The cover of The Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, 1941-42, published by IDW Publishing in 2009.
Volume 7 of The Complete Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy covers the period from January 1941 to September of 1942, and during this time most people would probably say that Dick Tracy entered its classic period. It’s in Volume 7 that we start to see the kind of grotesque villains like Little Face and the Mole that Chester Gould was famous for creating. For readers overwhelmed by the 29-volume set of The Complete Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, Volume 7 would be a fine place to start. Speaking of readers who might be overwhelmed by 29 volumes, now that the complete run of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy has been issued by IDW Publishing, wouldn’t now be a really great time to produce a new one or two volume “Best of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy” to entice new readers who might be encountering this classic detective comic strip for the first time?
For each review I’ve written of the individual volumes of Dick Tracy, I could easily write a separate review highlighting Gould’s fantastic artwork from each volume. Gould was a master at creating striking visual tableaus, and his artwork was full of expressionistic shadows. Gould would have made an excellent film noir screenwriter or director. It’s too bad no one ever made a real film noir movie of a Dick Tracy story. The 1940’s Dick Tracy movies just aren’t high quality enough to be classic film noirs, and Warren Beatty’s 1990 film version, as fantastic as it is, understandably highlights the comic strip nature of Gould’s bright, vivid colors found in the Sunday comics, rather than the black-and-white sensibilities of classic film noir and the Monday-Saturday strips.
After going slightly overboard on the backward-spelled names in Volume 6, Chester Gould backed off of that trend in Volume 7, offering just four backwards names:
Selbert Depool: looped (a reference to Selbert’s mental state—he was forcibly committed to an asylum)
Revol: lover
Charley Yenom: money (fitting, as he blackmails Little Face)
Amard: drama (he’s a drama critic)
I’ll recap the stories in Volume 7 and give each a 1-5 ranking. Overall, I would give Volume 7 a 5-star rating. Obviously, some stories fall short of the 5-star rating, but the collection as a whole is fantastic.
Krome gets trapped in a blizzard, January 27, 1941.
Krome: Krome’s story began in Volume 6, as Krome carried out hits on other criminals in the city. At the very end of Volume 6, Krome’s girlfriend Kitty shot and wounded him. Krome murdered Kitty, and as Volume 7 begins, he is desperately seeking to escape the city and get to a doctor. Gould throws Krome into a whirlwind of a blizzard—snowstorms were always one of Gould’s strengths as an artist. Krome makes it to a doctor, but gangrene has already set in, and his left arm has to be amputated. (Chester Gould may have been obsessed with amputations, as you’ll see from this volume. He also had a strong sense of what would creep out his readers.) Gould orchestrates a dramatic ending for Krome: he freezes the death in the blizzard, his hand reaching for his gun. Snowstorm + amputation + dramatic death=5 stars.
The terrifying Selbert Depool, March 12, 1941.
Selbert Depool: This story is about how greed can destroy people. Selbert’s uncle had him committed to an asylum so he could take control of the family fortune. Years later, Selbert escapes from the asylum and murders his uncle in revenge. Selbert Depool is quite a terrifying villain, with a hulking physique and dark circles under his eyes. He looks like Sweeney Todd on steroids. Greed leads to lots of bad things happening at the Depool mansion. Rich people in Dick Tracy are rarely good people. I’m very curious as to what Chester Gould’s own feelings about wealth and privilege were, and where those feelings came from. I see some similarities in Gould’s attitude towards wealth to his contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald. I would love to know if Gould ever read any of Fitzgerald’s works. Oh, and I want someone to do a graphic novel mash-up where Dick Tracy is a character in The Great Gatsby, solves Gatsby’s murder, and beats the crap out of Tom Buchanan.
There are Gothic touches to this story, as Myrna Depool, the granddaughter of widow Depool, cries, “What has come over everyone? This house is evil!” Fortunately, she is able to escape the crazed greed that overtakes Selbert.
I don’t know if Chester Gould was claustrophobic, but if he wasn’t, he sure knew exactly what buttons to push to inspire terror in those of us who are not fond of tiny, enclosed spaces. In this story, there’s a lot of focus on the cistern in the basement of the Depool mansion. Once the water is drained from the cistern, there’s a panel that opens to a tiny room at the bottom of the cistern. Delbert hides down here when he first comes to the mansion, and Tracy is trapped in the cistern as the mansion burns to the ground. 4 stars.
There's a surprising amount of information about dairy cows on Trigger Doom's farm, June 12, 1941.
Trigger Doom: Meh. A definite letdown from the first two stories, and one of the weaker stories in this volume. The storyline begins with Constable Ferret giving Tracy a blood transfusion. Ferret is a comic character who looks like an older Brighton Spotts, who was an insufferable supporting character in a 1938 storyline. Turns out that Ferret’s daughter is palling around with Trigger, and she ends up perishing in a fiery car crash. Trigger hides out on a farm, which echoes Gould’s own farm outside of Woodstock, Illinois. Gould’s own obsessions and interests always found their way into the strip, and so there’s lots of information about the production of dairy cows in this storyline. 3 stars.
Little Face, July 29, 1941.
Little Face: Chester Gould had introduced grotesque villains before, but in the 1940’s he really got on a roll and created many of his most famous villains. Dick Tracy was a fascinating comic strip for many reasons, but one of them would be the strip’s intense realism grounded in actual police procedures, which often utilized the most advanced scientific techniques for crime solving, combined with villains whose physical features defy reality. Realism and fantasy intermingle in a fascinating way in the world of Dick Tracy. Eventually, Chester Gould’s fascination with technology would lead him to dream up ideas that were decades ahead of his time, such as the two-way wrist radio, introduced into the strip in 1946. This fascination with technology would eventually lead Dick Tracy to the moon during the 1960’s, but that’s getting way ahead of ourselves.
Chester Gould’s sadistic imagination was responsible for putting his detective into lots of death traps, and it was also responsible for trapping his villains in similarly awful scenarios. One of the most vivid is Little Face’s overnight stay in a meat storage freezer. It’s a terrifying scenario, and Gould plays it out for a full week of the strip.
Little Face won't freeze in the meat freezer, August 27, 1941.
I can imagine Chester Gould taking a tour of an industrial warehouse in order to get some inspiration. He’s the guy in the back who’s always lagging a little behind the rest of the tour group, and he’s making all these little notes and quick sketches in a notebook. He looks like an average enough guy, with a full head of silver hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a little bit of a paunch. But there’s a kind of dignity about him—he’s impeccably dressed, suit, tie, jacket, overcoat and hat, and he just carries this gravitas with him. You can’t figure out who he is, but he just seems like he’s somebody. And then when you get to the meat storage freezer, he suddenly peppers the tour guide with a bunch of questions! “Is there any way to open the freezer from the inside? Could someone survive if they were left in that freezer overnight? What if it was summertime and they didn’t have a jacket? How long before frostbite would set in?” And the tour guide fields some of the questions decently enough, but others creep up on him like a ground ball that takes a bad hop and leaps up at the last second and smacks him in the face. And for a moment you wonder who this guy asking all of these questions really is. Is he some kind of sicko planning a murder or something? And then months later, long after you’ve forgotten all about that warehouse tour, you open the comic pages and read Dick Tracy, and you see Little Face get locked in the meat freezer, and it all comes back to you.
Little Face’s time in the meat freezer reminded me of this quote from Max Allan Collins, who wrote in the introduction to Volume 7, “Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Gould’s writing is his ability to make us identify with the villains—these are not nice people, and they are physically repellant in many cases, but their urgent attempts to avoid capture seizes our attention, particularly in the day-to-day-storytelling.” (p.18)
I strongly agree with Collins. Our identification with the villains does not come out of any specific empathy for Little Face, or whatever past experiences have led Little Face to embark on his life of crime, but rather it’s a more general identification as the reader imagines themselves facing the same situation as the villain. What would it be like to be locked in a meat freezer overnight? Terrifying, obviously. I think throughout Dick Tracy there is a dual identification going on—you want the forces of good to win, for Dick Tracy to capture or kill the criminal so that justice is served, but you’re also wondering during the pursuit what the villain will do next. I think Gould knew and understood this duality well, otherwise he wouldn’t have focused so much on the villains and the chase and pursuit aspect of his stories.
Little Face’s ears get frostbitten during his night in the freezer, and they have to be amputated. Think for just a moment about having your ears amputated. Once again, Chester Gould knows how to creep you out.
Charlie Yenom is one of the truck drivers who discovers Little Face in the meat freezer. Charlie is seemingly an innocent truck driver, but he sees a chance to make some money off of the criminal. Charlie takes Little Face to his house, calls a doctor (who has to amputate Little Face’s ears) and then once Little Face finally wakes up, Charlie blackmails the criminal, telling Little Face that he’ll call the police unless Little Face pays him $10,000. Yenom gets his money from Little Face, but he also gets arrested.
It’s really interesting to me that Gould has characters like Charlie Yenom in his stories. You might expect Gould to exhibit a simplistic kind of morality in his comic strip. Bad people get punished; good people get rewarded. But the world of Dick Tracy is quite complicated. Yes, bad people get punished, but good people sometimes get punished too. And sometimes the good people even get killed. And then there are people like Charlie Yenom, who is seemingly a good person, but he greedily takes his opportunity to blackmail Little Face when it presents itself. It’s a complicated moral calculus in the world of Dick Tracy, a worldview that fits in with film noir and detective novels of the time as well.
I wonder how much Gould read or watched other detective/crime fiction? Did he read noir authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett? Or did he stay away from detective stories because he didn’t want to influence the strip? I would suspect film noir of the 1940’s and 1950’s was strongly influenced by the visual style of Dick Tracy. It might be challenging to prove that definitively, but I think you could argue that by the early 1940’s Dick Tracy was deeply ingrained enough in pop culture that filmmakers and screenwriters would have been aware of it. 5 stars for Little Face.
Steve the Tramp/Duke/Sugar/the Mole: 5 stars for Mole, 3 stars for others. Mole gets all of the stars! Stars will make Mole’s underground lair bright and shiny, he he! Mole think that all of Volume 7 should have been about Mole! Much more interesting than other villains! Readers want to know entire story of how Mole got revenge on his gang for trying to kill him, ha-ha! No, Mole, stop, this isn’t your review! Go back underground! Tracy, help me out here! Ye Gods!
Duke and Sugar plot another heist, October 23, 1941.
The next storyline ends with the Mole, but it starts with Steve the Tramp being released from prison. Gould rarely used villains more than once, but Steve the Tramp was an exception, as Gould kept bringing him back during the early years of the strip. The 1941 storyline was Steve’s fourth appearance in the strip, and Gould brings us a reformed Steve the Tramp. Steve’s story leads us to Duke, a pickpocket and small-time thief. Duke’s accomplice Sugar, a leggy brunette, provides some cheesecake for the readers.
Duke is ultimately a small potato, and not a terribly interesting bad guy, but his true significance is that he leads us to the Mole. Now the Mole is one of the classic Dick Tracy bad guys. I was surprised when I realized that the Mole is only in the strip for about a month. (Gould did bring back the Mole for a 1971 storyline.) The Mole was used as a character in the early 1960’s Dick Tracy cartoon TV show, adding to his fame.
True to his name, the Mole lives underground. He makes money by harboring criminals who are on the run. Duke is overjoyed to be staying with the Mole, but his enthusiasm quickly wanes when he learns that the Mole’s fee for hiding Duke is the entire $2,000 that Duke just stole. The Mole speaks of himself in the third person, and at first, he seems like a pretty cheerful fellow. Just don’t try to double-cross him and steal his money, like Duke does. Mole makes quick work of Duke, strangling him with his powerful hands.
The Mole tries to escape his underground hideout, December 7, 1941.
The Mole’s storyline is another one that highlights claustrophobia, as Mole’s underground lair caves in and he must dig his way to the surface. Mole’s storyline also shows Gould’s interest in villains who create their own environments, as Mole has built his own underground lair, and we get a peek at Gould’s interest in technology, as Mole has a closed-circuit TV system that he uses to communicate with Oily, a gas station attendant who brings Mole his food.
Dick Tracy is surprisingly nice to the Mole, even giving him a Christmas present after his capture. On Christmas Eve, we see Mole opening the package in his jail cell. “Cigarettes-fruit-candy! This is the first time in thirty years,” says Mole, as tears stream down his hairy cheeks.
Jacques: This is the weakest story in Volume 7. But it does give us one of the most famous death traps in Dick Tracy. Jacques dumps Tracy down a caisson and then pushes a huge boulder down behind him, intending to crush the detective like a bug. According to Jay Maeder’s excellent 1990 book Dick Tracy: the Official Biography, Gould was well and truly stumped about how to extricate his detective from this death trap. Gould was even considering inserting himself into the strip in a deus ex machina move and getting Tracy out of the caisson. Fortunately, Gould was advised that this would be a serious blow to the strip’s credibility, and he was able to get Tracy out of the jam without inserting himself into the strip.
Dick Tracy in the caisson death trap, January 13, 1942.
What’s interesting about the death trap is that it seems like a very sudden move on Jacques’ part, as he’s only been in the strip for a few days, and the relative ease with which Tracy escapes the caisson. Obviously, Gould had worked out all of the problems with the strip weeks before, but in just reading the strips Gould’s struggles are not obvious to the reader.
Jacques bites the dust in this striking panel, January 25, 1942.
Jacques’ story is that he has tricked wealthy society dame Debbie Thorndike into believing they are married, and he is blackmailing her for money to support his night club. The story feels lightweight, and it’s just not that compelling. 2 stars.
B.B. Eyes, February 11, 1942.
B.B. Eyes: The best thing about Jacques was that he provided us with an introduction to the next villain: his brother, B.B. Eyes. (I guess that means that Jacques’ name was Jacque Eyes.) B.B. Eyes shows up bent on taking revenge on Tracy, and eventually we learn that his real racket is selling tires on the black market. This is the first mention in the strip of the United States’ entry into World War II. During the war, rubber and tires were rationed, and in short supply.
B.B. Eyes meets his end, April 18, 1942.
B.B. Eyes is the rare bad guy who puts Tracy in two death traps: one an exploding boiler with Debbie Thorndike, and the other being encased in paraffin with Pat Patton. B.B. Eyes’ death is another claustrophobic nightmare. In police custody, with his hands cuffed in front (Tracy should earn a rebuke from the Crimestopper’s Textbook for that rookie mistake) B.B. Eyes jumps out of a moving police car, then falls from a bridge onto a garbage scow. Already suffocating in the garbage muck, once the garbage is dumped into the water, he drowns, with his body becoming encased in an old tire. Poetic justice, Chester Gould-style. 5 stars.
Van Dyke, Dianne, and Dick Tracy, April 24, 1942.
Van Dyke/Yollman: an odd story for Gould. It’s a theatrical love triangle without a typical villain. The story begins with Van Dyke, the understudy for Yollman, informing Dick Tracy that Yollman has disappeared. It turns out that Van Dyke has enlisted a hypnotist to keep Yollman in a spell while Van Dyke plays his role on the stage. (And he woos Yollman’s wife Dianne, who had been previously engaged to Van Dyke.) When the spell is broken, Yollman turns the tables on Van Dyke, taking his understudy to the theater and forcing him to recite lines for hours at gunpoint—a scene that is wonderfully campy and deranged. Yollman fears that he has killed Van Dyke after a sandbag drops on Van Dyke’s head, so Yollman hops a train and ends up in Wood City. There Yollman begins coaching the high school drama club and becoming friends with the local drama critic for the newspaper, Mr. Amard. (Drama spelled backwards, of course!)
The storyline ends happily for the three main characters, which is a bit out of character for the hard-bitten world of Dick Tracy. The Van Dyke/Yollman story is notable in some ways for what it lacks. It doesn’t have a memorable villain, no one gets killed, and the story doesn’t end with anyone being charged with a crime. While all of this means it’s not a classic Dick Tracy story, it does make it a rather unique story. It’s also interesting how Gould shifts the antagonist halfway through the story from Van Dyke to Yollman.
Yollman forces Van Dyke to act for him, May 15, 1942.
Van Dyke and Yollman are both patterned after Orson Welles, who had attended the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, and performed in several theatrical productions in Woodstock. Since Chester Gould lived in Woodstock as well, this surely influenced his decision to pattern Van Dyke and Yollman after Welles. Two years after the Van Dyke storyline, Gould would have more success with another character who was an actor: the washed-up Shakespearean star Vitamin Flintheart, who would become one of the most successful supporting characters in Dick Tracy. 3 stars for Van Dyke and Yollman.
Tiger Lilly and Frizzletop, July 24, 1942.
Tiger Lilly/Frizzletop: a solid ending for Volume 7. Tiger Lilly isn’t a terribly interesting villain, but he is another villain who is creating his own environment—he has a secret underground lair accessible by a passage near a bunker on the golf course that he owns. Frizzletop is a fun supporting character—she was engaged to Tiger Lilly’s brother, who was killed in the Philippines. Frizzletop was a nurse who lost her left arm—yet another example in this volume of Gould’s fascination with amputees, and she plays a vital role in tracking down Tiger Lilly. This storyline features Tracy going undercover, posing as a groundskeeper in order to work on Tiger Lilly’s golf course. There’s a little in-joke and nod to Gould’s residence as Tracy says, “I worked for the Woodstock club one summer.” 4 stars.
Volume 7 of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy finds the detective hitting a peak as he battles some of his most famous foes.