The Comical Dick Tracy, Part 2

In the comic strip Dick Tracy, creators Mike Curtis and Joe Staton have set three different story arcs in motion -- all of them related to other comic strips. The first involved a reference to Al Capp's "Lil Abner" (see The Comical Dick Tracy). The second, foreshadowed at the same time, brings back a character whose own strip ended with an unresolved storyline. (click on images to enlarge). 

In the very first panel we see the logo for Little Orphan Annie. The actual comic strip, updated to just "Annie" was abruptly discontinued on June 13, 2010. Here's the final sequence:

And so it ended, with Annie being spirited off into the Guatemalan interior by a war criminal on the run -- fate unknown.

Then these sequences appeared in Dick Tracy, interwoven with other story lines:

March 24, 2014

:

 March 26, 2014

 March 27, 2014

Harold Gray's characters return -- not on the comics page where that first Sunday panel suggested, but actually in the world of Dick Tracy. Which, we hope, will mean that the saga of Annie will finally get the conclusion the strip deserved.

But there's yet a third comics-related storyline in the current sequence, as we'll see in Part 3.