Customer Reviews

The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy, 1931-1951

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This was an outstanding collection of comic strips that made up the career of my favorite crime fighter Dick Tracy.I began reading Dick Tracy comic strips at the age of 5 in the Beaumont Enterprise. Dick Tracy was the embodiment of forces of good crushing the forces of evil.I am now 50 and I still enjoy Dick Tracy. This book is the best of Dick Tracy. You have an early
history of the beginning of Tracy's crime fighting career.This
book features some of Tracy's most evil villains.You have the Blank,Mary X,Jerome Trohs and Momma,Little Face Finny,the Mole,
B.B. Eyes,88 Keyes,Flattop,the Summer Sisters,the Brow and Gravel Gertie,Breathless Mahoney,B.O. Plenty,Mumbles,and Pear Shape.This is a must buy for the serious Dick Tracy fan.This
is the finest of Dick Tracy.Read this and you will become a fan of Dick Tracy too.

I searched high and low for this book until I found it for sale on line through Amazon. I first read this collection of Dick Tracy comic books at the age of 10 and have been hooked ever since. Reading through it a second time was even better because I now had a historical context to enjoy some of the references and greater awareness of some of the unfortunate racial stereo-types sometimes depicted. The cases include criminal minds like Flat Top, Pear Shape, Gravel Gerty & BO Plenty, The Blank, 88 Keys, Jerome Trohs & Mamma, Little Face Finny, The Mole, The Brow, Breathless Mahoney and Mumbles. Some color pages. This is a must read and must have for all Tracy fans and fans to be.

I clearly remember when this was first published. I snapped it up and devoured it. This was the first time I had ever had access to these legendary pre-1950s Dick Tracy comic strips, and I kept hoping that more books like this would come. As it turned out, one did follow a decade later, covering the first two years of Dick Tracy (The Thirties, etc.), but none followed that one until the current comprehensive series of books. I'm now going on age 65, and I guess it was worth the wait, but boy! That was some wait!
There has always been a real downside with this book, and now that the complete strips are being published, this book is definitely obsolete. That downside is the fact that none of the Sunday strips is included in it. Therefore, there are major continuity gaps in the story, with the reader feeling frustrated about missing something every six strips. In fact, some of the stories end prematurely, e.g. The Brow appears to be heading off to jail in this book, whereas his real end comes when he becomes impaled on a flagpole (American flag flying from it -- very symbolic and graphic!). It's nice that the daily strips about The Blank have been colored in this edition, but once again lack of continuity ruins it for me.
My suggestion is to buy the current series of the complete strips and forget this relic. Starting with the upcoming Volume 7, the very best of the Dick Tracy strips will be published. These editions suffer from lack of color and small images for the Sunday strips, but they are complete!

Yes, I admit it. I am a Dick Tracy fan. I loved the old serials with Ralph Byrd, and I was captivated by the garish sophistication of the Warren Beatty extravaganza. But most of all, I liked the comic strips, with the stark yellow-and-black designs, the x-ray diagrams, the cross sections, and the arrowed labels of significant clews and objects. At least once in a single storyline, the villains would put Dick in a really tight spot-- dipping him in paraffin, breaking his gun hand, stabbing him with a lightning rod, pushing him out of an airplane, handcuffing him inside a truck and setting it on fire-- but he would always find a way to escape. And eventually, he would always give his own back in return.

I never had much use for the television show, because it would recycle villains much in the manner of _Batman_ or _Superman_. But in the original strips, most of the villains (no matter how colorful) eventually come to bad ends by death or disfigurement. (Though there were a few like B.O. Plenty and Gravel Gertie who eventually reformed.) This is in keeping with Dick Tracy's oft-repeated motto: "Crime does not pay!"

The downfall of the villains was usually in part the result of Tracy's methods of detection. But there was usually a certain element of Grecian ironic fate that came into play as well. One gangster, for example, who dealt with black market tires during the 1940s, was dragged to his death at the bottom of a river by an old tire from a garbage scow.

Chester Gould's _The Celebrated Cases of dick Tracy_ (1970), with an introduction by Ellery Queen is a sampling of Dick Tracy adventures from 1931 through 1949. Perfectionists may complain that some of the episodes are not complete and that other favorite cases were omitted. But this is inevitable in a single volume collection that spans almost twenty years.

Tracy's first case is there, in which we are introduced to Tess Trueheart and her family. The central villain, Big Boy, is really a fairly stock gangster. But we quickly move into adventures with The Blank, Jerome Trohs and Mamma, Little Face Finny, the Mole, B.B. Eyes, 88 Keyes, Flattop, Gravel Gertie, B.O. Plenty, Mumbles, Breathless Mahoney, and Pear Shape. Once Gould's villains became colorful grotesques, his strip developed into a vivid morality play.

Recommended, though I will admit that there is violence that even today may be a bit unsettling.

I too was a long-time fan of Dick Tracy ,who at age 18 got a copy of Celebrated Cases...for Christmas. Previously available through Harvey Comics reprints,the availability had long since disappeared to the average fan. After my initial excitement,I quickly realized that the Sunday strips were missing from nearly every story!! On top of that,the editor ended not one but two of the greatest sequences (Brow and Flattop) prior to their actual conclusion.Each continuity went on to have a slam bang ending that the reader does not get to see. Money would be better spent on IDW Publishing of "The Complete Dick Tracy".

This book collects the strip from when it was started during the depression, through the war years, and into the early post war. The cast of characters, the story lines, and settings provide insight into an era fading from memory. It's a morality play from a simpler though poorer time the country is nostolgic for. Good and evil are black and white. Innocents are led astray by cold hearted killers, shown the error of their ways, and forgiven. The storys take place in a time during which the US went from facing the greatest hardships it had known to finding itself a superpower. It was physically a different country, heavily industrial, agricultural, without television, linked with railroads instead of interstate highways. Dick Tracy was the prototype of today's tough, smart cops, MacGyver and CSI in a time when a cop had little to rely on besides his own eyes and brain. He always got his man - if he (or she) didn't earn some horrible end first. Crime doesn't pay. It's great fun to read.

I first found this book at a library when I was 13 and could never stop checking it out. This book covers every famous Dick Tracy case with superstar villains such as Mumbles, Flattop, and all the others using the daily and Sunday comic strips. It's great to read along and watch Dick evolve from crude drawings to the now famous two way wrist radio to the two way wrist tv. This book is the topper to any great collection.