Chester Gould's Dick Tracy: An Appreciation

Dick Tracy with some of his most memorable villains from the 1940's. (This must date from 1947 or 1948, as it shows Mumbles, who appeared in 1947, but it's before Chief Brandon stepped down in late 1948.)

When I was a little boy, I went through a phase where I was obsessed with the comic strip Dick Tracy. It was right around the time Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy movie was released in 1990. I was very excited when the movie came out, so my fandom must have begun shortly before then. Neither of the metro area papers in the Twin Cities, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press carried Dick Tracy, so my fandom was all about the old Dick Tracy comic strips. 

I was never into superheroes. Batman, Superman, and Spiderman did nothing for me. What I liked about Dick Tracy was that he was real. Okay, sure, there was no way Dick Tracy was ever going to get killed. But he didn’t have superpowers. Dick Tracy used his intelligence to get out of the impossible situations he found himself in, and that appealed to me.

Dick Tracy, written and illustrated by Chester Gould, began in 1931. The strip quickly became a hit with Depression-era America, at a time when gangsters and bank robbers were seemingly around every corner. But Gould was able to keep the strip going long after the real-life gangsters of the 1930’s had been killed or arrested. Part of Gould’s genius was his ability to keep coming up with more and more outrageous villains for the square-jawed Tracy to battle. The first of Gould’s grotesques might have been 1937’s “The Blank,” a man without a face. (Okay, so it was just cheesecloth covering his face, but he still looked creepy.) In the 1940’s Gould really got on a roll, with eerie villains like “Little Face” Finney, the Mole, B.B. Eyes, Pruneface, Mrs. Pruneface, Flattop, the Brow, and Influence. A notable non-grotesque from the 1940’s was Breathless Mahoney, a shapely blonde with a Veronica Lake-like hairstyle. 

Many of the Dick Tracy books I had focused on the first twenty years of the strip, and the 1930’s and 1940’s were certainly the most popular era for Dick Tracy. And it’s probably true of any comic strip that runs for more than twenty years that the first twenty years of the strip are the “classic” period and everything else is just, well, keeping things going. 

Dick Tracy lives here and likes it! This drawing was promoting Woodstock, Illinois, where Chester Gould lived. It's a great drawing of the square-jawed detective.

But Gould found ways to keep the reader’s interest. Dick Tracy had always been focused on the scientific part of police work and crime fighting, and Gould kept Tracy up to date on all the latest technology. And sometimes he put Tracy ahead of the latest technology, like when he introduced the two-way wrist radio to the strip in 1946. The radio allowed Tracy to communicate with the station even when he was out in the field. Chester Gould would have been thrilled to see Apple Watches, which are basically really fancy two-way wrist radios. The two-way wrist radio was eventually supplanted by the two-way wrist TV in 1964. 

Gould’s interest in technology blossomed during the 1960’s, as he inaugurated what has become known as Dick Tracy’s “moon period.” Diet Smith Industries, the company behind the two-way wrist radio and other inventions, had pioneered space travel with the invention of the “Space Coupe.” Human-looking aliens who lived on the moon became recurring characters in the strip, and Dick Tracy’s adopted son Junior ended up marrying Moon Maid, the daughter of the moon governor. The moon period was a very bold choice for Gould to make, as he took what was basically a gritty, urban crime procedural, albeit with a highly eccentric cast of characters, and turned it into a sci-fi strip. I haven’t read very many stories from the “moon period,” in part because that era was not well represented in the Dick Tracy anthologies I bought. In one of those anthologies, 1990’s The Dick Tracy Casebook, the last Chester Gould story is from 1960, thus totally ignoring the moon period. 

I’m not going to say that the moon period was a success, but I admire how Chester Gould went all in on it. It was a bold gamble to make, and one that ended up costing him a lot of readers, as newspapers started dropping the strip. From 1960 to 1974, the number of newspapers carrying Dick Tracy went from 550 to 375. (Dick Tracy: The Official Biography, by Jay Maeder, p.199)

The moon stories receded after Apollo 11 landed in 1969, and Tracy returned to being a mostly Earth-bound detective. During the 1970’s, the strip got more political, as Gould got more heavy-handed in his criticism of the rights of the accused. Some sample questions the characters posed during the 1970’s: Lizz the policewoman asking, “Have the courts become an ally of the underworld?” Sam Catchem: “What chance has law enforcement got in today’s judicial climate?” and Dick Tracy himself mused on December 31, 1975: “With the milksop backing a cop gets, should he quit his profession?” 

It’s not really that surprising that Chester Gould held such views. After all, he was literally working in a black-and-white world. In Chester Gould’s world, Dick Tracy was always right, and the criminals were always wrong and guilty. Of course, in the real world it’s more complicated than that. 

As comic panels got noticeably smaller in the 1970’s, it became harder for serial strips like Dick Tracy to keep going as dialogue and exposition was severely limited. As Jay Maeder writes of Gould, “He never successfully adjusted to the reduction, and his pacing fell off badly.” (Dick Tracy: The Official Biography, p.203) Chester Gould retired at the end of 1977, handing the strip over to Max Allan Collins, who would write the stories, and longtime Dick Tracy art assistant Rick Fletcher. Gould had been working with assistants since the 1930’s, but supposedly Gould never let anyone else touch Dick Tracy. 

Gould might not have received the rave reviews as an artist that contemporary Milton Caniff did, but in my opinion Gould’s artwork was superb. Gould’s style was always more cartoony than Caniff’s detail-packed realism, but it was extremely effective. Gould was particularly effective at using shadows. 

A great example of Chester Gould's dramatic artwork. The book this image is from notes that this could be a Roy Lichtenstein painting.

Another single-panel from Dick Tracy that highlights Chester Gould's dramatic use of shadows.

Gould was also a master of pacing and narrative drive. Part of this was because he was never very far away from his deadlines. The furthest Gould ever got ahead of deadline was 14 weeks. And most of the time Gould would only plot out the strip a week at a time and then draw it! (Dick Tracy: America’s Most Famous Detective, p.42) Maybe that accounts for the breathless pace and excitement that were hallmarks of Dick Tracy. 

While re-reading many Dick Tracy strips for this essay, I’m more and more intrigued by what kind of a person Chester Gould was. What I do know about him is that he was unflashy, and lived on a farm in Woodstock, Illinois for most of the years he drew the comic strip. So how did this seemingly simple fellow come up with all the elaborate storylines and crazy villains that inhabited the universe of Dick Tracy? I have no easy answer for that question. Suffice it to say, Chester Gould had one heck of an imagination.