Book Review: The Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy Volume 1: 1931-1933 by Chester Gould (2006)

Cover of The Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy Volume 1: 1931-1933. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Chester Gould wrote and illustrated the comic strip Dick Tracy for 46 years, from 1931 to 1977. Gould created a detective strip that became a sensation, spawning movies, radio shows, and all kinds of tie-in merchandising. In the years before he created Dick Tracy, Gould had written several gag-a-day comic strips like The Radio Catts and The Girl Friends. None of these strips had become a hit with the public. But Gould was a hard worker, and a persistent man. Gould bombarded Joseph Medill Patterson, the founder and owner of the New York Daily News, with ideas for strips all the time. Gould rarely received a reply, but he didn’t let that dissuade him. In August of 1931 Gould sent off 5 strips titled Plainclothes Tracy. It was unlike anything Gould had drawn before. The strips featured a hoodlum being tortured with a blowtorch applied to his feet, highlighted Tracy’s sharp skills of observation, and ended with the threat of an imminent shoot-out. Patterson cabled back to Gould: “Your Plainclothes Tracy has possibilities.” It was Patterson himself who changed the title of the strip to, simply, Dick Tracy. 

The first appearance of Dick Tracy, in the first of the five Plainclothes Tracy strips that Chester Gould submitted in August of 1931. In these strips Tracy doesn't yet have a first name, and he wears a straw boater hat instead of his famous fedora.

The Complete Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, an ambitious project undertaken by IDW Publishing and the Library of American Comics, began with the publication of the first volume in 2006. The project is still not complete—the next book will be Volume 27, due to be published in January of 2020. Volume 1 of The Complete Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy includes all the strips from October 1931 to May of 1933. 

Gould’s vision for Dick Tracy was unlike anything else that had come along in newspaper comics. Gould created a mixture of scientific detective work, grotesque criminals, and hard-hitting violence, mixed with the occasional serving of humor.  In doing so, Gould essentially invented the modern police procedural. But all that would take time to perfect, and in Volume 1 we see Gould figuring things out as he goes along. If you’re expecting over the top villains with bizarre deformities, you’ll be disappointed. 

Dick Tracy began with two Sunday strips on October 4^th and October 11^th, 1931. The Sunday strips were originally stand-alone stories unconnected to the action of the daily strip. Indeed, on the second and third Sunday strips, Tracy captures the crime boss Big Boy two weeks in a row, while in the daily strip Big Boy remained at large until May of 1932. That same month, the Sunday strips finally connected to the Monday through Saturday continuity of the strip. The daily strip Dick Tracy started on Monday, October 12, 1931, and the initial storyline examined Tracy’s first case as a plainclothes police officer. 

Dick Tracy announces his engagement to Tess, October 15, 1931.

Dick Tracy became a detective by accident. One night, Tracy is having dinner with his girlfriend, Tess Trueheart, and her parents. Shortly after Tracy and Tess announce their engagement, hoodlums break into the Truehearts’ apartment, shoot Tess’s father, steal the $1,000 he has saved, knock out Tracy, and kidnap Tess. When Tracy regains consciousness, he pledges to bring the guilty parties to justice. Police Chief Brandon is impressed by Tracy and almost immediately offers him a job as a plainclothes officer. Tracy accepts. 

Tracy joins the force, October 22, 1931.

What probably strikes modern readers as odd is that there’s no explanation of who Dick Tracy is, where he came from, or anything about his background. In fact, throughout the strip there’s precious little background information about Dick Tracy, the man. But maybe we don’t need an explanation of how Dick Tracy came to be who he is. Dick Tracy simply is honest and tough and fearless and smart. In a 1980 interview with Chester Gould printed in Volume 1 and 2 of The Complete Dick Tracy, Max Allan Collins asks Gould what Tracy did before he became a cop. Gould replies, “I never gave that one bit of thought.” When Collins presses again, Gould says, “He was just a nice young guy.” And there you go. 

By the end of November 1931, certain trademarks of Dick Tracy are already there—Tracy’s ever-present fedora and trench coat have made their first appearances, and we get a gun battle in the street that fells the hood who killed Emil Trueheart. The violence of Dick Tracy was truly shocking for the time, and even today it’s still incredibly violent for a newspaper comic strip. 

Dick Tracy, in a rare moment of reflection as a beat cop, January 25, 1932. This isn't a classic snowstorm yet, but Chester Gould's snowstorms are great examples of his artistic skill.

Dick Tracy goes through some growing pains professionally. After a raid goes wrong in early 1932, Tracy is busted down to a beat cop. When he’s a beat cop, Tracy is uncharacteristically morose and full of self-pity. Fortunately, he quickly snaps out of it and gets promoted back to a plainclothes officer. 

The action in this first volume moves too fast at times. An example would be when Tracy is trying to find the kidnapped child Buddy Waldorf, crime boss Big Boy throws Tracy overboard from an ocean liner. Tracy gets thrown overboard, picked up by a Norwegian tramp freighter, transferred to a British aircraft carrier, and flown back to the ship, all in 6 days! It happens so quickly that there’s no real suspense to it. Had this sequence happened say, ten years later, Gould would have stretched it out and ratcheted up the drama.

The Dick Tracy of the early 1930’s was a talky strip. Gould eventually streamlined his dialogue and narration, but in these early strips he’s very loquacious, as many comic strips of that time were. The very first Dick Tracy daily has 100 words of dialogue and narration in it! That would be enough for a week’s worth of strips in 2019!

There are moments in this first volume of Dick Tracy that are very dated. For example, when Tracy rescues Buddy Waldorf and captures Big Boy, Tracy challenges Big Boy to a fistfight, no weapons, and promptly beats Big Boy to a pulp. I’m not endorsing the excessive force used by a comic strip cop 87 years ago, but I think Chester Gould intended Tracy’s pummeling of Big Boy to be a stand-in for the readers’ desire for the punishment of criminals like Al Capone, whom Big Boy was clearly modeled after, and the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby, the crime that inspired Gould’s Buddy Waldorf storyline. 

Tracy's sidekick Pat Patton shooting a hood on June 30, 1932 is an example of the sometimes awkward artwork of the strip's early days. I know the guy's getting shot, but there's something about this panel that just makes me laugh.

Gould is still figuring out how to best tell a story in this volume. There are numerous clunky times when Gould makes strip time real time: i.e., someone will say “I haven’t seen Pat for 3 days.” Eventually this rightly falls by the wayside, as Gould makes it clear that the action of the strip is continuous. 

Dick Tracy was influenced by Sherlock Holmes, and several times in Volume 1 Tracy disguises himself, something that rarely happens after 1933. Like Holmes, Tracy is a sharp observer of human behavior and many times finds clues that others overlook. 

There are odd little continuity errors here and there, such as Gould not being able to decide if Dan Mucelli’s last name is Mucelli or Muzel. In the same speech bubble, Tracy uses both last names. Oops.

Mucelli or Muzel? Even Dick Tracy doesn't seem to know the crook's last name on November 27, 1932.

For me, Dick Tracy turns a corner for the better in September of 1932 when Gould introduces the character of Junior, a 9-year-old boy who has no parents and has been riding the rails with Steve the Tramp. Junior is eventually taken in by Dick Tracy himself, and the boy becomes key to the rest of the stories in this volume. 

Junior's first meeting with Tess Trueheart doesn't go so well, September 26, 1932. If you're annoyed by incorrect speech, Junior's litany of "dese" "dem" "dat" and "dose" will drive you nuts.

Personally, I think Steve the Tramp is the most terrifying villain that Gould had created so far in the strip. Sure, I wouldn’t want to meet any of the other villains in a dark alley, but Big Boy? Stereotypical Mob boss. Broadway Bates? He looks like the Penguin from Batman. Dan Mucelli? Meh, just a typical drug pusher, with a strange nose. Steve the Tramp, on the other hand, is a ruthless figure out of a nightmare—he strangles a postal worker just to get his hands on a postcard. Steve threatens severe bodily harm to Junior on an almost daily basis. He’s really, truly awful. I suspect Chester Gould’s response to my feelings about Steve the Tramp would be: “Good, he’s supposed to be terrifying and disturbing!” 

Steve the Tramp and Stooge Viller are the most interesting villains Gould had yet created, and in Volume 2 they will join forces and take up much of the strip’s storyline in 1933. Viller makes his first appearance in January of 1933, and he’s the opposite of Steve the Tramp, a well-dressed city slicker whose stock in trade is being an expert pickpocket. Viller, who resembles the actor Edward G. Robinson, was responsible for getting Tracy kicked off the police force by planting counterfeit money in his pockets. And to add insult to injury, Viller hangs around town and romances Tess Trueheart, who has broken her engagement to Tracy in the wake of his dismissal from the force. What a jerk! 

 

Stooge Viller romances Tess Trueheart, February 6, 1933. Just six days later, he'll shoot her. Tess's first warning that he was no good should have been his name. Stooge, really?

By the end of Volume 1, the strip has gone through some growing pains and is starting to emerge into the strip that readers of the classic Dick Tracy period will recognize. Gould’s artwork has also improved, and his visual style is becoming more distinctive. Gould could work wonders with shadows, and we see more of that as Volume 1 ends. Particularly effective is the strip from January 27, 1933, as we observe a 3AM phone call from Tracy to Tess, as he professes his innocence about the counterfeit money, and she hangs up on him. All four panels occur in darkness, with only shadows and cross-hatching, and it’s tremendously effective. 

The science of crime-fighting always played a large role in Dick Tracy, and we see examples of this throughout Volume 1. In November 1932, a nurse asks Tracy “But what’s ballistics?” This was a question that probably many real-life police officers would have also asked at the time, as the science of matching markings on bullets to specific guns was in its infancy. Throughout his career, Gould worked hard to keep Tracy ahead of the curve in any scientific advancements that would aid his crime-fighting. 

During my earlier boyhood Tracy-mania, I read all the strips in Volume 1, as they were collected in the 1978 anthology Dick Tracy the Thirties: Tommy Guns and Hard Times. At the time, in the early 1990’s, I had hoped that book would be the beginning of reprinting all the Dick Tracy strips, but Tommy Guns and Hard Times was just a one-off, as no books ever continued the story. Reading Dick Tracy as an adult, different things strike you. Like the wordless final two panels of the May 28, 1932 strip, as Buddy Waldorf’s mother is reunited with her son. It’s only two panels, but it’s so moving. Gould knew he didn’t need any narration to trigger emotion from his readers. 

The Complete Dick Tracy Volume 1 is an interesting look at the beginning of an iconic American comic strip, and I would recommend it to any fan of Dick Tracy.