The mobsters were enforcers for Big Boy , a powerful crime boss. Chief Brandon recruited Tracy into the Plainclothes unit and Tracy proceeded to infiltrate Big Boy's operation, rescue Tess and brought the mobster to justice.
Soon afterwards, Tracy adopted a young street urchin who later chose to call himself Dick Tracy Jr. Pruneface , the Blank , Influence , Mumbles , and many others. It is not uncommon for Tracy to be targeted by relatives of his enemies seeking revenge. Early in his career, Tracy would often adopt some form of disguise and go undercover, but the approach was later abandoned in favor of more traditional police work and scientific investigation.
Tracy got a new partner in the freckle-faced, humorous Sam Catchem. Tracy and Tess were married around this time. Tracy endured several hardships during his extensive career, including hundreds of near death situations, injuries, and even a temporary divorce from Tess in the s.
City officials suspected at one time that Tracy was on the take because of his fancy car and big house, but these suspicions were unfounded. Tracy was able to prove that the car was a test model that he was testing for industrialist Diet Smith which had special police features , and the money for his house had come from his thrifty saving during his bachelor years. Tracy has been on many adventures and in many different places around the world and beyond.
Later, Tracy was stranded for weeks in an Island in the South Atlantic with a Scotland Yard police detective during an adventure that also took him to pre-Communist Cuba.
Tracy returned to Cuba several years later in pursuit of the fugitive known as Specs. In , Tracy was recruited by President Ronald Reagan to participate in the government exchange program where he was sent to Russia as an observer of their law enforcement with the KGB.
Tracy later returned to Russia to aid in the case involving Hammerhead and a nuclear submarine. In the mids, Tracy became involved in a number of cases that took him to France and England. He sometimes used the French-speaking Jenny Saisquoi as an interpreter. In , Tracy and Tess took a vacation to Europe where they retraced the steps of the famous detectives C. In addition to different countries around the world, Tracy has been to the Moon along with Diet Smith. Tracy is the most decorated police officer in America and also known for having killed the most criminals in the line of duty.
He is a celebrity, and is probably the best-known law-enforcement officer in the country, having the same level of name recognition as Elliot Ness or J. Edgar Hoover. At this time, the standard publication size and space of newspaper comics was sharply reduced; for example, the Dick Tracy Sunday strip, which had traditionally been a full-page episode containing 12 panels, was cut in size to a half-page format that offered, at most, eight panels—these new restrictions created challenges for all comic artists.
In one of Max Allan Collins' first stories as the strip's writer, the gangster known as "Big Boy," whose gang members had killed Tess Trueheart's father years ago, learned that he was dying and had less than a year to live. Big Boy, still seeking revenge on the plainclothesman who sent him up the river, wanted to live just long enough to see Tracy's death.
He put out an open contract on Tracy's head worth one million dollars, knowing that every small-time hood in the City would take a crack at the famous cop for that amount of money.
One of the would-be collectors rigged Tracy's car to explode, but inadvertently killed Moon Maid instead of Tracy in the explosion. A funeral strip for Moon Maid explicitly stated that this officially severed all ties between Earth and the Moon in the strip, [3] thus eliminating the last remnants of the Space Period.
Honey Moon received a new hairstyle that covered her antennae, and was ultimately phased out of the strip. Junior later married Sparkle Plenty the daughter of B. In the s, Tracy's own son, Joseph Flintheart Tracy, took on a role similar to Junior's in the earlier strips. During the late s the strip was thought to have been drawn by a few other artists due to an ailing Gould.
The Plenty family was a group of goofy redneck yokels headed by the former villain, Bob Oscar "B. Gravel Gertie was introduced as the unwitting dupe accessory of the villain, The Brow, who was on the run from Dick Tracy.
The family provided a humorous counterpoint to Tracy's adventures. The Plenty sub-story was decades long, and saw Sparkle Plenty grow from an infant to a young married lady. The Plenty family appeared with Tracy in a story that occurred in a bank, where "B. His face has yet to be shown.
Beginning in the early s, the Sunday strip included a frame devoted to a page from the "Crimestoppers' Textbook", a series of handy illustrated hints for the amateur crime-fighter. This was named after a short-lived youth group seen in the strip during the late s, led by Junior Tracy, called "Dick Tracy's Crimestoppers.
After Gould's retirement, Collins initially replaced the Textbook with "Dick Tracy's Rogues Gallery," a salute to memorable Tracy villains of the past. Chester Gould retired from comics in ; his last Dick Tracy strip appeared in print on Sunday, December 25 of that year.
Gould's name remained in the byline for a few years after his retirement as a story consultant. Collins wrote the death of Moon Maid, and removed other Gould creations of the s and s including Groovy Grove, who was gravely wounded in the line of duty and later died in the hospital; Lizz married him before his death. Collins took a generally less cynical view of the justice system than Gould—Tracy came to accept its limitations and requirements as a normal part of the process he could manage.
Extreme technology, such as the Space Coupe, were phased out in favor of more realistic advanced tools such as the 2-Way Wrist Computer in New semi-regular characters introduced by Collins and Fletcher included: Dr. Vitamin Flintheart, the aged ham actor created by Gould in , who had not been seen in the strip for almost three decades, reappeared occasionally as a comic-relief figure. The Plenty family B. Original villains seen during this period included Angeltop revenge-seeking, psychopathic daughter of the slain Flattop , Torcher whose scheme was arson-for-profit , and Splitscreen a video pirate.
Collins brought back at least one "classic" Gould villain, or revenge-seeking family member, per year. The revived Gould villains were often provided with full names, and marriages, children, and other family connections were developed, bringing more humanity to many of the originally grotesque brutes. Rick Fletcher died in and was succeeded by editorial cartoonist Dick Locher, who had assisted Gould on the strip in the late s and early s.
Locher was assisted by his son John, who died in In , following a financial reorganization of their comic strip holdings, Max Allan Collins was fired from the strip, and Tribune staff writer and columnist Mike Kilian took over the writing. Kilian was paid less than half of what Collins was making per strip, but continued until his death on October 27, Locher was both author and artist for over three years, beginning on January 9, On March 16, , Jim Brozman began collaborating with Locher, taking over the drawing duties while Locher continued to write the strip.
In , Tracy was a guest at Blondie and Dagwood's 75th anniversary party in the comic strip Blondie. Later, Dick Tracy appeared in the comic strip Gasoline Alley. Staton and Curtis are assisted by Shelley Pleger, who inks and letters Staton's drawings, along with Shane Fisher, who provides the coloring on the Sunday strips, and Chicago-area policeman Jim Doherty, who provides "Crimestopper" captions for the Sunday strips, and acts as the feature's technical advisor.
Chester Gould won the Reuben Award for the strip in and In , the strip was one of 20 included in the Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative postage stamps and postcards.
The early shows all had minute episodes. NBC's weekday afternoon run from January 3, to April 28, had sound effects by Keene Crockett and was sponsored by Quaker Oats, which brought Dick Tracy into primetime Saturdays at 7 pm and, briefly, Mondays at 8 pm with minute episodes from April 29, to September 30, Announcers were Ed Herlihy and Dan Seymour. La Guardia read a complete Dick Tracy strip over the radio.
Jim Ameche portrayed Tracy in a two-record set recorded by Mercury Records in The record sleeves were illustrated with Sunday strips reprinted in black-and-white for children to color. The character proved very popular, and a second serial, Dick Tracy Returns , appeared in reissued in Dick Tracy's G-Men was released in reissued in The last was Dick Tracy vs. Crime Inc. The sequels were produced under an interpretation of the contract for the first, Dick Tracy , which gave license for "a series or serial.
In these serials Dick Tracy is portrayed as an FBI agent, or "G-Man", based in California, rather than as a detective in the police force of a Midwestern city resembling Chicago, and, aside from himself and Junior, no characters from the strip appear in any of the four films.
Bushman and others is the same kind of avuncular superior as Chief Brandon. The first serial, Dick Tracy , is now in the public domain. Cueball in , both with Morgan Conway as Tracy. Gruesome is probably the best known of the four, with the villain portrayed by Boris Karloff. All four movies had many of the visual features associated with film noir : dramatic, shadowy photographic compositions, with many exterior scenes filmed at night. Lyle Latell co-starred in all four films as Pat Patton.
The strip has had limited exposure on television with one early live-action series, two animated series, one unsold pilot that was never picked up, and a proposed TV series currently held up in litigation.
Ralph Byrd , who had played the square-jawed sleuth in all four Republic movie serials, and in two of the RKO feature-length films, reprised his role in a short-lived live-action Dick Tracy series that ran on ABC from to Additional episodes intended for first-run syndication continued to be produced into Produced by P. Palmer, who also wrote many of the scripts, the series often featured Gould-created villains such as Flattop, Shaky, the Mole, Breathless Mahoney, Heels Beals, and Influence, all of whom appeared on film for the first time on this series.
Criticized for its violence, the series remained popular. It ended, not in response to criticism, but because of Byrd's unexpected, premature death in The series was filmed on a low budget, with many long hours and a rushed shooting schedule. In the first cartoon series, produced from to by UPA, Tracy employed a series of cartoon-like subordinate flatfoots to fight crime each week, contacting them on his two-way wrist radio.
Even people unfamiliar with Dick Tracy have at least some passing knowledge of its colorful library of villains: Pruneface, Flyface, the Mole, Flattop, the Brow. Fearing readers might tire of villains, Gould killed them off with regularity—and in some astonishingly violent ways. The Brow was impaled on a flagpole; a rabid dog attacked one, while another was scalded to death in a Turkish bath.
While much of Tracy was sensational in nature—few actual cops relied on video watches or almost exclusively hunted disfigured crooks—Gould still wanted to portray police work as accurately as he could.
The artist took courses in ballistics, fingerprinting, forensics, and other procedural techniques to remain current on the latest investigative tools.
A flat-headed criminal, Flattop spent several weeks in facing off against Tracy before a Gould-ish ugly death by drowning and an unceremonious burial in a field. He was a charming killer, though, and readers took his demise to heart. Fans in Middletown, Connecticut even held a wake. Tracy goons typically had 10 weeks of life in them. Flattop earned Newspapers even held Moon Maid lookalike contests to find women who resembled the character, minus her antennae. As reactionary as the strip had been to s politics, Gould doubled down in the s.
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