Wrap it Up is a lot like my Provide Some Answers feature, which is about long-running comic book plots finally being resolved. This, though, is a more specific comic book occurrence where the plotlines of a canceled comic book are wrapped up in the pages of another comic book series. This would happen most frequently in Marvel Comics, but other companies did it, as well.
Today, thanks to a request by reader Mark G., we’re doing a rare instance of when a comic STRIP was resolved in the pages of another comic strip.
After 86 years, Little Orphan Annie ended in June 2010. That’s sad enough, but the craziest thing was that the comic strip ended with Annie KIDNAPPED by a dangerous war criminal! It’s just a big ol’ “yeah, she might be screwed, but who knows>”
It’s one of the craziest cliffhangers that you’ll ever see.
After FOUR years, Dick Morris and Joe Staton decided to resolve the storyline in the pages of the Dick Tracy comic strip. Tracy is brought in on the case in June 2014…
Tracy ended up deciphering a clue Annie left in a letter she managed to sneak out of where she was being held…
Tracy then wakes up in the hospital…in the 1940s?!?!
Everyone in the town is obsessed with a radio show (that is a riff on Annie’s own famous radio series back in the day)…
Annie figures out that the show is brainwashing people, so she tricks Tracy into not listening to it…
People are being brainwashed into thinking it is 1944. This is all part of a plot by a criminal to convince a scientist it is World War II so that he will create a bomb that the crook can use to…I dunno…sell, I guess? Annie ended up there after being on the run with the criminal from her strip (yes, the guy she ended up kidnapped by didn’t even factor into the final plot somehow).
So then Annie was free! She and her supporting cast have now become occasional guest stars in Dick Tracy’s strip, which is pretty darn fun, I thimk.
So there ya go, Mark, than’s how Dick Tracy wrapped up Little Orphan Annie’s plotlines!
If anyone has a suggestion for a comic book series that was wrapped up in another comic, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!