Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for June 15, 2023

I was right!!! :-)

“Sorry we dinged your Lamborghini.”

Surprise, Surprise. Surprise! NOT!!!

Good morning™, all!

Suddenly, a Space Coupe appeared. I wonder where that came from. It definitely seems like a preview of an upcoming plot.

holy shee-IT… a genuwine space coupe really HAS materialized in the yard… I thought it was a lot of wishful thinking on a lot of people’s part here…

it WOULD make a helluva lawn ornament as well as the talk of the town…

color me flabbergasted…

it’s not very often that my flabber can get gasted like this…

Everything’s coming together now. It’s a clever forgery made by Silver Nitrate!

I had the Aurora model kit of the Space Coupe.

Nice of whoever left that Space Coupe there to put it right on top of Diet Smith’s swimming pool……

What purpose was served leaving the space coupe over a pond?

If word gets out, the call center will be offering it as a prize. Sure would make Publisher’s Clearing House Prize Patrol look like they are awarding monopoly money.

A parking ticket.

I’m sure Mike wants this to be a, “Oh Wow!!!” moment.

It’s not!

Once again, he trudges up a relic from the past in the hopes of exciting us.

Who flew the space Coupe and left the note, Chick Tracy???

Times are rough if the best introduction of a new character the past few years is a bird!

“I thought you gave up building space coupes”. “I have, this one appeared overnight”. Hmm…an employee of Smith Industries probably took ownership when he or she heard they were being discontinued. The garage this object was in must have been padlocked. I can’t imagine the person operating it when going out of town on vacation.

Good morning™, Shazaams !!!

Maybe (ex) Moon Gov needs an oil change and the gonkulator* tuned and those old magnets replaced with the current crop of super mags.

Where did that one come from ? *

The moon people are back!

“Here’s your coupe. We want our damage deposit back.”

Sorry, I just have this vision of a pilot opening the door and dropping into the pool…….

I guess they didn’t have enough yellow ink to have Tracy in his coat.

Aha. Just what the alien astronut theorists had always suspected.

I bet it was put there by a bunch of engineering students as a college prank.

Or maybe it’s just an association of ideas because I came here after reading Doonsbury.

Diet Smith sent a space coupe on autopilot off into deep space to get rid of a little “problem” named Dr Zygote. Alas it has returned! Is it the same one? If they survived, Smith could be charged with kidnapping and attempted murder!

And the reason Tracy had to come out alone? And whoever parked it on Smith’s lawn knew the day all of Smith’s household staff was gone, doctor’s orders? (Why did the doctor order Smith give all the staff a day off each week? 6/12.) The mansion is isolated no one saw the thing being landed or parked in the back yard? (I guess if the walls are high enough that’s plausible…) But if you’re as interested in security as Smith certainly should be, and high walls would indicate – what do the security cameras taping every angle show? And I repeat the question I asked yesterday and started off with today – why ask Tracy to come alone? He asked Tracy to come alone before he’d found the note on the dashboard, so that can’t be the reason. Is he hoping Tracy will help him bury it in the backyard so no one will find it?

It’s a parking ticket, diet wants tracy to sweep it under the rug…his insurance premiums are already thru the roof!

Oh we’re goin’ to Moon CityGonna have some fun….

It’s payback time. The doctors paid Diet a visit

I was right…

“The people watching me put this note on your windshield think I’m leaving my number and my insurance contact, but I’m not.”

A note from the Lunarians.

“We no longer have a need for your space vehicle to travel the cosmos. We have developed our own.”

I was half joking when I mentioned the Lunarians yesterday. Now I wonder if I had a touch of precognition, with this soon to explained deposit of a Space Coupe on top of DIet’s pool?

Yes ! There it is . One of the coolest space vehicles in fiction. At last my strained patience is rewarded .

Who called it?

Someone said yesterday that it was a space coupe on the lawn. Who was it? They deserve the Armchair Detectives Award of the week for accurate wild guesses. Kudos!!

Hmm, completely evades all detection? Interesting.

The note on the dash is everyone’s order for Chick-fil-A. It’s a Grub Hub Space Coupe. lol….

Note: Ship needs and upgrade from the 50’s to the 2000’s. Bill me.

A parking ticket?

Probably just a coincidence – but the shape of the rear of the space coupe reminds me a little of the yellow ornament on the wall in Smith’s mansion – seen in both Monday and Wednesday’s strips.

“Hmm. Someone says they hit it in parking,but ‘tough noogies’ on finding him. THIS is a job for a DETECTIVE! But I’m kinda’ tired. I’ll call Sam.”

1-DT: I like the color DOIT: Yeah, of course you do. Anyway, I went inside and found this note. DT: That’s nice.

2-DOIT: frown In case you’re wondering, it says: ”Flush out the shltter for me, Signed Cousin Eddie.”

DT: Was his dog, Snots, in there? DOIT: sigh NOW you’re curious. Yeah. It took him the longest 5 minutes of my life to “finish”.

It wasn’t that long ago, within the strip, that Tracy went on his little adventure to “Moon Valley in the Arctic”. Seeing this Space Coupe should instantly trigger the thought “they’re ba-ack”

It turns out it’s the Thermians who have reconstructed a space coupe from reading old Dick Tracy comics.

I think we’ve found the boiler for the boiler room.

Well I was close earlier I said space ship……off we go into the wild blue yonder….

Cool , cool , cool , nothing but cool . The Moon / Space Coupe is as great as it is cool . Like nothing we’ve ever seen before . Complete , total and radical departure from the staid and ordinary of design . A machine of magnificence. Mike , put away your quill and unleash Shelley to dazzle me with renderings of this vehicle from every possible angle and in every mode of flight . Now to you simpletons who make silly and ignorant remarks about parking tickets or The Space Coupe crashing or the pilot falling out the door into the pool – you are all stuff to fill graves .

cue the dark ambient music with discordant overtones which, although broadly tonal, is inflected with chromatic and polytonal passages representing the archetypal example of a florid, melodramatic style

MOVIE QUOTE—-“Time is a crook”

Peter Lorre—BEAT THE DEVIL—1954

It’s just the Moon Governor,finally returning the lawn mower he borrowed in 1967.

Actually,this CANNOT be Dr.Zy Ghote’s ship; which would hardly have miraculously returned without a scratch on it.

And whoever flew it h ere and dropped it off,how did THEY get back home?

They also had the colossal nerve to park over Diet’s swimming pool.

The note is a parking ticket left by an overzealous rookie cop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX_t-pNBMNU oh my!

Link was here. He’s searching for Zelda

How about that? I made a lucky guess.

This has absolutely nothing to do with Dick,but I must explain my absence from yesterday.

I took the day off from work to see a Broadway show.We have Ray Toler and a few other Chicagoans on this page,so maybe they saw GOOD NIGHT,OSCAR when it played Chicago.

Sean Hayes won the Tony for “Best ACtor In A Play” last Monday,and I’ve been a Levant groupie for over 20 years;so I made it my business to see it as soon as I could.

Levant was one of a kind, so the idea of ANYBODY convincingly impersonating him tough to get a grip on.A genius and one of theworld’s leading hypochondriacs,he worried himself into a complete nervous breakdown in the middle 1950’s.The show focuses on his nervous television comeback in 1958.

And oh,that saintly wife of his.He would only have lasted half as long without her.

If Bernard Breakdown could play the piano, he’d be Oscar Levant

Combed through the cultTVman hobby shop website for a Space Coupe kit. Everything else you can think of but no Space Coupe. Some Ed Roth reissued kits that I want and the Vampirella kit looks cool but I guess the Space Coupe is going to have to be a scratch build .

Bring Back the Moon Maid! (Although she was killed)

moon people are baacccckkkk!

….note reads: Please perform scheduled oil-change and magnetic wands rotation…..am leaving it with you, promise to return to shop for pickup before closing time……thanks!!

For me, the key word today is “appeared” (as in Diet’s explanation, “This one appeared overnight.”). Nothing Diet has said or observed suggests this Space Coupe flew in and landed in any normal manner. Rather, it sounds as though it has materialized suddenly, as if out of another dimension, another space, or another time.

Could it be the ship that was taken by Drs. Zy Ghote and S. Tim Sail? Perhaps. I thought that might be so, yesterday. But now I am more doubtful about the two lost scientists having returned mysteriously. And the note (if that’s what it is) left on the dashboard, as Diet calls it, carries the mystery forward. I can see why Smith was so anxious as to call for Tracy in person….

I think it’s a hint from Moon Maiden’s family .

Wow, over 300 comments for a crappy story?

Maybe Mike’s smarter than we think!