LEGENDARY HEROES #10

DICK TRACY

Chester Gould (1900-1985) was born in Pawnee, Territory of Oklahoma before it became a state.  All four of his grandparents were pioneer settlers in Oklahoma and Chester was the son of a minister of the United Brethren Church.  Gould moved to Chicago to attend art classes at the Art Institute and Northwestern University, then went to work for local Chicago newspapers where he did advertising art and comic strips.  In 1931 Gould had the idea of creating a police comic strip that would feature a modern day American Sherlock Holmes, who would be tougher than the criminals he tangled with, a cop who would shoot first and ask questions later.  It was a lawless time in America, with Prohibition and the Depression at the same time, and no place was as lawless as Chicago.  So Gould created a strip titled "Plainclothes Tracy" and submitted it to the Tribune.  Joseph Medill Patterson suggested the name change "Dick Tracy" and the comic sleuth was born.

The first Sunday page appeared in the Detroit Mirror on October 4, 1931 with the first daily strip on October 12.  The first villain to square off with Tracy was Big Boy who was modeled upon Al Capone.  Ironically, as Tracy was going after the fictional Big Boy the real Capone was being sentenced for tax evasion.  In the origin story Tracy becomes engaged to Tess Trueheart (in what would become an 18-year engagement) and hoodlums break into the Trueheart home above their delicatessen to rob the family, shooting and killing Tess's father, and kidnapping her.  Chief of police Brandon asks Tracy to go undercover into the underworld to rescue Tess and avenge her father's murder.  This was a new sort of comic strip for the newspapers, something that had never been seen before.  Murder in the funny pages!  In the adventures that followed over the next decades, Gould utilized real police methods and forensic science to aid Tracy in his war against crime, giving the comic a sense of reality.  By 1937 Dick Tracy was the third most popular comic strip in America, and in the 1940s was often #1 in reader polls.  Almost as popular as the comic strip detective were the villains that he encountered.  Beginning in 1941 the villains had names that reflected their appearance or some physical trait, and the Golden Age of Dick Tracy began with Little Face, the Mole, B. B. Eyes, Pruneface, 88 Keys, Flattop, the Brow, Shaky, Measles, Breathless Mahoney, Itchy, Shoulders, Gargles, Influence, Coffyhead, Mumbles, Heels Beals, Pearshape, Wormy, and Blowtop.  The villain Flattop was so popular that when he died readers wrote to Gould and the Tribune to complain.

In 1934 Dick Tracy was heard on radio in 15-minute episodes that aired on weekdays on NBC's New England stations.  Tracy went national on CBS radio in 1935, then moved to the Mutual Broadcasting System until 1937.  Tracy returned to NBC on weekday afternoons and was sponsored by Quaker Oats which took Tracy into primetime on Saturday and Monday evenings with a half hour program.  Just as Ovaltine had merchandised Little Orphan Annie, so too did Quaker Oats with Dick Tracy.  They launched the Dick Tracy Secret Service Patrol.  Juvenile listeners were encouraged to send in boxtops that were redeemed for badges, directly proportional to how much Quaker Oats a kid could eat.  A sergeant's badge was worth 5 boxtops, a lieutenant's was 7, and so on.  The escalation mercifully stopped at 15.  The radio show went to ABC's Blue Network where it was sponsored by Tootsie Rolls and aired until 1948, completing an impressive 14 year run on radio.  On February 15, 1945, the radio show Command Performance aired a musical comedy titled "Dick Tracy in B-flat, or, Isn't He Ever Going to Marry That Girl?"  Bing Crosby was Dick Tracy, Bob Hope was Flattop, and Dinah Shore was Tess Trueheart.  The Tracy nuptials were constantly interrupted as Tracy chased after one villain after another.  With Judy Garland, the Andrew Sisters and Jimmy Durante it was an all-star extravaganza.  In reality, Tracy and Tess were finally wed in the comic strip on Christmas Eve, 1949, only to have their honeymoon ruined by the bad guy Wormy.

The very first Big Little Book by Whitman was a Dick Tracy title and every Tracy adventure was reprinted in the BLB format into the early 1940s.  Tracy made his first comic book appearance in 1936 in the first issue of Dell's Popular Comics.  Tracy remained a regular feature through issue 21, and his newspaper stories were reprinted in Dick Tracy Feature Books and Dell Four-Color Comics.  In January 1948 Dell published the first Dick Tracy Monthly which began a regular series.  Dell published the first 24 issues then Harvey Comics took over, ending with issue 145 in 1961.  Over the years Dick Tracy has appeared in paperbacks and hardcovers almost continuously from the 1940s until today.

Republic pictures put out a 15-chapter serial titled "Dick Tracy" in 1937 starring Ralph Byrd.  The serial was a success and Byrd went on to portray Tracy in three more serials for Republic from 1938-1941.  RKO released a feature film of Tracy in 1945 starring Morgan Conway, who reprised the role in a 1946 sequel.  But Ralph Byrd, a fan favorite, returned as Tracy in two 1947 films.  In 1990 Warren Beatty portrayed the comic strip detective in the Disney film that he also directed.  Ralph Byrd went on to play Tracy in the ABC-TV series that ran 1950-1951.  Episodes for another season were being made when production came to a halt when Byrd suddenly died of a heart attack at age 43.  In 1967 a new TV series was in the works, produced by William Dozier who created the campy but successful "Batman" series in 1966.  A pilot was filmed with Ray MacDonnell as Tracy but the series was not picked up by any of the networks.  Tracy also appeared in animated form in the 1960-1961 series produced by UPA.  130 five-minute episodes were made and packaged for syndication.  UPA also made the Mr. Magoo cartoons and in 1965 they partnered Tracy and Magoo in an episode titled "Dick Tracy and the Mob".  A second cartoon series by Filmation aired in 1971 as part of Archie's TV Funnies.

Throughout the 1940s Chester Gould kept readers coming back with innovative storylines and characters.  Two of his characters who were created as secondary figures, Gravel Gertie and B. O. Plenty, would almost rival Tracy in popularity.  Gertie first appeared in 1944 with the Brow, and she was a snaggle-toothed bewhiskered recluse who lived in a shack by a stone quarry.  B. O. (short for Bob Oscar), was a tobacco-chewing hillbilly who almost strangles Breathless to death.  As fate would have it, these two would be married and when it was revealed that they were to be parents, readers waited anxiously to see what sort of hideous creature their union would produce.  To everyone's surprise they gave birth to a beautiful baby girl with waist-length golden hair and they named her Sparkle Plenty.  The birth of Sparkle was met with great fanfare, even given a full page layout in LIFE magazine.  Ideal debuted a Sparkle Plenty doll for little girls and it became the hottest selling doll to that date (1947) even surpassing the sale of Shirley Temple dolls.  In 1946 Tracy introduced the 2-way wrist radio that readers thought was farfetched.  Turned out that Chester Gould was way ahead of his time.  He also launched Crimestoppers, an amateur anti-crime organization that helped police.

So just how popular was Dick Tracy?  In 1942 cartoonist Al Capp, in his "Li'l Abner" comic strip, created a strip within a strip called "Fearless Fosdick" that was a satire of Dick Tracy.  Fosdick was Abner's "ideal" (idol) and he read it avidly.  The satire was so popular that it ran continually throughout the strip's history.  A poll in the 1940s found that more people knew Dick Tracy than knew who the President was.  Merchandising of all sorts of items made Chester Gould a very wealthy man, and he was living in a home that he had built in the exclusive Bull Valley neighborhood of Woodstock, Illinois.  The farm had a small golf course, a swimming pool, a running waterfall inside the house, and a top room that rotated 360 degrees to offer a scenic view of the countryside.  Towards the end of Gould's stewardship comics were turning away from continuity and adventure strips, and the constant complaints of gore and mayhem in the strip didn't help.  Gould was never shy about displaying bloodshed or showing bullets whizzing through villains.  By the time Gould retired in 1977, ending a 46 year career, the strip was a pale ghost of itself.  It's still being printed today, and not much better.  Gould was the recipient of two Reuben Awards for the best comic strip, and an honorary Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America.  Gould died in 1985 of heart failure in his Woodstock home.  Still, there aren't many people who wouldn't recognize that iconic profile of Dick Tracy who has become a mainstay of pop culture almost from the moment he was created.