An electric typewriter worked much the same way as a manual typewriter, using electrical power rather than finger and arm power to move the keys and the platen. No text storage except on the hard copy itself.
This comic was on the stands in late 1987, and by that time American offices and some writers had PCs. (I bought my first a couple of years before, spending extra bucks for 256K of RAM.) Dick is apparently still fond of the older technology for whatever he had to type.
I gave up my electric typewriter about the time I gave up comics, with the Wolfman/Pérez Teen Titans books being the last to go. That means that Titans and typewriters are filed in the back of my brain in the same place as early MTV videos.