Dick Tracy: His Aim is Straight

Before I fully got into superheroes,  I was a fan of Dick Tracy, the hatchet faced detective.   It was 1972 or so and one of my Christmas gifts was The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy.  Reading the first major story arc featuring The Blank,  I was hooked.  Chester Gould was a master of pacing,  and he keeps the suspense high as the Blank proceeds to rub out all those who know his real identity. 

 Junior Tracy, the mop-headed weirdo Tracy has more or less adopted is put in danger  frequently and while no kid would envy his appearance,  as a young boy who gets to fully romp about the dangerous world of Dick Tracy he represents the tie-in to the younger audience.   Although endangered often,  Junior is no slouch;  he's resourceful, smart and willing to go the extra distance to help out Tracy and the police. 

Over the years through  reprints and finally IDW's Complete Dick Tracy I now have the entire Chester Gould run.  Without a doubt,  the 1940s are Gould at his best with the most memorable rogue's gallery including Flattop, the Brow, Pruneface, the Mole,  Shaky and 88 Keys.  But Gould kept going full tilt into the 1970s.   Yes, there are moments where Gould seems to be losing his marbles,  and sometimes he can't resist the urge to Preach to the reader directly through his characters,  but considering the number of times he was amazing the reader with his storytelling and artistic skill,  I refuse to hold any of his slips against him. 

One of the things that struck me was his rapid imagine in creating various bizarre villains for Tracy to battle.  Often, the duel between good and evil ends in a hail of bullets or some supreme Act of God stepping in to render the bad guy dead. The point being is that they stay dead.  I always bumped up against this in the superhero comics -- here's a bad guy with a good final death and  before you can say Copyright Worries,  the bad guy is up and alive again sometimes with a lame excuse of how he escaped death  and sometimes without any explanation at all.   It bugs the heck out of me.   Chester Gould had problem taking a wildly popular bad guy like Flattop and killing him.   Shaky ends up a skeleton to the start of another adventure.  The Brow gets impaled on a flagpole.   But a totally 1960s based shmuck like Marvel's Boomerang gets to escape death again and again.  He had a great death in Iron Fist.  Scraped.  But then,  Marvel is so weak now that an easy to find cosmic cube has given Captain Stacy life again. 

 I'll take the annoying weird and silly Moon Maid story from Gould over what passes for  reading matter today.