A Dick named Tracy...

I have, of late, been re-enjoying the adventures of one Mr. Richard Tracy, better known as Dick Tracy, as recounted by Chester Gould. Created in a time when the word Dick was slang for a detective and not a male body part, Tracy was the definitive comic strip policeman and Chet Gould was a rare talent.

Back in 1931 the newspapers were filled with the true stories of criminals and the coppers who hunted them. Dillinger, Capone, and the soon-to-be folk heroes Bonnie and Clyde, plus Pretty Boy Floyd, Ma Barker and others, occupied the minds of Depression-era people everywhere. Everyone was pretty much down on their luck, and anyone that ripped off the banks, considered bad guys themselves in middle America with farm and business foreclosures the rule of the day, captured the imaginations of readers.

Along came cartoonist Chester Gould with a pitch to Captain Joseph Patterson at the Chicago Tribune syndicate, titled Plainclothes Tracy. Patterson bought it and changed Plainclothes to Dick, and the cop was off and running. At a time when straight action story strips were a rarity, Tracy seemed torn from the day's headlines. Dick became a cop to avenge the murder of his girlfriend's (Tess Trueheart) father.

Gould's art was simplistic but vital. It clearly told the story. And Chet embraced the 4-panels-a-day format, mastering how to tell a continuing story one day at a time without being redundant. A Sunday strip was added. Through the 30s, Gould plied his trade, learning as he went and by the end of the decade, Tracy was a huge success. As America went to war, Gould came up with exceedingly strange villians to fight his cop and Tracy hit its stride. With an incredible parade of bad guys starting with Little Face Finny in 1941 and continuing with The Mole (1941), B-B Eyes and Pruneface (1942), Mrs. Pruneface and Flattop (1943, the latter being Gould's most famous villian), The Brow and Shaky (1944), Itchy (1945) and on and on, Gould countered the horrifying headlines of World War II with his own dose of horrible henchmen.

Gould really hit his creative stride in the mid 40s, and I think his work is best from around 1942 to about 1960. Gould, aided and abetted by a great group of assistants, produced both his best art and story in this time period. In the 60s, the stories and art became increasingly bizarre. I have not read a lot of those stories. They haven't been reprinted much. (I believe there is a pricey series of ongoing reprints, put out by a small company, but the bizarre layouts of the books combined with incredibly high-prices, push them away from me.) Gould retired in 1977, replaced by mystery novelist Max Allan Collins and former assistant Rick Fletcher. Collins brought a major creative revival to the strip and wrote it for a number of memorable years. The strip now is a shadow of its former stuff, and survives on name-value only, undoubtedly helped by the Warren Beatty movie and licensing.

My own Tracy fascination started with the Harvey Comics reprints. Harvey published the original Dick Tracy Monthly for many years, picking up with #26 (Dell Comics published the first 25 issues) and the Flattop story. With new covers (later in its run drawn by Joe Simon), the Harvey issues had more of a sensationistic bent to them than the quiet looking Dell run. In the heat of the horror/crime comics craze in the early 50s, Tracy covers were often among the more violent on the stands. When the Comics Code came into play in the mid 50s, Harvey took to just plain whiteing-out dead bodies and eliminating Gould's patented bullets whizzing through people's foreheads and out the other side.

My first vivid Dick Tracy memory is from the Flattop Jr. storyline. Yes, the hired assassin, Flattop, one of Chet's most memorable villians, had a kid! And he looked just like his old man and was twice as ruthless. Gould fashioned the Flattop Jr. story during the height of the juvenile delinquent craze. Harvey reprinted the story in the late 50s, with memorable, vividly-colored Joe Simon covers. But the thing I was most fascinated with was Flattop Jr.'s car. He had this huge green sedan, with a TV set, a safe, a sink (!), a hotplate and more, all built right in. The kid was a genius! He could live in the car--and did so--if he had to. You never really found out what happened to Flattop Jr. in the Harvey books. I only learned his final fate years later, reading the "uncensored" stories.

After Harvey folded up the Tracy comics line (ending with 5 much-loved "Harvey Giant" issues consisting of reprints of earlier issues), Tracy languished. A mini-renaissance happened in the early 70s with a major book collection, The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy. Blackthorne, a company created from the ashes of Pacific Comics, took up the cause in the 80s with a major reprint line. Gladstone took over for a short run after that, but other than Tony Raioli's Pacific Comics Club reprints of the early 30s stories, nothing had been done with the classic Chester Gould-era Tracys. I think it's high time someone presents these stories in complete, chronological order, ala The Complete Peanuts or The Spirit Archives. These stories deserve a deluxe, complete treatment.

I'm recapturing my Tracy jones with buying up all the Blackthorne "Reuben Award Winner Series" books I can find. These are borderline graphic novels, published by the defunct San Diego-based company in the 1980s. Back then, Blackthorne had a little cottage industry going in strip reprint books, and they had a fair to middling success with Dick Tracy Monthly, so much so that for a short time it was Dick Tracy Weekly. Then they added the Reuben Award books, and some other ones, like The Early Years and The Unprinted Stories, and, of course, the inevitable Dick Tracy 3D. They did 24 of the Reuben series in all, and some of them are increasingly hard to find. I'm currently bidding on 10 of them on eBay, but was quickly outbid for the 3 that matter most to me. If you have them and you're willing to part with them, I currently need #s 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23 and 24. E-mail me if you have any of them.

And for those of you whose knowledge of Dick Tracy begins and ends with Warren Beatty's movie, seek out the original Gould strips. If you have a comics-loving bone in your body, you'll become a convert to Gould's quirky storytelling, great characters and precognative ability when it came to gadgets and crimefighting tactics. I guarantee it.

Comments

[kathleen eason]

enjoyed this article...but i need your help...where can i locate in fo on the net about the weekly publication ...sunday edition of dick tracy that included a "save & clip" dick tracy crimestopper/crimefighting tactic...the size of a manufacturer coupon found in newspaper now...i inherited a few of these gems from my uncle...where can i view more?
kathleen
kathleeneason@hotmail.com