Radical Romance: That Brinkley Girl

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Those curls! Those explosions of curls often outsized even the heads of Nell Brinkley’s (1886-1944) famous “Brinkley Girls” of the 1910s and 1920s. They had a life of their own, dense with insanely, finely penned line detail. In some of Brinkley’s full pagers of the 1910s, those curls could own the page, become part of the character’s expression, somehow embody the heady fantasies in which “Brinkley Girls” usually engaged. It was a visual signature so recognizable and appealing they launched Brinkley-endorsed hair products with her name attached.

But those Brinkley curls were more than a cartoonist’s signature. They embodied important aspects of Nell Brinkley’s art and contribution to comics and pop culture that critics miss… when they pay attention at all. For, even though she was called the “Queen of Comics” in her day, Nell Brinkley has been poorly served by subsequent comics history. She doesn’t appear in many anthologies, and I have heard some question whether her work even qualifies as comics. Thankfully, Trina Robbins has maintained her reputation and memory in a book devoted to the many iterations of the “Brinkley Girls” and more recently by devoting 50 pages to reprinting her work in the magnificent The Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists of the Jazz Age. I can only speculate how the overwhelmingly male field of comics history may not appreciate, let alone value, the hyper-romanticism of Brinkley’s work. I believe she deserves to be included among the pantheon of greats. In many ways, Brinkley extended into the emotional realm the principles of caricature and fantasy that McCay had practiced in Nemo and screwball cartoonists like Milt Gross brought into the physical slapstick realm. They were over-the-top, eccentric and implausible, and unapologetically so. Her artistic command of the full Sunday comics page, her use of line, color, expression and fantasy rival anything the better-known pioneers put to paper. The cartoon aesthetic established by McCay, Opper, Gross and Herriman allowed artists and readers to defy logic, bend propriety, bruise conventions, rearrange physics, ignore plausibility. Indeed her 1910 fantasy image for the New York Evening Journal, “The Chorus Girl and the Lobster,” showed how well she could mimic the rarebit fiend hallucinations of Winsor McCay. But across the rest of her career, Brinkley channeled the latitude cartooning allows into realms of emotion, gender roles, social relations, romance.

Born in Colorado, Nell’s early artistic talent found its way into children’s books and illustrations in the major state newspapers. Hearst lured her to New York in 1907 where her effusively curly heroines, quickly dubbed “Brinkley Girls,” were a major hit. They were featured in songs, theatrical revues and even licensed hair curling products. While Brinkley did many spot illustrations and even famously covered a scandalous murder trial, her most enduring work took the peculiar form of the graphic short story. Running across a dozen or more weekly episodes, these finite “Romantic Series” included the wartime “Golden Eyes” ( a fiancé follows her betrothed to the front lines), “Kathleen and the Great Secret” (a couple involved in corporate espionage), “Betty and Billy and Their Love Through the Ages” (a romance projected by crystal ball into past historic eras), “The Adventures of Prudence Prim” (a farm girl comes to the big city), “Dimples’ Day Dream” (heroine fantasizing adventure, fame and career success).

Golden Eyes was a full-page single image and text serial across late 1918 and early 1919. It tells the patriotic wartime tale of Golden Eyes, her dog Uncle Same and her man Bill when he (Bill, that is) leaves to fight as the US entered the European war “Over There.” But it is also where Brinkley weaves a socio-political fantasy for the women who were left to serve and support from home by putting Golden Eyes and Uncle Sam into the intrigue and muck of the war. Girl and pooch dash off toward the front, get captured by the enemy, cold cock a rapacious Hun with a champagne bottle and even crawl through the mud of the barren No Man’s Land among WWI trenches. And she looks impeccable and stylish doing it.

And that is no small thing. Golden Eyes’ has a seemingly endless wardrobe of brightly colored ruffled and layered gowns, high heels, and tightly tailored uniforms in which she could model alluring style ideas to her loyal followers while also saving the world for democracy. It is too easy to dismiss such fancy, because Therin lies the appeal and cultural power of Brinkley’s work. She uses the improbabilities of cartoon world to make the personal political, to overlay romance and patriotism. It imagines Golden Eyes and her readers out of the helplessness and fear of being “Over Here” and fantasizing power and effectiveness in the world.

And this is the alluring dance she does throughout the teens, 20’s and 30s, blending the personal and political, letting her heroines assert themselves into a man’s world within the safe context of fantasy or eventual domestication into marriage. But assert herself she does. 

What Charles Dana Gibson’s “Gibson Girl” was to pre-WWI America, an attempt to visualize an “ideal” American womanhood, the “Brinkley Girl” was to the 1910s and post-WWI culture. And the contrast between the two archetypes are as stark as the eras that each idealized. Popularized in the 1890s, The Gibson Girl generalized and abstracted the white middle class woman as curvy and fully corseted but far from subservient. Gibson often depicted them as independent and well-educated, always striving for both self and social improvement. She often took on progressive causes, like Women’s Suffrage, but never seems fully poised to step into a man’s world. She embodied many of the social changes for women that were in the air without challenging the status quo. Visually, Gibson depicts her as composed and aloof, a robust hourglass figure topped by a massive pompadour, often with half-closed eyes that gave a sense of control and remove. The Gibson “girl” was very much a self-contained woman in control.

The Brinkley Girl was dramatically different.  Brinkley was revising the archetype quite self-consciously. As she describes one early character, “Frank and strong, and happy and good, just a girl — an American girl such as many of you know — a strange young combination of peacock and saint, little girl and sapient woman, athlete and romantic baby, changing as the winds — and as unchanging.” It would be a mistake to reduce Brinkley’s romantic heroines to Flapper era party-girls, although she loved to draw Gatsby-style gala scenes. She was capturing in her heroines a sense of expression and independence that was radically different from Gibson’s idea and as explosive as their signature head of hair. Just as she was replacing the upswept pompadour with coronas of unruly curls, bodices with sequins, feathers and flowing gowns, Brinkley was liberating the feminine personality. That explosion of curls was also an explosion of self-expression, a notably more passionate and performative assertion into the world. Part of the fantasy she crafted so effectively in her art was indeed letting women have it all. 

And so the journey could get wondrous and weird hallucinations, conflations and juxtapositions. Golden Eye decided to pursue her love for Billy to war torn France, where she could at once help win the war and win her man. She is accompanied by their patriotic dog Uncle Sam and the visual symbol of love, a cherub. Having a fashionable woman with seemingly endless wardrobe changes traipsing through the ruins of Europe’s front lines leads to surreal scenes. In one week we find her deep in the French trenches, in a spotless white dress amidst the dark outlines of muddy fields and scorched trees. The Betty and Billy series used a crystal ball device to project these two lovers into every imaginable era of world history. From pre-historic jungles to Egypt, Babylon and Old Virginia. 

Brinkley worked unapologetically in a mode of high fantasy, but of a self-conscious kind. And that was what makes her work so glorious. She called attention to the fantasizing of her heroines and seemed to celebrate the radical leaps from reality she and they were taking. There was nothing frivolous about these daydreams. In fact, one of her 20’s characters, Dimples, spends the entire series resisting her lover’s pleas to marry him in favor of her daydreams of having a range of careers, including become the first woman President. Her romantic serials almost always resolved these adventures in the marriage of our heroine, but Brinkley made the journey more compelling and important than the final, if inevitable, nuptial.

Visually, Brinkley built her fantasies carefully. In the first serials, the stories were told in each Sunday episode by a single evocative full page scene with accompanying text. In the stories of the 1920s this format evolved into something closer to but not quite like a comic strip, with five or six numbered vignettes and blurbs advancing the story. Brinkley never resorted to speech balloons or even firm panel outlines. Instead, her vignettes floated on the page without definite borders in a dreamlike motif.  

In all of these formats, Brinkley invented a visual style that was at once ethereal and precise. She was famous for a thin and heavily detailed pen line that echoed Art Nouveau. She used this line work to build incredibly rich environments, whether the stone walls of Montezuma or the crowd scenes at a flapper party. The scrolling stonework or the floral arrangements, or the face of a desert camel – all had a density of realistic attention. Compared to the simpler line work of contemporaries in the Sunday section like Herriman, King, or even fellow nouveau stylist McManus, Brinkley’s art was downright Baroque. And yet she also colored this line work with a watercolor wash that bathed the scenes in mood just as it ran across the careful penwork. The effect was uniquely dreamlike, vivid in detail but unreal. 

Comics historians often cite the ways in which early innovators like McCay or Feininger used the full Sunday page to experiment with color and format, but Brinkley in her own way was bringing this spirit into the post-WWI newspaper in these remarkable flights of fantasy. While it is true that Sterrit, Herriman and King did  continue to innovate in their Sunday formats especially, no one was working with color, mood and detail as richly as Brinkley.

Also unique to Brinkley’s palette were her primary colors of emotion and expression. She focused on the expressive face in ways that other cartoonists couldn’t within the constraints of panels and balloons. She registered on her characters’ faces those heightened moments of shock, joy, envy, snobbery, ardor and more. There is an emotional intensity to Brinkley’s work that is working at the same high volume as the fantasy. To be sure, she was working in a genre of romance that traded in intense emotion, but she was visualizing these inner feelings on the faces that dominated her page. Indeed you could say that emotional moments were the driving force of her Sunday pages. While most comic artists were using sequential drawing to drive story progression, a slapstick gag or physical action, Brinkley’s sequence of vignettes are illustrating the emotional peaks of a story that is really being told in a linear way in the text. Was anyone else in the comics section working to surface such a full range of emotion and inner worlds? One has to look to the silent screen for this kind of singular focus on expression and visualizing personality. 

In Brinkley we see the ties between self-expression and the increasing materialism of modern consumer culture. Her heroines are generally affluent, soaked in the largesse of high fashion, travel, lavish parties. By the late 20s she had become adept at visually swooning over luxe objects, from shiny limos to ornate nightclubs. But Brinkley always seemed to insist on the substance of the surface. She never trivialized the fashion and multiple wardrobe changes of her characters, but instead made them outward expressions of some inner emotion, identity, mood. Her lush use of color, detail, texture lends an erotic quality to all of her work, whether it is depicting an embrace of lovers or a gleaming auto. She seems to be in love with the material world and her art is struggling to lend some sense of depth and authentic emotion to this world of abundance that modern consumer culture had made available, at least to some.

And yet, Brinkley is determined to immerse her heroines in adventure and escape from domesticity. The theme throughout her art, culminating in the 1930s in her final great series celebrating pioneering and accomplished real life women of the sort she foreshadowed and fantasized about in her 10s and 20s strips. Ultimately, Nell Brinkley was a feminist working within the tropes and genres available to her and her audiences in an unmistakably patriarchal America. Brinkley allowed her readers to have it both ways, to pursue the goal of romance and marriage while also engaging the adventure and career identity with which modern American seemed to tease women as possible, if not preferable. 

Man of Stature: Dick Tracy Promo from 1961

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Even 30 years into one of the most successful runs in comic strip history, Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy continued to promote itself to new newspapers that still hadn’t syndicated the iconic hero. This ad ran in Editor & Publisher, the longtime trade bible for print periodical publications. Of course, this “man of stature” led the most grisly, violent and truly weird of all American comic strips. It was also one of the most compelling. For a gallery of gruesome villain deaths, see this earlier post. On the impaling of The Brow. On the general strangeness of Gould’s imagination. On Gould and Tracy’s conservatism.

Serious Fantasy: Nell Brinkley’s Flapper Feminism

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A wildly successful woman in the man’s world of cartooning, Nell Brinkley (1886-1944) was intent on letting her comics page heroines have it all. Fantasy was the passport Brinkley used to ferret her characters and readers from the domesticity most experienced to a world of self-expression, assertiveness, fame and professional success. I have written a bit about Brinkley in an earlier review of Trina Robbins’ superb Flapper Queens, and I am in the middle of writing an extended essay on her under-appreciated importance to comics history. But here is a compact example of the wonderful extravagance of her romantic fantasies and the ways she channeled for women a growing frustration with the social roles available to them in 1920s America.

Dimples’ Day Dreams from 1928 came late in the series of graphic short stories Brinkley drew through much of the 1920s, each of which would run for a dozen or so weekly episodes. In Dimples, Brinkley underscores a theme present in most of her work, modern women breaking out of the domestic sphere into adventure, professional competence, intrigue, fame. Romantic engagement and marriage often served as the end point of these series, but not the substance of most episodes. In fact, by the time we get to 1928, Brinkley’s Dimples premise is the tension between social expectations of women, Dimples’ boyfriend begging her to marry, and dreaming of bigger, more satisfying lives.

“Be Pretty Mrs. Jones” urges Dimples “droning” boyfriend. Broken down here into its rough panel structure, this episode embodies Brinkley’s use of feminine escapist fantasy as a motif. And the sheer extravagance of that fantasy is such a delicious part of Brinkley’s work. Dimples isn’t just a celebrated film star in this day dream, but her erotic power threatens to “burn the fuses.” The thrill of Brinkley’s work is its excess. There is the excess of line work and detail. There is the material excess of her heroes’ embrace of Gatsby-era materialism, high fashion, eroticism. It is all there and all over the top.

Compared to just about anyone else working in the Sunday comics pages of the 1920s, Brinkley extended the form into a unique kind of visual storytelling. Her “panels” are aimed less at advancing a linear story than hitting different emotional notes to flesh out a central fantasy. Most of her Sunday strip culminate in an emotional climax rather than a gag or story resolution in an oversized splash image. Compare this progression to that other great comics master of fantasy, Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend0. McCay’s fantasies end in a final panel where his protagonist wakes from the dream. Brinkley end with the fantasy at its peak.

Nell Brinkley is not only an undervalued pioneer of American comics, but she is an important figure in understanding the complex history of American women in the last century. On a weekly basis she was engaging her audience’s discontent with the social roles available to them and fantasizing a broader range of options. That she had to use extravagant fantasy and daydreaming to get there only underscored the constraints her admiring audience experienced and felt.

Krazy Philosophy: Herriman At His Best

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I have to admit that I have always admired and appreciated George Herriman more than I enjoyed reading him. The gush of praise for his work among American intellectuals in the 1920s was deserved and an important piece of pop culture history. My own favorite pioneer of pop culture criticism Gilbert Seldes famously declared Krazy Kat among the most satisfying works of American art in the 1920s. But I always have had trouble really getting into him. I have to dip in and out of Herriman, sip him briefly, in order to appreciate the full effect of his offbeat sensibility, linguistic play, hit-and-miss humor. The characters and their world, while wonderfully abstract and even surreal, also create a distance for me.

All that is to say that there are also times when the abstraction and subtle philosophizing in Krazy Kat really pops through and reminds me what a rich mind was at work behind the strip. This daily from 1922 is one example of the ways in which Ignatz and Krazy really do represent fundamentally different sensibilities that were quite relevant to the America Herriman was experiencing in the inter-war years. Ignatz, the worldly, materialist, the jaded modern defender of “realism” is not only opposed to Krazy’s more ethereal, romantic approach to the universe, he is moved to violence at the very sight of it. That to me is the most interesting dynamic in their relationship. It is not the difference between the two world views they represent. It is how they react to one another, Ignatz’s frustration and intolerance of the very existence of a Krazy-eyed view of the world, that activates the strip for me and speaks to its age. Most Krazy Kat dailies don’t end with a brick to Kracy’s head but instead Ignatz reaching for a brick as a primitive response to Krazy’s musings or poor pun or nonsensical quip. Herriman calls attention to our own response. Who are you? Ignatz or Krazy?

Like Krazy her/himself, I find that I am appreciating Herriman by taking it slow through his dailies and Sundays. Others that caught my eye are here and of course the discussion of Krazy’s gender here.

Nemo in Dystopia Land: The Man Who Owned Mars (1910)

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Between April 24 and Aug 23 1910 Winsor McCay sent Nemo and Flip to Mars, making for one of the longest and most politically pointed of the Slumberland adventures. Mars was a dystopian vision of cement canyons of urban overgrowth, faceless workers rushing to their jobs in stifling clots of bodies or scooting around the unappealing cityscape in spherical flying cars. Running this overbearing urban machine is a capitalist nightmare in which everything, from air to words, come at a cost. “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Try to Enter Here Without the Price” reads an archway to the city.

Mars and even its most basic elements were under the sole proprietorship of one B. Gosh and Co. He owned and resold the basic elements of discourse and survival. Clearly a satirical mash-up of the Gilded Age monopolist and corrupt political boss, “He does certainly love money,” Nemo says. And clearly McCay, after all a newspaperman and political cartoonist, is building a critique of emerging consumerism, a growing class divide, and exploited labor in crafting B. Gosh and Co.’s Martian realm. Because words are literally for sale, we are told, “You see only people who have money can talk. Unless you buy them you cannot use them.”

McCay’s dystopia takes to satiric excess the key trends of early 20th Century America, consumer capitalism, monopoly and centralized control and urban scale. While he did thousands of pointed editorial cartoons in other pages of the newspaper, the Mars episode is one of the few instances where you catch the artist making an extended satiric vision of America’s turn-of the-century “progress” in his otherwise fantastic Little Nemo opus.

But here, McCay deploys his artistic genius to illustrating the sense of suffocation, anonymity, despair of among a people oppressed rather than liberated by modern “progress.” The caverns of Mars skyscrapers are so tall that sunlight needs to be shipped in. Workers are punished for trying to get to genuine sunlight and not allowed to cheer during sporting events. B. Gosh himself is a robber baron in the classic mold. We rarely see Gosh himself during these months on Mars. We see the dystopia narrated through his assistant, with Gosh himself occasionally barking in commands. When rebellious pirates kidnap Nemo, Gosh defeats and captures them. But Gosh’s assistant admits the boss will most likely turn the rebel chief into a personal advisor. “Old Gosh is a robber himself or he’d not own everything,” his assistant tells Nemo. 

This is a remarkably insightful episode in McCay’s Nemo run, and it reminds us how this milestone of wild fantasy and surrealism got much of its impact from the way McCay manipulated and exagerrated the experience of a rapidly changing 20th Century America. The Progressive Era was one in which Americans were imagining both light and dark results from “progress.” One of the best selling novels of the late 19th Century had been Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which imagined a utopian socialist future. But just prior to McCay’s Mars sojourn, we saw a number of dystopian rejoinders. authors like Jack London (The Iron Heel, 1907) and Hugh Benson (Lord of the World, 1908) as well as E.M. Forster (The Machine Stops, 1909). They warned of a future where aggregated power corrupted governments and corporations and technology created alienation. The Marie episode of Little Nemo in Slumberland not only fits within this dystopian mode but enhances it in ways only the comic arts can. McCay visualizes the anonymity and dehumanization of the crowd just as effectively as other comics artists of the day were trying to humanize the urban “masses.”

Perhaps I become tiresome, but one of the themes of this blog and my take on the cultural history of the comic strips is that this medium brought to a rapidly changing 20th Century America unique perspectives on the experience of social change. The best and most popular of these artists were in conversation both with their readers and with their times in ways that were unavailable to the other great mass media of radio, film and TV.

The entire run of Nemo on Mars is reprinted below. Pardon any long load times but I wanted to preserve the resolution so readers could zoom for detail.

Between April 24 and Aug 23 1910 Winsor McCay sent Nemo and Flip to Mars, making for one of the longest and most politically pointed of the Slumberland adventures. Mars was a dystopian vision of cement canyons of urban overgrowth, faceless workers scurrying to work or scooting around the unappealing cityscape in spherical flying cars. This is McCay’s consumer dystopia. “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Try to Enter Here Without the Price” reads an archway to the city.

Mars and even its most basic elements were under the sole proprietorship of one B. Gosh and Co. He owned and resold the air and even the words. Clearly a send-up of the turn of the century monopolist, “He does certainly love money,” Nemo says. And clearly McCay has emerging consumerism, a growing class divide, and exploited labor in mind in B. Gosh and Co.’s Martian realm. Because words are literally for sale, they are told, “You see only people who have money can talk. Unless you buy them you cannot use them.”

McCay’s dystopia brings emergent consumerism, monopoly control and urbanism to satiric excess, one of the few instances when you catch the artist making an extended satiric vision of America’s turn-of the-century “progress.” The caverns of Mars skyscrapers are so tall that sunlight needs to be shipped in. Workers are punished for trying to get to genuine sunlight and not allowed to cheer during sporting events. B. Gosh himself is a robber baron in the classic mold. We rarely see Gosh himself during these months on Mars. We see the dystopia narrated through his assistant, with Gosh himself occasionally barking in commands. When rebellious pirates kidnap Nemo, Gosh defats and captures them. But Gosh’s assistant admits the boss will most likely turn the rebel chief into a personal advisor. “Old Gosh is a robber himself or he’d not own everything,” his assistant tells Nemo. 

Pioneer Slapstick: A.B. Frost’s Poisoned Cat (1884)

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A.B. Frost’s 1884 graphic album Stuff and Nonsense was one of the earliest book-length cartoon collection published in the U.S., and it proved to be a milestone in the evolution of the art. Jim Woodring argues that until this point, most American caricature tended to deal in lifeless, static stereotypes. “This collection laid the foundation of real American cartooning: frisky pen drawings of people and animals that exuded rough, warm, egalitarian humor,” he writes in the recent collection of T.S. Sullivant drawings. Woodring credits Frost with bringing character to American cartooning by using facial expression, movement, gesture and more to individuate what had been stiff social types in most drawing of the day.

Scanned here from the original Stuff and Nonsense is the first lengthy narrative in the 92-page collection, “The Fatal Mistake: A Tale of a Cat.” Each image is its own full page. The captions I have attached to each are A.B. Frost’s own, although in the original book they are found in the Table of Contents rather than beneath each image.

  • The Fatal Act
  • Suspicion
  • The Pang
  • The Rush Through the Hall
  • And Through the Library

Frost was a regular in the humor weeklies of the 1880s and his influence on the first generation of newspaper cartoonists is apparent here. In just this sequence we can see previewed so many themes and visual tropes of the first decades of comic strips. The comic disruption of middle class stoicism and order with slapstick chaos was the centerpiece of comics. And it was expressed with the cartoonist’s fascination with cause and effect, the physics of exaggerated motion, the shocked response.

The first three reaction images to the poisoned cat seem like Frost exploring with increasing velocity both the shocked facial and physical impacts of the frantic cat. Keep in mind that motion and the art of freezing motion was very much in the air in the late 1870s and early 80s. Eadweard Muybridge had already started his seminal stop-motion studies of animals in motion that impacted both formal and cartoon arts. And while certainly there are precedents for caricatured pratfalls and slapstick in the pioneer Rodolphe Töpffer’s work, Frost’s superb rendering of extravagant cause and effect were helping establish a special cartoon physics that Opper, Outcault, MacDougal and others would further refine in the 90s and 00s.

  • New Treatment for the Mumps
  • Likewise for the Gout
  • Into the Kitchen
  • Down the Cellar Stair (A Study in High Perspective)

Frost appears to be relishing the mayhem he is creating as he upends the familiar objects and cast of a common affluent household. This is an anarchic convention that many artists took up in the first five or ten years of the next century in middle class bad boys like Little Jimmy, the Katzenjammers and Buster Brown. And Frost is clearly conscious of his own experimentation. The final page in the selection above is entitled “Down the Cellar Stairs (A Study in High Perspective).” In the next-to-last page of the narrative (below) he brings us behind the charging cat to create a new point of view for the audience that also seems to put the viewer in motion as well. Clearly, he knew what he was doing, test driving the potential of caricature to render new effects.

And it all works so well because Frost is just such a polished caricaturist. The bend of the butler’s inhumanly lanky long legs, the slippers shooting from the toppling man in the library, the enormous bedsheets flailing behind the mumps patient are all so convincingly animated. And make no mistake; this is black humor, comic antics bracketed by an accidental poisoning and finally death. The most effective geniuses of cartoon art always have that ability to make the cartoonish still feel real and the real feel cartoonish.

  • And Out Into the Cold Cold World
  • Carrying Everything Before Him
  • To a Watery Grave

My favorite sequence, however, must be the cat, dog and master in mutual terror erupting from the sewer. All three mouths seem to mimic each other. There is no cause and effect. They are both at once. And yet Frost uses the eyes of each figure to individuate and give each its own voice and character. A decade before the creation of the newspaper humor sections that would nurture a comics universe, A.B. Frost was setting down a comic grammar for this new art to follow.

Death Becomes You: Tracy Villains Meet Their Fitting End

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Retribution was Chester Gould and Dick Tracy’s model for justice from the beginning. The strip started in 1931 literally as a revenge narrative. Standing over the murdered body of his fiancé Tess Trueheart’s father, civilian Tracy swears vengeance on the killers. He quickly joins the police force, but the themes of retribution and conviction by poetic justice remained a hallmark of the strip across four and a half decade run. From the beginning Chester Gould unapologetically crossed the lines of good taste. By the late 1930s in criminals like The Mole, B.B. Eyes, Flattop, Pruneface and the like, Gould started using outward disfigurement as expressive of inner villainy. And the level of explicit violence and even torture in Dick Tracy was unlike anything else on the comics page, or elsewhere in pop culture for that matter.

The revenge motif was baked into the strip’s moral universe. Tracy villains didn’t just need to be sought, caught and jailed. They needed to be hounded and often tortured along the way. Many of Tracy’s prey ended up behind bars, but just as often they met poetically just ends. Gould turned the grisly, fitting deaths of villains into his own special kind of art. Here are some examples from the first two decades of the strip that highlight Gould’s dark talent for retributive justice and capital punishment Dick Tracy style. At these climactic moments we see most clearly the visual, moral and often bizarre world,

Final Curtain for Whip Chute – 1939

Subtlety was not in Chester Gould’s quiver. Here he triple underlines his irony.

B-B Eyes Gets Dumped – 1942

More than anything, Gould loved to kill and humiliate Tracy villains in slo-mo. Here, B-B Eyes hides in a garbage barge in the final leg of a desperate flight from justice, only to get dumped, trapped and drowned. Gould had a special talent for using the panel. framing and zoom techniques to communicate feeling through his use of space. His signature tight shots on dead villains often conveyed the loneliness and claustrophobia of death itself.

Flattop Gets Spiked – 1944

In 1944, Gould concocted two of his most venal villains. Flattop was simply psychopathic as a hit man, and he would be followed by The Brow, who was sadistic and a spy. Hiding beneath a ship being constructed, Flattop gets hung up on protruding spikes, leading to another close-up of deserving death.

The Brow Is Killed By Patriotism – 1944

Far and away the most inventive and stomach-turning death in the first decades of Dick Tracy was the impaling of The Brow. I covered this in greater detail and with more context elsewhere. But here again is the wartime spy getting impaled on the flagpole commemorating the city’s war dead. The bending flagpole is a gruesomely brilliant touch to amplify that moment of maximal tension that will ultimately pierce the villain.

Gargles Eats Glass – 1946

Falling through a skylight, again in comic strip slo-mo, Gargles gets sliced across three panels. And Gould can’t resist giving us his final shudders. In fact Gargles hangs on until the next strip so his final words exonerate an innocent suspect just in time for Christmas. One of the hallmarks of Dick Tracy was the strip’s extremism, Gould’s penchant for balancing unmatched graphic violence and angry vindictiveness with maudlin sentimentality. This sequence leads up to a Christmas strip that celebrates the villain’s death and the joy of the season.

Mumbles’ Cry for ‘Elp’ – 1947

Making a speech impediment somehow expressive of a villain’s evil was a questionable move to begin with. But Gould doubles down on this conceit by having Mumbles frantically, futiley hail for “ELP”.

T.V. Wiggles Can’t Move – 1950

Gould loved to draw in that little bit of grisly business to convey violence. While he used a heavy, cartoonish line and unreal, expressionist style that set the strip far apart from the illustrative style of most adventure strips, Gould used other ways of communicating hard-boiled reality. He had a penchant for objects penetrating bodies. Bullets often passed through their targets in shootout sequences. And as the deaths of The Brow and Gargles showed, the impaled body has a special place in Gould’s sense of horror. The death of T.V. Wiggles comes from fallen metal sheets that form an ersatz coffin. But it is that little corner of metal piercing a flap of neck flesh that telegraphs the experience of death itself.

Mr. Crime and Judge Mix Blood and Money – 1953

Mr. Crime was among Tracy’s most ruthless, pitiless villains of the 50s, and in the context of the Gould moral universe I am surprised (and a bit disappointed) that he suffers a simple shootout with Tracy. In fact Gould reserves the grisliest image for Mr. Crime’s extorted dupe, Judge Ruling. When cornered, the corrupt Judge chooses suicide. But of course Gould can’t give us a gunshot sound effect heard through a closed door. We have to get an image of Judge Ruling eating the gun, complete with cheek lines to suggest how deep he has planted the barrel. But we’re not done with this duo. As is his wont, Gould closes in for a final tableaux of both villains swimming in their own blood and money.

Flattop Jr.’s Near Miss – 1956

Flattop Jr. was indeed the son of the original Flattop, but he was framed by Gould as a neglected youth who embodied the overhyped scourge of the 1950s – the juvenile delinquent. He appears to meet his end in a theater fire he himself set to cover his escape. Despite the massive explosion Gould depicts dramatically, and the presumption of having died in the inferno, Jr. turns up later where his genuine death takes place in the middle of another villain’s cycle. And so that final contemplative panel here turns out to be ironic.