When I was a kid (funny how many of my posts start out that way), one of the features on the front page of the comics section in the Sunday newspaper was DICK TRACY. So I grew up reading this comic strip about the square-jawed police detective. Unfortunately, that was during an era in which the strip’s creator, author, and artist Chester Gould had taken it in some weird directions, getting away from the hardboiled police action and bringing in more and more science-fictional elements, such as hidden civilizations on the Moon. I read DICK TRACY anyway and enjoyed it, although it was never one of my favorites.
THE CELEBRATED CASES OF DICK TRACY, an oversized volume containing more than a dozen storylines ranging from Tracy’s first case in 1931 to episodes from the late Forties, is an excellent introduction to this classic strip, featuring numerous examples of the things that made DICK TRACY a success: hardboiled, even brutal, action with fistfights, elaborate death traps, and shoot-outs in which characters, both good and bad, actually died; grotesque villains with colorful names like Flattop, Mumbles, and the Brow; and at least an attempt to be realistic when it comes to police work, making TRACY an early example of the police procedural.
Chester Gould’s plotting, writing, and willingness to pull no punches in his stories are what made this strip work. The artwork starts off pretty crude, and while it improves some with time, it never comes close to the level of, say, Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, or Hal Foster. But by the Forties it’s good enough not to detract from Gould’s fast-moving storylines. My main complaint about this volume is that it reprints only the daily strips, leaving out the Sunday pages that were part of the continuity. As a result, there are some jarring gaps in the action where the reader has to figure out what happened on Sunday from the context of Monday’s strip. This isn’t a huge problem, but it can be annoying.
Overall, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. I have another Dick Tracy collection, THE THIRTIES: TOMMYGUNS AND HARD TIMES, which reprints practically the entire first two years of the strip, and I’m looking forward to reading it, too.
(This post originally appeared on June 26, 2007. I don't believe I got around to reading TOMMYGUNS AND HARD TIMES, and six months after this post, that copy was lost in the Fire of '08. I don't recall ever replacing it . . . until now. My interest in Dick Tracy has been rekindled recently by reading the new strips being published on GoComics.com. The current writer, Matthew K. Manning, and artist, Howie Noel, are taking a very vintage approach to the strip and spinning a great yarn so far. So I ordered a copy of TOMMYGUNS AND HARD TIMES as well as another classic Tracy collection. With luck I'll be writing reviews of those books before another 18 years go by!)
The modern Tracy strips have been a little hit or miss for me, but overall the new team seems to be trying to stay true to the (long) legacy of the comic.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to the strip every day now, instead of it being just one that I read out of habit.
DeleteMy childhood was blessed by the Dick Tracy comic books which were reprints of the comic strips from the thirties, forties and fifties. I didn't just read those comics, I lived them!
ReplyDeleteJim Meals
I read some of those comics, too, but for some reason they didn't show up much around here.
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