Ah, the good old days, when a man and his family could pick up the morning newspaper and see a criminal’s head jammed in a torture device, or a thug buried alive in ice, or perhaps impaled on an American flag.
Newspaper comics are rapidly becoming a thing of the past, but in its heyday in the last century, nobody went harder than Chester Gould’s “Dick Tracy,” who’s been fighting crime since 1931.
There’s a tendency sometimes to imagine the past was somehow cleaner and more innocent than the modern day, but the stuff Gould was pumping out to be read over the breakfast table each day was dark and often very, very twisted riffs on crime and punishment. Hard to imagine it being published in the anodyne world of what’s left of today’s newspaper comic strips.
A recent re-read of strips from the post-war era in the handsome Library of American Comics volumes confirmed how unrelenting Tracy’s world was – the need to grab readers every day means there’s very little internal life for Tracy, who catapults from one criminal to the next, a rogue’s gallery of grotesqueries who rarely survive the first encounter with him. Fighting crime is all he is.
It’s a black and white world, but sometimes that stark certainty is a lot of fun in fiction because real life sure ain’t like that. I sometimes like Steve Ditko’s Mr A, too, even if it’s dogmatic and reactionary and I don’t agree one bit with his philosophies.
You certainly don’t want to binge-read years of Dick Tracy’s adventures in one go, as it can be a bit much, but in smaller doses – imitating the frequency they originally came out in – it’s riveting stuff. You can see why with its cliffhanger endings and rapid-fire action it became one of the biggest comics of all time.
Now, as a fellow with somewhat liberal leanings, I’ll admit that Gould’s Tracy is often the epitome of right-wing fascism. Crooks are bad and he is right and in real life I imagine Dick Tracy would’ve had more than a few internal affairs investigations going on over his conduct.
Many people only know Dick Tracy from Warren Beatty’s intriguing but slightly undercooked colourful movie take which didn’t quite capture the fierceness of the comic strip. Gould’s own ‘Tracy’ comics famously became weirder and more eccentric the longer it went (such as when Dick Tracy went to the moon) and his conservative opinions became stronger as the strip went on, but at its zenith in those 1940s-1950s strips, nobody wrote a better gritty crime comic strip.
Crime does not pay, they say, and for a while there Gould unrelentingly showed why day after day in some of the most gruesome images to ever be seen next to your morning ‘Blondie’ and ‘Gasoline Alley’ visits.
Nik Dirga 