My love for Dick Tracy, the comic strip, has been documented numerous times on this blog. IDW's high-quality chronological reprinting of the strip is a dream come true, and quite quickly we've come to the classic years of the strip--The Complete Dick Tracy, vol. 7, contains strips from January of 1941 through September of 1942--when creator Chester Gould unleashed his rogues' gallery upon the world. It may have been the coming storm of World War II and the horrifying news that greeted people each morning when they opened their daily newspaper that inspired Gould to ramp up his storytelling. In that time, the newspaper was everyone's main lifeline to news. Today, as papers struggle and even go out of business, it's hard to imagine the importance of the newspaper to people of bygone decades. It's even harder to imagine how comic strips were an essential part of them each and every day.
But this is the volume in IDW's ongoing series where it all changes: new size, new format, new editor. Dean Mullaney, who won an Eisner Award for his Terry and the Pirates series has taken over as editor. The format has increased to the size of the Terry books, which presents the daily strips 3 to a page and the Sundays--still in black and white--at a much larger size. And while the collector in me curses the publisher for abandoning a format mid-stream, the new look and size is a major improvement, and it does come along at a time when the material warrants such an upgrade. Along with Max Allan Collins' ongoing thoughts about Tracy, a new series of essays by Tracy historian Jeff Kersten has been added, chronicling Chester Gould's life. These essays contain information provided by Gould's daughter, Jean.
There's one underlying theme in this volume that I don't think the publishers realized (and of course, neither did Chet Gould) and that's how much of a countdown to history it is. Besides the beginnings of Tracy's Golden Age--the likes of Little Face Finny, The Mole, and BB Eyes make their appearances in Dick's ongoing saga, just warm-up acts for the super-villains to come--the strips in this volume slowly make their way to World War II. It's interesting to read the Sunday for December 7, 1941, and to finally see the war rear it's ugly head on March 11, 1942, as Tracy, hot on the heels of tire bootlegger BB Eyes, is told by a service station attendant, "There's a WAR on..." You can count backwards and see the lead time of the strip, when Gould and company were working away, blissfully ignorant of what was to happen. On that fateful Sunday in December, Dick Tracy was involved with the Mole and just about to meet him face to face. The rest of the country met history face to face that day, and nothing was the same afterward.
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