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.
