlowe, an African-American detective who worked in Hollywood in the 30s and 40s. That Louise was described, in the 2014 L.A. Times feature story “Finding Marlowe,” as “a wisp of a redhead with high cheekbones and appraising eyes.”

Geez, Louise, pleaseTake a picture of the river.To fall so far and land in thatIt makes a body shiver.The dogged headUpon the caneIts eyes so fiercely lockedUpon the churning watersIts owner far from shocked.His calm demeanorSays so muchYet the man remains so silent.The men he sawPlunge to the mawDid battle oh so violent.

I am loving this story! :D

Nigil Bruce:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/3f/bb/6a/3fbb6a16a80c717b52dc25d2b7d81929.jpg

The way this strip is going, Simon Templar will be making an appearance.

i find it amazing how seemingly nobody just “reads the strip” anymore and wants to “decipher the clues” or “try to outwit the writer by guessing the road the story will take” before it’s unveiled.

whatever happened to just ENJOYING a comic strip?!?

First thought was that the stick’s a clue or a totem. Then I thought he was just giving it a good look.

.Good morning guys!.Have no fear, Vista Bill is here!

Maybe a Baskerville? Not Barnabas Collins…?

Z-z-z-z-z. I’d have been more impressed if his cane had a goat’s head on it. Maybe, “honored” is a better word.

I don’t recall Watson having such a cane.

He looks a bit like William J. Burns “America’s Sherlock Holmes,” too.

Is he quoting lines from the Sherlock Holmes story?

We Are All Dick….TBC…

Dr. Watson makes several references to a similar cane, Holmes’ “alpine stock”, in The Adventure of the Final Problem. In the accompanying original illustrations it is depicted as having a curved dog’s-head handle.

Though other, more erudite, speculation in earlier comments here may better describe the first panel, I cannot help but hear a (sly?) reference to Ethel, here Louise, in Ray Stevens’ The Streak (how low-brow of me!).As for the gentleman in panels 2 and 3, who seems to know the Holmes & Moriarty story well, he looks to me like A.I.C. Doyle himself, who at times used a cane (though with limited, online research, I cannot find reference to one with a dog’s or wolf’s head). See the Doyle statue (from Wikipedia)….Did Tracy and Kadaver really plunge into the river?

looks like dog head cane guy is a brand new character. A brand new super villain no doubt.

Being greedy, can we have both Vincent Price (radio) and Roger Moore (TV) play Simon Templar? I loved both their portrayals. (No, I’m nowhere near old enough but thanks to retro-TV channels and Satellite radio I got to enjoy both) And I agree that that has to be either Watson or Doyle in the last frame. Only makes sense due to Holmes not actually dying there in the books.

Looks a lot like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to me.

I don’t get the significance of dog’s head cane guy ?

I believe that it’s meant to be an intriguing puzzle. You are not supposed to get the significance.

.Lawrence Talbot used a silver wolf’s head cane to kill the gypsy lady’s husband, a werewolf, that attacked him. Alas, Larry was bitten in the fight..Enter: “The Wolfman”!.

Into the Mighty River…TBC

Go with the humour !!!