Dick Tracy: The Thirties : Tommyguns and Hard Times

This collection covers the first two years (1931-3) of the famous comic strip DICK TRACY (except for its very first story, reprinted in an earlier collection). It's fascinating to see how the strip evolved. Chester Gould's artwork started out very poor, but we can see it gradually improving. Tracy's character also evolved. He started out as a weenie by today's standards, and the character paradoxically benefited from being reduced to a square-jawed icon. Notice that in the first year he sometimes used disguises; he didn't do this much in later years, since his visual presence is the strip's anchor. Notice also that few of the stories were about bootleggers: the public was already turning against Prohibition. Yet much of the first-year work in this collection could have been dispensed with. I enjoyed the Hammettesque story of Texie Garcia, a gun moll blackmailing a politician. (Texie: "Think what you could do with a thousand dollars." Tracy: "Yeah? I could roll it up in a wad and cram it right down your slippery throat.") Ditto the Lindbergh-like story of Big Boy Caprice kidnapping Buddy Waldorf Jr., with its knock-down dragout fight at the end. But editor Herb Galewitz himself admits that the stories of Tracy's demotion to a beat cop; con man turned kidnapper Broadway Bates, who resembles Batman's foe the Penguin; bond forger Alec Penn; and dope smuggler-blackmailer Kenneth Grebb are somewhat below par ... Of course, after a year the strip really came to life, and gained readers and newspapers, when Junior first appeared. This was also the occasion for introducing the thug Steve the Tramp, the first of the strip's great villains. He and counterfeiter Stooge Viller dominate the second year, even escaping prison together. The editors would have been well-advised to drop much of the first year, and their selections from the first six months of the Sunday strips, which weren't yet connected to the daily continuity. The space saved would have been better spent on some later stories such as Junior's mother, or Jean Penfield's fight with Tess Trueheart.

This is the perfect companion piece to the book THE CELEBRATED CASES OF DICK TRACY as well as Warren Beatty's DICK TRACY movie. The book collects the early 1930's exploits of the most famous comic strip detective of them all and one can see the evolution of writer Chester Gould's storytelling style. In his heyday Tracy, like Beatty, seemed lean and boyish (his sharped-cut nose and chinned developed slowly) as he matched fists and bullets with bloated mobsters like "Big Boy." The early stories, themselves, play like matinee melodrama as young Tracy's misadventures with his girlfriend Tess Trueheart and "son" Junior (the comic's first "boy-sidekick")border on being pure soap opera. Still, while the artwork and plotting seems childlike and crude, these 70 year old adventures hold up due to a breathless mix of danger and innocence.