Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for October 17, 2021

Tracy knows a thorny rose and how to bide his time

Pick her up. Slap on the cuffs. ‘Tis time she faced her crime.

Whispered low in ear, Pouch did hear. News sure travels fast

Treasure hunters are not punters. Cash makes good times last.

No need now to travel back. Great treasures realized

A messy end. Time not a friend. Drone not stabilized.

Tear in time ends Sterling’s crime. Reaction loud and strong

Time cares not. The corpse still hot. While time just marches on.

Well, there goes the time probe. Elliot should have read the report on the attempts to travel to the future.

Bye bye Eliot!!

Good morning™, everyone!

There wasn’t supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom, but now the Smith Industries building has turned into a giant fireball. That will really “erase the tracks” and a few other things!

I assume that Sterling Eliot decided to play the lottery for his own personal profit and planned to leave the Apparatus organization with his winnings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9wmWZbr_wQ

Happy days is over all because of greed…

Well, Mr. Elliot certainly “wrote his ticket” out of the Apparatus !

I wonder what will happen to the Ace of Spades ?

And Mumbles will have plenty of “downtime”…

Mumbles needed a break. He was starting to slur his speech.

That’s that.

Now there’s a plot twist I don’t think any of us were expecting…

Good morning™,“time” of death !

This guy dies and there is no questioning so the apparatus gets away with the recovery that involved the unauthorized use of the Time Drone™.

Oops

What just happened here?

Years ago, Diet Smith sent a camera into the future and when it came back, it had a picture of Smith Industries in rubble “…and aircraft filled the sky.” This has got to be it.

I sure didn’t expect this! What a twist! Did anyone die? Did anyone get hurled into the past or the future? Man, I can’t wait till Monday!! And it’s Saturday night here as I write this, 11:00 PM, to be exact. Whew!

So the plan was to go into the future (not previously done??) see who won the lottery (what if it wasn’t you?) and then play those numbers and change the future? What could possibly go wrong?

Don’t you HATE it when that happens?

That’s what you get when you try to mess with the future. He shoulda checked with Michael.

Looks like some major damage to Smith Industries properties.

What an unexpected twist, will this kill the Time Drone program?

Irony of ironies, Eliot did write his own ticket outta there except it was a losing ticket.

Well that was unexpected.

Looks like SOMEONE decided the future remain a closed book, and planted a virus in the Time Drone

ka-oops

Super great images today , and now what ?

Well that is one way to end a tale that was becoming more convoluted every day.

Whatever the aftermath, this is the most exciting action the strip has seen in ages….

Very impressive turn of events. Kuddos to team Tracy.

Wouldn’t it be something if the green gas sends Tracy and Sam into the past?

“Where’s the enemy?” “You’re breathing him!”

I didn’t expect this so quickly…

And lo, Smith Enterprises is no more. Destroyed, not with a whimper, but with a BFB!

The real culprit is chain smoker Smith, who dropped a lighted cigar in the machinery.

Where was Eliot’s googles? So much for safety in the workplace.

Well, then. explain THIS away ad ask for a week off to recover.

Your ticket has been formally punched.

It will take every fire brigade in Tracy land to deal with this blaze. As for the tech guy….he is both barbecue and toast at the same time.

When the Apparatus sees this on the news….one can imagine what Ace of Spades fate is going to be.

Diet Smith is in another part of Smith Industries when he sees his latest development go up in smoke. Egad! Smith almost swallowed his cigar.

“…the encounter could create a time paradox, the result of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe!”

—Dr. Emmett Brown, Back to the Future Part II

Looks like the Doc was right.

1-SCARFY FACE: OK, as master of my Grand Theft Auto city, I run the hookers out of town – BY RUNNING OVER THEM! BWAA HA HAAAA…

2-WHAT THE…Did a hooker’s IUD just pop out and materialize…?

3-THAT CAN’T BE GOOD! ABORT, ABORT! Oops. Can’t say that..

4-KAAAAAAAAA-BOOM!

5-HORNY (aka Mysta): IT’S HAPPENING! THE MOON PEOPLE TAKE OVER HAS BEGUN! Oh. It’s just Smith Industries blowing up. I wonder if that’ll have any impact on my cushy Smith Industry subsidized life… IT BETTER NOT!

It ripped the fabric of the space-time continuum.

…and this was how the apocalypse began…

…and this was how the apocalypse began…

A better ending to criminal misappropriation! !

You can’t travel into the future because there are infinite futures being created simultaneously.

No wonder the drone was unstable! look at the size of that keyboard? Must be one from a dollar store.

Well, I was expecting a Sweatbox Ending.

Just not this fast!

This isn’t good for Smith industries.

Looks like another possibly unvaxxed cop didn’t make it..

I think Diet Smith probably got out, but his security and Rose? IF Diet has an experimental prototype of the drone, it could be somewhere off the property…I’m sure the plans for it are backed up in the cloud. I’ma just thinking of all the work that was put into it…what do you think? (^.^)

Elliot competing with Shatner now?

…and it couldn’t happen to a nicer (son of a bachelor)!

Oops.

Over 100 comments already. There’s a lot to talk about today.

Er, assuming Eliot was peering into the future to see the winning Mondobux numbers, like in a newspaper or TV report, wouldn’t he also likely have seen news coverage of a tremendous mysterious explosion at Smith Industries? & Wouldn’t that have tipped him off & maybe lead him to decide to just leave the time drone in the future? Of course, if that happened, then the explosion would not have happened & then there would have been no news report of the explosion … this is why time travel stories are so problematical.

I think Eliot’s first name is Tom so "T.ELIOT, and as Gould used to do with characters names spelled backwords ??? TOILET ? Giggle, Giggle

You should check out this YouTube channel. (https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC1W8ShdwtfgjRHdbl1Lctcw) The videos there may feel like they were taken via Time Probe.

Those are great videos. I’ve seen others where they take footage from the silent film era, correct the playback speed, colorize the images and add ambient sound. There are clips of New York City and Europe.

This is the closest thing to time travel that exists.

Well, isn’t that nice?

“The late Sterling Eliot perished at his own hand, causing a massive explosion and fire at the Smith Industries complex, centered in a building reportedly used for top secret research. Diet Smith had no immediate comment. Mysta Chimera has not been seen since the Blast From the Past, as some wag termed it.”

Wait ’til Wendy Wichel is finished spinning this one!

I wonder if Sterling Eliot’s deadly error will open a rift in the space/time continuum resulting in who knows what kind of damage to the timeline in Tracy’s universe….

Could Flattop and his family of murderous fiends be brought “back to life”?

https://youtu.be/VErKCq1IGIU

https://youtu.be/ZcesnqVF0us

https://youtu.be/oPDSoFgivPA

Maybe time itself got tired of being messed with.

Wow it’s like when Gotham City was destroyed several years ago in the comics. What in heck is gonna happen next?