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Chester
Gould and the Morality Play of Law and Order
The inspiration for this strip came
from the front pages of the newspapers, which daily headlined bribery,
extortion, graft, corruption, arson, and shoot-outs in the streets. Raised in the frontier traditions of swift justice
that still prevailed in the Oklahoma Territory at the turn of the century,
Gould was disgusted by the seeming triumph of gangsterism in Chicago
during Prohibition. What was
needed, he said, was the kind of incorruptible cop who would shoot known
hoodlums on sight, a champion of law and order and “direct action, who
could dish it out to the underworld exactly as they dished it out—only
better. An individual who could toss the hot iron back
at them along with a smack on the jaw thrown in for good measure.” Gould appropriated the persona of the hard-boiled
detective that had been flourishing in pulp magazines and, in visualizing
his hero, gave him the chisel-jawed profile he associated with Sherlock
Holmes. Al Capone had just been
convicted of income tax evasion and shipped off to Alcatraz when Gould's
Tracy arrived on Patterson's desk in the summer of 1931. When Gould met his appointment with Patterson,
Patterson changed the name of the feature to Dick Tracy (observing
that “they call plainclothes detectives ‘dicks’”) and outlined the opening
sequence that established Tracy's character and the motive for his dogged
crusade against crime. Tracy would begin as an ordinary citizen,
but when his girlfriend’s grocer father is murdered by robbers on the
fourth day of the strip’s run and she is kidnaped, Tracy dedicates himself
to her rescue and the hoodlums’ apprehension. (Patterson also named
the girl—Tess Trueheart.) The police recognize Tracy’s merit and quickly
enlist him in the department’s plainclothes squad. As a matter of historical record,
Dick Tracy began as a Sunday feature on October 4, 1931, only in
the Detroit Mirror.The first Sunday strip was a stand-alone escapade;
and another of the same sort came out on the following Sunday. The daily
series started the next day, Monday, October 12.
Until Tracy’s debut, the newspaper
continuity comic strip had focused on one of two extremes—exotic adventure
or domestic intrigue. Tracy
brought the excitement of adventure to its readers’ front doors when
Gould's cop began fighting contemporary crime in everybody's home town. The strip was a success from the first, its
popularity springing from its overt recognition and exploitation of
the violence in American life. Tracy's
first foe, Big Boy, was a scarcely veiled version of Capone; in the
following spring, Gould capitalized upon the sensation of the Lindbergh
kidnapping case, staging a blatantly similar crime in the strip. Nor
did the cartoonist confine himself to reality for inspiration: one of
his most popular early villains, Stooge Viller (who first appeared January
3, 1933) was the spitting image of movie star Edward G. Robinson, then
starring in a succession of gangster films. Raw violence on the comics
page began with Dick Tracy; until then, gunplay and bloodshed
had been nearly taboo. Gould
changed that. His criminals were
compunctionless brutes specializing in cruelty, and he delineated their
crimes and foul deeds in unblinking detail—knifings, shootings, clubbings,
throttlings, in short, death and maiming by every known means. Gould seemed to delight in submitting
his hero (as well as countless innocent women and children) to physical
torture at the hands of the crooks, and Tracy was plunged into and extricated
from a morbidly fascinating series of outlandish deathtrap situations. Among the most celebrated, the contrivance of
the vengeful Mrs. Pruneface in which Tracy is chained to the floor beneath
a spike protruding from a plank upon which a refrigerator is supported
by two giant blocks of ice, both melting from the heat of a nearby oven;
as they melt, the spike will slowly, diabolically, be driven into the
chest of the detective by the weight of the descending refrigerator.
(One cringes at the thought of the spike’s slow penetration of Tracy’s
chest!) But if Gould dwelt on such grisly matters,
he did so to emphasize the strip’s moral: crime does not pay. Retribution
was dealt out to every miscreant in visual terms as graphically detailed
as those that recorded their crimes:
they died by drowning, freezing, impalement, crushing, mauling,
hail of hot lead, and, Gould's specialty, a bullet between the eyes,
depicted in dramatic close-up. But Gould's strip was more than a string
of violent shoot-`em-ups. Tracy
combined intelligence with action. And
Gould was quick to adopt the realism of authentic police procedures
and kept himself up-to-date on modern methods, even hiring a retired
Chicago policeman for weekly conferences on new developments.
Tracy quickly emerged as the world’s first procedural detective
in fiction, his exploits illustrating in painstaken detail the techniques
of contemporary crime detection. Gould even anticipated some innovations: the use of closed-circuit television to monitor
potential criminal activities in such places as banks and two-way wrist-radio
communication. (Gould admitted that he’d bought some “laughing stock”
when he introduced the latter in 1946, but he had the last laugh: his
science fiction became fact within a few years.) Gould's achievement as a cartoonist
arises from his pictures as much as from his stories. His drawing style is simple, almost geometrically
so, liberally deploying solid flat blacks for character's clothes and
for modeling objects. The result
is a stark rendition of reality--planes of black giving definition to
planes of white (and vice versa) with uncompromising contrast. The strip is an exercise in black and white
both graphically and philosophically:
there are no grays in Gould's moral convictions either. Despite the precision of his technique, however,
Gould's graphic treatment is not photographic in the illustrative manner;
it is only semi-realistic. It
is a style that permitted Gould a dramatic deviation from naturalism. And he took full advantage of the opportunity:
he created a gallery of ghoulish villains, caricatures of evil that
underscored the moral of his strip:
crime doesn't pay, and a life of crime will put one in daily
communion with such creatures as these—Pruneface, Flattop, the
Mole, Shoulders, B-B Eyes, the Brow, Shakey, Influence, Mumbles, none
of them realistically rendered. All are grotesques, gargoyles of criminality.
Hence the greatness of the strip:
Gould's unique accomplishment was to combine realistic storytelling
and graphic moralizing. It is a combination none of his throng of imitators
could successfully duplicate or sustain. In the 1960s, Gould took a long detour
into science fantasy: inspired,
no doubt, by his success at predicting technical advances, he invented
the “space coupe,” an interplanetary vehicle powered by magnetism, and
he forthwith sent Tracy and his cohorts to the moon, where they discovered
a race of horned humanoid beings. With the U.S. moon landing in 1969,
however, Gould had to abandon his fantasy (we all knew for certain,
then, that there were no inhabitants on the moon), and the strip came
back to earth. In his last years on the feature, Gould's championing
of law and order became strident as he spoke out against the coddling
of criminals that he saw in legal precedents that established rights
for criminals. Gould retired
from the strip with the installment for December 25, 1977, leaving the
drawing of the strip to Richard Fletcher, his long-time assistant, and
the writing to novelist Max Allan Collins. (When Fletcher died in early
1983, the drawing was assigned to the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer-winning
editorial cartoonist Dick Locher, who had assisted Gould briefly 1957-61;
Mike Killian took over the writing task in 1992 when Collins was rather
unceremoniously shoved out the door.) Gould died at his farm near Woodstock,
Illinois, which he had purchased in 1936 with the first fruits of his
success and where he worked on the strip daily except for the two days
every week that he spent in his office at the Tribune Tower in downtown
Chicago. A member of the National Cartoonists
Society, Gould twice received its Reuben trophy as Cartoonist of the
Year—1959 and 1977. One of the earliest straight adventure story comic
strips and the first procedural detective feature, Dick Tracy
set the pace for virtually every detective comic strip concocted thereafter. Gould created a host of memorable humorous eccentrics
like B.O. Plenty, Gravel Gertie, and Vitamin Flintheart as well as his
famed rogue's gallery, but Tracy was his most famous grotesque, a fiction
as archetypal of his genre as Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan. Bibliography. Dick Tracy:
The Official Biography by Jay Maeder (1990) contains biographical
material on Chester Gould as well as on his creation. And Dick Tracy: America's Most Famous Detective edited by
Bill Crouch, Jr. (1987) includes autobiographical essays by Gould as
well as reprints of the strip as produced, first, by Gould, then by
his successors, novelist Max Allan Collins, first with Rick Fletcher
doing the drawing, then with Dick Locher at the drawing board.
Also useful are “Dick Tracy:
The First Law and Order Man” by John Culhane in Argosy (June
1974; pp. 20-21, 44-47) and The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy: 1931-1951 edited by Herb Galewitz (1970),
which includes biographical front matter and reprints several of the
most famous of the strip's sequences.
In Dick Tracy, the Thirties:
Tommyguns and Hard Times edited by Galewitz (1978), many
of the strip's earliest stories are reprinted.
Standard reference works on the comics also include biographical
details: The Comics and Their
Creators by Martin Sheridan (1944; rpt. 1971); The Comics by
Coulton Waugh (1947); and Comic Art in America by Stephen Becker
(1959). And my own book, The
Art of the Funnies, repeats much of the information in the foregoing
biography—adding stories of the birth pangs of most of the Chicago Tribune-New
York Daily News strips midwifed by Joseph Patterson (Gasoline Alley,
Moon Mullins, Little Orphan Annie, Terry and the Pirates, etc.);
for more details about the contents of the book, click here
to be transported to reams of concise promotional description. Much
of Gould's original art is in the possession of the International Museum
of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton, Florida. |
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