Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for August 14, 2023

Oh boy, it finally happened. Sunday and dailies have different continuity.

Good morning™, well deserved trapped rats !

At least Audie and the ladies will get out, and possibly into the just arrived D&S hands. Hope they brought enough ‘bracelets’. Be sure to bill Madcaps for the broken window, Dick.

Good morning™, all!

It looks like the flames are blocking Madsen from following the others, but if he can’t continue heading down the hall, it looks like there’s a window he could jump out of.

Everyone remember those windows on the side of the building when Tracy and Sam notice the fire?

Get ready to watch Madsen receive justice when he eludes being burned alive by taking a leap from a 5th story window to his doom……

Either make his own exit or be a crispy critter.

He’ll make his own exit, we will see!

I smell burned banana !!!

I kinda like Madsen, hope he survives

unless he plans to jump out the window, those walls are gonna be pretty hard to run through even with all that fire.

Excellent art, wow. That boy is screwed.

Many years ago I worked for Xerox in CT and was one of the building’s faire marshals if a fire started. Most people who left the building to the back parking lot every day when down a long hall and then turned hard left to the security center and out. If you did’t turn hard left there was, straight ahead, emergency doors. They were alarmed.

Every now and then someone would goof or was new and set off the alarm. One time we had a real fire in the elevator shaft (3 story building.) Alarms going off, smoke the whole 9 yards.

I and the regional controller were at the back to help people, we had on the little hats and vests and watched half the building walk past us and turn left just from a fear of setting off the alarm.

“what do they consider a real emergency” I asked “IBM ninjas coming through the front of the building with uzi’s?”

What now ?

Looks like someone is in big trouble,finally

Hope Susan and everyone get out safely.

Exit…stage right!

@firestrike1:

it’s never been the same for me since Sy Barry left…

I think that any time a strip gets a new creative team, there needs to be a “grace period” to let readers get used to the NCT and to allow the NCT to get settled. (This strip is no exception.)

Mike Manley (dailies) and Jeff Weigel (Sundays) have been doing a fantastic job with the artwork, but I think a new writer is needed. Tony De Paul spends much more time on his motorcycle trips than he does writing the strip, and it shows — we get way too many days in a row of single-panel strips that fail to move the story along at the proper pace and the stories just drag and drag at slower than a snail’s rate of speed.

You mean there has been continuity? Where?

Apologies for the big ballet finale with Tracy and Sam performing Schulz’s The Yodeling Swan Prince And The Bow-Tied Frog being cut. Last minute issues fitting Tracy with a tutu with a reinforced pocket for his gun. Kept tearing through with the gun dropping on the floor and shooting Sm in the foot.

Sam’s understudy, some Fife fella’ seemed to approve of this, but kept insisting “It’s an ART. Let me show you how it’s done, kid.”

There were also some heavy duty complaints around the communal dressing room of a smell of pastrami that ‘could peel paint’.

No a total loss, though. I sold the rights to GASOLINE ALLEY, so be prepared for some of that thar’ high culture stuff!

1-ROD THE BOD MADSEN: And to think I gave up smoking for my health…

2-… OH NO!!! The devil’s here to take me to Hell! Where’s my gun??? I had it a second ago…

3-… Wait! What light through yonder window breaks? Tis the dawn…of my salvation! I KNEW I HADN’T DONE ANYTHING TO DESERVE HELL!

BEELZEBUB: Sure. THAT’S WHAT THEY ALL SAY! BWAA HA HAAAA cough choke… Grab him up boys. This smoke is killing me!

Unfortunate timing by this strip, to have a fire, considering the horrible news from Hawaii. Of course, it was written before this wildfire

It sounds like a remix chant:“Koff! Koff! Cut off! I can’t go that way.”

So, I’m going to guess that our fearless foes: Audie, Sabrina, and Sprocket; got through the door pretty quickly before Madsen could turn the corner and follow them?

I’m just wondering – perhaps the building is well old enough to not be up to code as far as fire exits. It’s a thing.

Can this be the end of Leech Madsen?

Boo hoo. Bad Guy takes a wrong turn (the smoke! the smoke!), coughs (or koffs) to get our sympathy (ha!), finds flames effectively cut off the preferred route to a safe escape, turns to windows and thinks of trying to break out and jump from one of them (that perspective in panel 3 seems to show a long hallway with one side lined with windows, though I might be misinterpreting that feature, and I think on the ground floor). Anyway, the Blond Baddie is focussed now on saving his own skin from being roasted and has given up, at least for the nonce, on trying to kill Audie (and maybe Sabrina and “Susan” for good measure)….

They will search the building with no sign of Madsen, Wendy Wichell will do a live broadcast (declaring that the fire is somehow Tracy’s fault) and we will see madden’s eyes peeking out from under her ginormous hat