Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for March 30, 2023

“And there was a guy illegally parked too! Bring a ticket book.”

Good morning™, missing panels !

THAT was a big jump !  Guess we wont be seeing where Archie’s “warning” shot went or Tracy first getting a whiff of a bad deed going down, before today’s sequence.

Whenever I see a bank robbery scene now, I always think back to the scene in “Bonnie & Clyde” where Bonnie & Clyde run out of a bank & can’t find the get-away-car because their driver. C.W. Moss, parked it down the street when a great parking space opened up. Apparently the BlowTop gang didn’t have this problem, I’m assuming that’s Ed on the other side of the car, he seems to be holding a gun in one hand & I’m guessing the loot in the other. And somehow Archie made it out of the back of the bank & out into the street without getting shot. What happens now? Do they get clean away, & Tracy’s historical first face-to-face meeting with Flattop stays intact?

Good morning™, everyone!

So, they are parked directly in front of the bank. The café that we saw before is across the street in the background.

It does seem that everyone involved managed to shield themselves from the actual bullets. We already knew that Flattop and Blowtop wouldn’t have been disabled in this incident and killing your guest stars (Archie) is bad manners (:-)

would have been nice to have a shootout and a standoff for a couple of days or so, with the Tops making good a surreptitious escape to fulfill their first appearances in the future with Tracy, leaving Dick scratching his head wondering how they escaped and who they were… and their escape was made good with Dick never seeing their faces or hearing their voices, and if he DID, then something would have struck a chord in Dick’s mind when he meets each of them face to face eventually, which he did NOT, because at that point, when they DID finally meet, this flashback story had never happened… but NOW, this flashback has been retro-conned into canon and Blow and Flat will have remembered their unofficial almost-encounter with Dick in this flashback, but will keep shut about it and Dick will be none the wiser that it was the Tops he ran into in that near-first encounter during the Wolfe/Zeck affair… this kind of stuff can be tricky to play with, but this is how I see it being played out to some degree of logicality… I THINK… LOL…

(did I just save Mike’s-ass with this POSSIBLY plausible explanation?)

“Missed me barely. But what me barely were doing out there, I’ll never know.”

These thieves are turning the street into a shooting gallery!

Is Flattop wearing a hat or a hubcap or something in the last panel?

:Missed me by THAT Much! Maxwell Smart takeoff!

Exciting isn’t it?!

Escalated quickly, but then that’s strip comics.

Say hello to my little friend !

OMG! Stray shots took out the deli across the street. Sma will be CRUSHED! OH, the cole clam! The pastrami!

Wonder if it’s a difference in model or caliber that makes some comic strip machine guns go BRATATAT instead of RATATAT? (Of course in old DC war comics they often went BUDDA BUDDA, which opens up a whole new line of speculation….)

Archie, you know that Thompson Sub Machine Guns aren’t noted for their accuracy. It’s all “spray, and, pray.” You’re just lucky Blowtops prayer wasn’t answered.

Keep things moving….great!

O.K., so he didn’t drop at least one of ’em yesterday…….oh well on with the show!!

Seems like we missed some action here…

I was a small town cop. At a convention, I spoke to a cop from NYC who was on a special bank robbery detail years and years ago, when there was a lot of them. They would stake out banks. When the robbery went down, they were already outside. 9 times out of 10, the robber was startled and would shoot, or at least raise their gun, and they would get shot down.

NOW HE’S GOT TO KISS ME!

1-DT: Oh good – the landline on this car is still connected! THIS IS TRACY! I WAS WRITING A PARKING TICKET WHEN THE CAR’S OWNERS GOT REAL UPSET ABOUT IT! SEND BACKUP!

2-ARCH DIOCESE: At least I saved the bank’s money when I took out the guy holding it – OH. Nope. There he is. I guess I missed. Anyway, I’m sure these guys have learned their lesson and will never again attempt a TRACY! WHAT’RE YOU DOING???

DT: The way I figure it, PUNK, you’ve shot all the bullets from that Tommy’s 20 round clip so you gotta ask your…. BLOWSMOKE: It’s a 50 round drum, dummy.

DT: Uh, never mind. Carry on… help!

and times today are no different than when they were back then…

worse now, if you ask me…

good old days, they AINT, then AND now…

Tracy and Goodwin are no closer to finding Nero Wolfe.

MOVIE QUOTE—-

“I know who you guys are! You’re Groucho! And you’re Chico! And you’re Harpo!

And you must be Fu—ko!"

Mel Gibson yelling at armed crooks—-LETHAL WEAPON FOUR—1998

Okay,now we KNOW this is way in the past because there’s no 2-way wrist radio.

Remember,the strip was 15 years old before Diet Smith invented the prototype.

I don’t hear any wisecracks about “talking heads” today!!

They finally sneaked a shootout past the censors!!

I’m a bit of an underworld expert,so I’m thinking of a bunch called The Brady Gang;who died in a shoot out in the middle of downtown Maine(Bangor,I thinkl).1939

I see it as a good old bank robbery. What comics are made of.

In honor of Chester Gould,there should be a small arrow pointing to “antique,outdated car phone”.

HEY, I JUST noticed that vengey ain’t been around the last couple of days… hope all is alright with him and nothing untoward is responsible for him not gracing us with his presence…

Tracy has finally realized that it’s not just a parking violation up ahead of him, as Ed (panel 2) firing back from the driver’s side of the getaway vehicle punctures Tracy’s windshield and our lead character phones (sic) in an “all cars” alert, holding his gun as crouches for safety but thereby impairs his vision of what’s going down!

Meanwhile, Archie is pinned down at a corner of the bank building (presumably) by the spray of hot lead from Blowtop’s “Chicago typewriter,” a quirky, unreliable weapon (especially when using that 50-round drum magazine). “Missed me by this much,” he thinks in a foreshadowing of Maxwell Smart.

The Jones Boys and Ed will apparently succeed in escaping, for now….