Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for August 27, 2023

Good morning™, everyone!

I believe the guest writer is Eric Costello, who co-created some anthropomorphic novels with Mitch Marmel. Search for “The I Do’s of March” Contents (Spontoon Island setting) to read it. Needless to say, he’s a good friend of Mike Curtis who knows his writing well.

“Couldn’t be Johnson. He hasn’t had two hits in a row in a month!”

Good morning™, murder investigators !

Story and art look promising. I like the (Chief) Wiggum name mutation for the stadium name. Is that 18 year old Sam in panel 2 ?

Obviously the water boy did it.

Looks like Lee got busted down to “patrol officer”

Super great images today , but I must admit that I’m not sure ( who did what ) ? But it is great no mater who did it ? Whew !

Can you tell by looking there are broken bones in the hand? While there is a cursory examination of the body in situ I think you wait for the medical examiner to confirm some of this details. OTOH, let’s get this puppy moving, we only have a couple weeks, so we’ll assume the officer is a trained pathologist and calling it right as to what the medical examiner will confirm.

And, thankfully, she’s wearing gloves.

Late Knight calls are so annoying….

I’d say the envelope has a clue. And Inspector Danger would have solved it by now

Very promising story beginning!

Weeghman Park. Very cute. Charles Weeghman was a German-American restaurant entrepreneur (actually he owned a chain of lunch counters) with an interest in baseball. When the Federal League started as a third major league in 1914 he was the owner of the league’s Chicago team, the Chicago Whales. He built a steel and concrete ballpark for the team, called Weeghman Park. When the Federal League failed after two seasons, Weeghman became part owner of the Chicago Cubs and moved the team to Weeghman Park. His chain of lunch counters gradually lost favour with the public and to keep that business afloat he had to sell more and more stock to his business partner, eventually selling the last of his stock in 1919. His business partner then renamed Weeghman Park for himself and his family’s company. His name was P.K. Wrigley, and Weeghman Park became Wrigley field

OOCH: As I figured I’d just sit around the house and edit on my birthday, I got to it last night. I’d seen this done by passably sane individual wearing a stylish tin hat and working with an obviously invisible assistant about 20 years back, so how complicated could it be?

Let’s just say that developing your skills from years of watching old Laurel an Hardy short is not quite the sound qualification you might reasonably assume it might be.

Got the old spring out just fine. Broken in half. No tension whatever. Either on its part or mine.

Best I can say is my left hand isn’t actually broken. Massively purple and let’s just say if I fall off the roof and desperately grasp for the eave like Indiana Jones in Te Temple Of Oops, I’m not going to count on it being my salvation. The new spring had enough tension to fell a peacefully grazing and unsuspecting rhino at 900 yards.

I now have the appealing look of an Outer Limits reject monster, with a large plum colored, very swollen left hand. Nothing broken as far as I can see, except my resolve to finish the job.

Well, being a philosophical idiot, I take away a potential benefit from this learning experience. If the swelling doesn’t go on, I can spent my birthday walking up and down our street, terrifying the local kids.

“Weeghman Park” is clearly “Wrigley field” – The look of an older inner-city ball park.

ok, a new Minit Mystery which is looking promising for NOW, at least… after this last joke of an arc, ANYTHING is going to look good, but THIS one might actually have some meat to it, so we shall see… good start and I’m actually looking forward to more of this, so don’t disappoint us… best of luck to our new crew responsible for this mystery… and let’s make it a REAL mystery with some logic to it that keeps us guessing till the very end… after the previous arc, I have high hopes and great expectations and not because ANYTHING will be better than the last arc, but because it SHOULD be a good and enjoyable read for a Minit Mystery…

The Butler did it!

An attack from the front and he fell on his face?

Find the bat, and you’ll find your murderer…….

Look at that hat in the last panel! This guy is terrible at drawing hats!

Do the clues indicate a left-handed killer and right-handed victim?

Weegman Park could have been an early name for Wrigley Field. Weegman owned the Chicago Federal League team, and, when that league folded. bought what would become the Cubs. Speaking of which, they are in contention for the playoffs. Unlike a team on the other side of town.

Mike Sagara’s art is terrific!

Congrats to Eric and Mike! Off to a roaring start! :)

From today’s Comics Curmudgeon:

Look, I know that I complain a lot that Dick Tracy’s glory days of theatrical ultraviolence are sadly far behind it, so I must admit the current Minit Mystery, which apparently involves professional baseball players bludgeoning each other to death in the locker room due to poor on-field performance, is pretty ultraviolent, actually.

A “two-week adventure” means that this Minit Mystery will conclude on September 10. It’s a tradition that the September 11 strip will be a tribute to those who lost their lives on that date in 2001.

A new story arc should begin on September 12.

I actually DO like the art here… it fits with Dick and has the appropriate style for it…

Watch your comments, Sam…

1-SAM: ♪♫ I read the news today oh boy, about a lousy team in Tracyville…♪♫

2-…Hey Dick – wanna buy what’s left of my Knight’s season tickets? Cheap? DT: I don’t care for basketball. SAM: ???

3-LEE: SPEAKING OF…my girlfriend who is a friend who happens to be a girl just called to tell me they’re giving away the unsold hot dogs for free at Weeghman Park.

4-DT: LET’S ROLL, SAM! LEE: DON’T BRING ME ANY! I’M NOT A FAN OF HOT DOGS!

5-20 OR SO HOT DOGS LATER: DT: What happened? Choke on a hot dog?

6-LIZ (sure, why not?): I’m getting a pulse! JUST KIDDING! Here, Dick – shake hands with the lead off batter for the Knights. JUST KIDDING! I’m ruling it Death By Multiple Bean Balls JUST KIDDING! DT: No, no – I like it. Write it up. C’mon Sam – I could go for another Red Hot!

SAM: Did no one else notice the water spilled at the end of the bench? Maybe… DT: Water? No way! Old Style and you’re buyin!

This looks very promising.

I like the art, especially of Tracy and Sam leaving. Good composition.

A very good job drawing that newspaper to look like actual paper, with a bent corner and wrinkles. In the past, some newspapers have looked more like stiff cardboard.

Roy Hobbs (aka Robert Redford did it)

Time to look for a left-handed murderer given all the hints in the description of the murder.

Oooh! This one’s opening with a MURDER murder!

Original TRACY art on a Pawn Stars rerun tonight.

Are they sure it’s not the Met’s locker room after all the money they spent !

The Yankees are team batting .229 so it’s not them because they would have missed the guy’s head the way they are swinging !

Gotta Love panel 4. The inset of Lee(?) still talking about the found body and the rest showing men on their way out the door.

So far, so good!

Both the art work and the story text in this new Minit Mystery are quite satisfying on this first day of the two-week run.

“Weeghman Park” is a thinly-veiled alternate identity for Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs (north side team), both in the name itself (as explained above by bmckee) and by the image in the so-called throwaway panel of this “half-page” format [see, e.g., https://tinyurl.Com/28p8vesv ] that pretty much replicates the façade of the real Wrigley Field. But that would make the “Knights” equivalent to the Cubs, whereas the poor record and the antics resulting in the murder of a player in the locker room suggest to me more Chicago’s south side team, the White Sox, who are struggling this year and have had some “drama” off field.

The detailed description of the pattern of the wounds on the corpse by the CSI technician to Tracy seem to point towards a left-handed perpetrator. (Hey, don’t look at me that way just ‘cause I’m left-handed and a northsider who was a Sox fan back when I followed sports much more than now!)

Water under the bench, envelope under the bench as well, and a letter dangles precariously from the edge…the victim fell to his left a d the injuries are to the right side of the head, meaning the killer stood IN FRONT of him and (presumably) swung a baseball bat…the supposed defensive wounds dont gel tho, unless the victim tried to block the bat before impact