Tag Archives: 1930s

Gould’s Dick Tracy, 1931- 1977

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Tracy Gets His Mission

Nearly 25 years ago IDW’s Library of American Comics began reprinting the full run of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, starting with the strip’s premiere in late 1931. This week, with the release of Volume 29, the series reached its end, marking Gould’s retirement in 1977. I had been planning to mark this occasion by posting the very first 1931 strips alongside the very last 1977 strips to illustrate the evolution of Gould’s style as well as the decade’s long consistency of his vision. Little did I know that Gould himself would beat me to it. See below.

The first week or so of Tracy locates the origin of Dick’s moral commitment to fighting gangsters in the robbery/murder of Emil Trueheart, father of his new fiancé Tess. Tracy was not a cop by trade, but a young man still finding his way. In the sort of surrealistic moment that would typify Gould’s storytelling and visual style for the next 4 decades, Tracy not only finds his moral mission but becomes a “plainclothes” detective as well as a natural leader for the force within weeks of the strip’s launch. The moment of moral truth is captured in the featured panel at the top of this post.

Between 1931 and 1977 Gould’s style had gove through several evolutionary stages. By 1977, Gould’s ink lines had grown thicker and a bit rounder. His more extensive use of close-ups and medium frames were a begrudging accommodation to the shrinking space allotted to strip artists even by the late 1970s.

Gould invented his hero as “Plainclothes Tracy” in a series of spec strips he sent to legendary publisher Joseph Patterson, who was in the process of building the New York Daily News into a pioneer of tabloid newspapers. Patterson suggested the change of name to the simpler “Dick Tracy” and seemed to understand that Gould’s penchant for violence, grotesque villainy and even sadism mapped well against his vision of the tabloid style. The gorgeously colored Tracy Sunday strip would be the cover wrapper for the Sunday Daily News for decades.

Famous for the brutality of his cartoon vision of crime and punishment, it is revealing that the first panel of the Plainclothes Tracy spec strip is a scene of bondage and torture among thugs.

By the mid 1930s, his signature thick outlines, highly abstracted iconography, extensive use of fields of blacks, and series of bizarre villains were all fully established. The Sunday page below is from 1937 and The Blank adventure.

Dick Tracy holds a special place in my own journey into comic strips. The lush reprint of classic adventures, The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy by Bonanza Books in 1970 was one of a trio of reprints that captivated me with the form. It was around that time that I first got hold of Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes and a Chelsea House oversized reprint of early Buck Rogers strips.

But it was Gould’s starkness in style and story, the extremity of art and character, that pulled me in then and still does decades later. I can think of no other comic strip artist that had such a singular vision. There has always been a peculiar geometry to Gould’s art. His panels alternated between use of deep perspective and no perspective, a weird penchant for flatness and depth. The stances of his characters, especially Tracy and his long inky black columnar legs, was so eccentric and physically improbable. Even though Gould became famous for his love of procedural detail in detection, gadgetry and eventually sci-fi crime-fighting inventions (i.e. the two-way wrist radio), his visual language was minimalist and abstract. His daily strip truly popped from the page of his fellow and able artists because it felt like being dropped into an expressionist daydream.

Gould was as famous for the brutal simplicity of his moral vision as he was for the violence of the action in his strips. The villains were not only surreal grotesques, but they met their end in grisly ways that suggested nature (or God) itself was meting final judgment. The impaling of wartime spy The Brow on an American war memorial flagpole is the best known. But Gould followed a formula with every adventure that moved towards a protracted manhunt and chase of the villain, which usually ended with the rogue’s end often via some strange knot of fate and chance.

Gould himself met a more peaceful end in 1985. The strip’s writer Max Collins and artist (ands former Gould assistant) Dick Locher memorialized him in the same simple, declarative style for which the master himself was known for decades.

Terry and the Psychologists

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We revere Milt Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates quite rightfully as the apex of the adventure strips. His evocative use of frame, staging, rhythms, ink and line (or blobs), setting, landscape, story arc – all set new and high standards for comic art in the 1930s and 40s that define the form. But as I read through the strip from its beginning I am struck by the pop psychological dimension of the strip. So much time is spent on characters musing on one another’s motives, gaming one another’s psychology, and especially mapping the contours of ideal manhood and the war of the sexes.

Terry the amateur psychologist – decoding adult relationships and the male ego in the first adventure with eternal Pat Ryan love interest Normandie Drake.

The basic psychological dynamic of Terry and the Pirates is father and son. In most places we are taking the perspective of teen Terry Lee who follows and tries to decipher ersatz dad vagabond Pat Ryan as his model male. In the very first story arch of the daily strip society gal Normandie Drake draws Pat’s eye. Here we get the first of many male/female cat and mouse games between Pat and a love interest. At one point Pat leaves Normandie because he doesn’t feel he could fit into her high society. She tries to retrieve him by falsely charging Pat with forgery. And the game is on.

Terry Lee is in the role of son actively trying to decipher the male role that stand-in father Pat is modeling. Connie is his sounding board, which lets Terry voice his readings of Pat without breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to us. And for all of the terrible stereotyping Connie himself endures at Caniff’s hand, he too engages in the pop psychologizing of men and women that quickly becomes one of the sub-themes of the strip.

For his part, Pat is less often an interpreter of human emotional signals than the classic American stoic, the isolato who spends more time silently staring out windows and having his actions and unspoken gestures read by others.

And Caniff’s world of men and women is one of deception, scheming and misdirection. As Terry understands above, a man or woman’s words or actions often run opposite their real meaning. Pat and romantic interests like Normandie, Burma and the Dragon Lady snub and reject one another regularly as ploys to intrigue and attract the other. Per below, Burma rages at Pat labeling him a coward to successfully challenge their stoic to declare his passion for her.

In a rare moment of vocalized reflection, Pat ponders the motives of Burma and his own worthiness as a suitor.

Pat often takes the paternal role to Terry, filling in the blanks on this great mystery that seems to be woman. Heart-to-hearts abound in this strip. Above Caniff invokes the familiar father/son exchange over “Dad” shaving. Caniff portrays the scheming and counter-scheming between men and women with the pointed curiosity of a boy’s view. The interpersonal plots in TATP take up at least as much panel time as the unfolding adventures as the two conceits of the strip run in parallel. And character introspection plays a large role in the day to day content of the strip. Typically the pulp adventure genre is about action, heroic characters who are fully externalized and use violence to express usually male emotion. In TATP, almost every character is capable of being at turns self-deprecating, introspective, analytical.

For and adventure genre usually focused on externalization, Terry and the Pirates uses character introspection to a remarkable degree. Here, Burma reflects own her own motives.

In putting Caniff’s masterpiece in its context of the 30s and 40s, we would do well to understand this dimension to the strip’s appeal. As pure adventure and graphic storytelling, the strip is unmatched. But Caniff clearly is also exploring with his readers human behavior, psychology, the layers of motive and delusion in human interaction. The basic insight of modern psychology, that humans are not always fully aware of their own motives and that actions are not always clear reflections of thought and feeling, are remarkably featured in this strip. It may be Caniff’s unique blend of external physical action with internal introspection that made the strip so rich and appealing during its very popular run.