Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for July 01, 2023

Tracyville has only ONE place that has stucco?

That’s a little unbelievable.

Tracy the investigator

Dicks still looks like he ate the canary in panel two…

Half of NYC is made of stucco! LOL!

Which is worse,

Sam’s bowtie or Tracy’s clip on tie?

Good morning™, all!

Proper evidence bags. That’s good to see. It looks like the Art Deco district at the south end of Miami Beach. I’m a fan of that style from the 1920s.

What’s all this wasted money and effort with gloves and bags and such? Just have Sam slip the evidence into his pocket like usual.

Good morning™, singular stucco districts !

Convenient, those kind of buildings are confined to just that section of town. That should make this a clean sweeping up of the bad guys. With any luck, if this is where the phone center is, that ‘Suzy’ will have gone home before the inevitable raid comes.

“Well, I could be wrong Sam, but this appears to be stucco from March 17, 1938, which is the date they were finishing up the former Gimbel’s Department Store in Nomar. And, if I had to make a guess, I suspect it came from the left side of the old employee’s entrance.”

“That’s amazing, Tracy.”

“Thanks. It’s easier when you plant the evidence.”

As we see in the last panel, the stucco came from the home of those darn Cambell kids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell’s_Kids

Mmm, mmm, good!

And tracy knows this…..how exactly?

I’m trying to figure out why anybody would think a random piece of stucco was evidence of anything.

The only place to buy groceries in that part of town…That’s right, Nomar is a food island.

….some Art Deco-type place! But of COURSE! D.T. say: "Elementary, Sammy-Me-Boy, ELEMENTARY!!

Well, this ought to be fun….

1-DT: Yum! I just a piece of fudge that Tess put in my holster (wonder what’d she did with my gun?) Oh. And she’s using those evidence baggies I took home. Saving money and surprising me with treats! I really should try to see her one in a while…

2-SAM: You gonna share that? DT: Uh, look in the mirror, Chubbo – your double chins are developing double chins. SAM: So…no?

3-MEANWHILE… THE KILLER: I’ve found the perfect hideout up here on the 2nd floor behind windows no one can see through in the ONLY ART DECO BUILDING IN TOWN. OWWW! Well, it would be perfect if I didn’t have to keep digging these stucco chunks outta my shoe!

Good thing the criminal carries around evidence and just leaves it around.

One place that was not gutted out for a coffee shop or some trendy restaurant. The developers have not gotten around to it. No real estate company has the Nomar shopping area as a property for sale.

Nomar? No-mar? No-more? Namor? LOL

Okay, now can Team Tracy tomorrow extend to six weeks their streak of actually advancing the plot on the Sunday strip? LOL

Perhaps the pinch hitter is stalling to hit the Sunday strip, but the pace has slowed down a bit.

Otherwise, I don’t have an issue with the stucco. It might not be entirely realistic, but this is a kind of alternate universe and has a number of unrealistic elements.

Let’s just follow the lead already.

Wow! Who ever knew Tracyville was such a smallish city with such a distinctive stucco-trimmed district?!

Its old, abandoned (?) Campbell building, in a district still with overhead electrical wires, must be nonetheless pretty well known to locals.

But, even so, how is the broken bit of stucco trim going to lead to a killer? Can it even lead to a boiler-room phone scam center?

Given how long Tracy and Tess have been together, I bet Tracy is an expert in very old trim.

With all the stucco I saw used when I lived in Los Angeles, I wonder if this part of Tracyville is in an earthquake zone .

Jessica Rabbit famously said, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”

Analogously, Tracy isn’t that smart, he’s just written that way. Being able to identify the age and provenance of a piece of stucco is pretty specialized knowledge. Didn’t Sherlock Holmes once write a treatise on tobacco ash?

Looks like a derelict Greyhound Bus terminal