Hot Rize was the personal assistant to the television cooking show host Flakey Biscuits. Rize was also responsible for using Biscuits' flour business as a cover for drug smuggling, allowing Biscuits herself to maintain plausible deniability.
Hot Rize had short, spiky orange hair and freckles. She wore multiple studs in her earlobe.
The Plenty Donation[]
When B.O. Plenty and Gravel Gertie's son Attitude was born, Biscuits instructed Rize to deliver some flour to the couple as a publicity stunt. Unbeknownst to Rize, the flour has been replaced by cocaine from one of her drug shipments by Earl, a truck driver. Rize received an angry phone call from George Romero, one of her distributors, who had received flour instead of the drugs he was expecting.
Rize returned to the Plenty home, replacing the illicit flour bags with genuine flour, claiming that the original delivery was a defective "experimental" flour. She then killed Earl and left the body with the abandoned delivery truck. Gertie has already used some of the "flour" to make a batch of biscuits. When they didn't bake properly, she became suspicious and informed Dick Tracy, who was also investigating Earl's murder. This brought Rize (and Biscuits) to Tracy's attention.
Death and Legacy[]
Tracy confronted Biscuits and Rize at Biscuits' flour factory. Rize panicked and fled onto the production floor, brandishing a gun. Tracy and Sam Catchem followed her, and she hid in a flour hopper. Flour was then released (by Biscuits) into hopper. It smothered Rize, who suffocated and died.
Biscuits was able to conceal her role in the drug dealing and Rize's death, and went into the Witness Protection Program. She was later found and (presumably) killed by Rize's twin sister Blaze, who had joined the new Mr. Crime's organization and was seeking revenge for Hot's murder.
Notes[]
- Both Hot Rize and her sister Blaze were said to be lesbians by members of the creative team, but the issue of Hot's sexual orientation was never specifically referred to in the strip.
- Hot Rize has the distinction of being one of the first original villains (along with Flakey Biscuits) introduced by the creative team of Joe Staton and Mike Curtis. She was also the first major original villain to die under this team's tenure.