By the end of his career in 1977, Dick Tracy creator Chester Gould was notoriously reactionary. His disdain for the counter-cultural forces at play in the 1960s and 70s, for liberal explanations of criminal behavior, were clear in the strip itself. In fact, his resistance to leniency in America’s legal system, and progressivism in general, had been baked into his epic since its roots n the gangster era of 1931. From the start, Dick Tray was an exploration of individual valor and evil rather than institutional or social forces. Gould’s take on the 50s moral panic around “juvenile delinquency” via Flattop Jr. is an excellent example. And the moral universe of Dick Tracy hinged on the personal evil of villains(usually embodied in physical abnormalities) and the poetic symmetry of their deaths via some kind of retributive justice.

None of which is to say that Chester Gould was closed-minded or immune to liberal instincts. The wedding of Junior to the Moon Maid on Oct. 4, 1964 was the culmination of an especially strange foray into sci-fi themes and the introduction of alien characters. Clearly, the culturally attuned Gould was channeling the spirit of the space race. America’s mortal enemy at the time, the USSR, had beat us into the ether, with the first earth-orbiting satellite in 1957 and first man in space in 1961. By 1964, the competition between the two Cold Warriors was fully engaged. But Gould took space into his own direction, reaching a climax when Junior Tracy falls in love with the alien Moon Maid, whom he marries in the Sunday strip reprinted above. Gould’s celebration of interstellar harmony and even cross-species marriage is all the more remarkable given the racial and Cold War politics of 1964.

Personal point of privilege. All of this only comes up for me because this famous marriage sequence is contained in the IDW/LOAC reprint volume (No. 22) I secured this week. It finally completes the Panels and Prose Library’s full run of Tracy reprints. I am not a collector, per se. My investment in this library is meant solely to feed my addiction to writing about the medium. My full reprint runs of Tracy, Terry and the Pirates, Little Nemo, etc. give me immediate access to the full context of the creation that I can dance across when writing about them. The monetary value or rarity of this stuff is of no interest to me. But I do take some personal satisfaction from completing the Dick Tracy collection. The 1970 Chelsea House Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy captivated me at age 12, and ignited my passion for the medium. Tracy remains my favorite strip of all time. Completing my shelf of Gould’s work is a moment.