Dick Tracy was the 61st cartoon-strip idea Chester Gould submitted to the Chicago Tribune. The other 60 had been rejected, but–ye gods!–Gould handled rejection the way Tracy handled bullets. He had come to Chicago at the age of 21 with a mail-order cartooning course under his belt and the Tribune as his goal, and nothing was going to stop him. For ten years he lobbed ideas at Tribune syndicate head Joseph Medill Patterson and collected thanks-but-no-thanks letters. Meanwhile he earned a business degree at Northwestern’s night school, supporting himself by cartooning for the other Chicago papers and doing commercial work. As our story opens, he had just decided to make the real-life war between organized crime and the Chicago police his subject.
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“YOUR PLAIN CLOTHES TRACY HAS POSSIBILITIES STOP,” Patterson wired from New York. Plainclothes Tracy was the moniker Gould had given his new hero, but he quickly gave it up when Patterson suggested changing the first name to the slang for detective. Patterson also fed Gould an initial story line. The strip premiered in October 1931 and developed a following that grew to an estimated 100 million readers. While the newspapers already had fantasy adventure strips like Tarzan and Buck Rogers, Dick Tracy was their first detective strip, the first adventure hero created for the papers, and the first strip to look violence in the face. When a gun was fired on Tracy’s beat, the blood flowed.
Dick Tracy became famous for one-step-ahead-of-reality gadgets like the two-way wrist radio, the portable surveillance camera, and the Voice-O-Graf. Gould hired a former cop as an adviser and incorporated a pseudotutorial, the Crimestoppers notebook. But the strip’s main appeal was its bizarre array of supporting characters, most of them criminals and all of them more interesting than straight and dense Dick (who was brilliantly parodied in Al Capp’s Fearless Fosdick). Besides Tracy’s allies–Junior, Sam Catchem, Gravel Gertie, B.O. Plenty, Sparkle Plenty, and Tracy’s daughter, Bonnie Braids–there was a gallery of Dickensian rascals so grotesque their faces alone might have justified a life of crime (though Gould said it was the other way around–their faces reflected the ugliness of their deeds). They included Flattop, the Brow, B.B. Eyes, the Mole, Pruneface, and the Blank.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Corbis-Bettmann.
