Showing posts with label Chester Gould. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chester Gould. Show all posts

26 July 2021

Dick Tracy by Chester Gould (No. 33)

Dick Tracy (1931-1977)
by Chester Gould

REVIEW BY ROBERT EDISON SANDIFORD:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
Before Bob Kane's Batman made the quirky villain criminally chic, before Hollywood movies turned trench coats and fedoras into hero's garb and before American detectives (at least the hardboiled sort) were known for brains as well as braun, there was Dick Tracy, the quintessential, as his name announces, "cop's cop".

Strong, savvy, only menacingly silent, he was a classic (and classy) type in the making since his first appearance in the Sunday, October 4, 1931 edition of the Detroit Mirror. Distant cousin to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and influenced by the bloody tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Dick Tracy the comic strip was a response to Al Capone's Chicago, where its creator, Chester Gould, an Oklahoman, was living and working at the time. Initially pitched as "Plainclothes Tracy" to Captain Joe Patterson of The Chicago Tribune-New York News syndicate, the character was born to be, according to Gould, "a detective in this country that would hunt [gangsters] up and shoot 'em down."

Despite the efforts of mystery writers like Max Collins or true-to-Gould artists like Mike Lilian, the series today reads like a parody of itself, far removed from its neorealistic, slightly futuristic pulp fiction origins. It's almost a dirty thing to say a comic is less great because it is less than realistic. Yet as George Perry and Alan Aldridge observed of the strips at its best in The Penguin Book of Comics, "The criminals and crimes in Dick Tracy may be wildly exaggerated; his police work is sound and orthodox."

Because a work is ultra realistic, does that make it art or good? No. What makes good art is its truth, its sentiment and the quality of its expression. Once Gould's skills as an illustrator and storyteller grew to transcend his four-panel dailies, so, too, did the iconographic appeal of his creation.

In his introduction to The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy 1931-1951, Ellery Queen wrote: "Pictorially, Gould has a comic-book genius for drawing grotesquely caricatured faces and heads and for inventing grotesquely Dickensian character-names to match the faces and heads [to wit, The Brow, Flattop, Pruneface, B-B Eyes]. And Gould's plots have all the excitement and suspense of 'thriller' fiction. So Dick Tracy is blood-brother in the royal line of fictional detectives, and an authentic 'first' in the history of the form."

The original procedural detective of fiction, he is as singular creation as his yellow trench coat or two-way wrist radio.


CHESTER GOULD:
My only thought is to keep my strip faithfully realistic and powerful enough so that it will stand out from the usual run of wishy-washy everyday stuff.


REVIEW BY JERRY ROBINSON:
Chester Gould introduced a new hard-hitting type of realism [that] marked a radical and historic departure: the comics were no longer just funny.


FURTHER READING: