Customer Reviews

Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy Volume 1

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It is becoming clear that our society has entered a golden era of comic strip reprints. Along with this handsome volume of early Tracy from IDW Publishing, fans can enjoy beautiful, hardcover editions of Gasoline Alley (from Drawn and Quarterly Press) and complete reprints of Krazy Kat, Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, and Popeye (all from Fantagraphics Books); as well as a complete collection of Little Nemo in Slumberland 1904-1914 (Evergreen Press). Some of these titles, like the aforementioned Gasoline Alley (being reprinted as Walter and Skeezix) and Dick Tracy are multi-volume, multi-year projects. In the case of the gorgeous and important Gasoline Alley reprints from Drawn and Quarterly, the complete collection will run over 20 volumes. I have a feeling that we have only seen the beginning of these prestigious, complete hardcover treatments for comic reprints. Many equally deserving strips linger now in incomplete soft cover editions and await this regal reassessment; most notably Little Orphan Annie, Terry and the Pirates, and the Katzenjammer Kids.

But about the Complete Dick Tracy 1931-1933:

What makes these years of Dick Tracy so compelling is that Chester Gould was one of the first comic strip artists to bring both a sense of realism and violence to the comic page - with the emphasis on violence. Men and women where shot dead on the panels of Dick Tracy, portrayed in Gould's brutal black and white at the moment of terminal impact. In one story arc, a mob boss ties Tracy to a chair, removes his shoes and socks, and goes to work on his bare feet with a blowtorch. Yes, this certainly wasn't Polly and her Friends or Harold Teen (and it is noteworthy that Tracy cracked under this torture, adding another layer of realism). While these early pages are not Gould's finest work as an artist, his superb pacing, storytelling, and marvelous sense of pathos and drama were there from day one.

And the art of these strips was never as crude as some have noted. The line of the work was simply much thinner than the beautiful and dramatic brushwork Gould would develop as the strip progressed, so that the difference in style is a bit jarring at first.

Reading through these strips, it is easy to see why Dick Tracy has become an icon. There is no contemporary mainstream strip that hits as hard as these vintage pages of Dick Tracy do (not even the current Dick Tracy). But then, few strips ever have. I guarantee it will keep you turning pages. I recommend it highly. - Mykal Banta

Comics Buyer's Guide reviewer Tony Isabella gives IDW's TRACY "5 Tonys"

Comics icon Dick Tracy recently celebrated his 75th anniversary and I can't think of a better way to commemorate that success than IDWs The Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, Volume One [$29.99]. Hard-hitting police action, unforgettable villains, tragic losses, the science of crime-fighting, and the camaraderie of the cops who put their lives on the line to protect and serve. The Gould/Tracy legacy inspired so many other great works of detective fiction: Bob Kane and Bill Finger's Batman, Dragnet, Ed McBain's 87th Precinct, all the way to C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation and its spin-offs, and so many others. But, when you travel back past the progeny of creator and creation, and even going back to the earliest years of Tracy, you arrive at cracking good stories that can captive today's reader as much as they did the readers of 1931.

This first volume has all the Tracy daily strips from October 12, 1931 through May 20, 1933. The Sunday strips didn't tie into the daily continuity until May 29, 1932, and this volume reprints those Sundays to that point and in color. The remaining Sunday strips appear in the daily continuity, albeit in black-and-white. But, wait, there's more.

This first volume also includes an introduction by Max Allen Collins, author of Road to Perdition and dozens of exciting novels, of great comics like Ms. Tree and C.S.I., of the Tracy strip from 1977 to 1993, and of sharp suspense films like Mommy and Real Time: Siege at Lucas Market; the first part of an interview with Gould conducted by Collins and Matt Masterson in September, 1980; and, most cool of all, the "Plain Clothes Tracy" strips Gould created to pitch his new hero to newspaper syndicates. There were but five of these strips, but, in them, Gould encapsulated the grim-and-gritty action and drama that would win him and Tracy millions of readers around the world.

Prepare for a spot of deja vu. There has never been a better time to be a comics fan or reader. Amazing new comics and graphic novels are available side-by-side with collections of truly classic material. I commend IDW for getting Gould's Dick Tracy back into print and doing so with such obvious reverence.

The Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, Volume One earns the full five Tonys. I'm looking forward to Volume Two.

I can't say enough about how enjoyable this book is. I got it because I love historic strips, and, really, I was being something of a completist. My interest in Dick Tracy was mild, but not overwhelming. But now, I cannot stop reading it.

The art is, as I expected, somewhat primitive. But I was not expecting it to be bursting with power and originality. There's not a strip that I've read yet that hasn't given me a start, with some bold use of blacks, or a character in an unexpectedly natural and expressive posture, or a striking background or some intricate line work or cross-hatching. For a cartoonist who is not renowned for his artistic skills, Chester Gould has been very seriously underrated.

And the dialog! This is some of the most hard-boiled dialog I've ever read, and I'm a serious fan of James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. Here's an example, where gun moll Texie Garcia is offering Tracy a bribe to get her out of jail:

Texie: "Oh - you're such a sweet kid - I think I could do wonders for you - That is, if you'd let me - Think what you could do with a thousand dollars."

Tracy: "Yeah? I could roll it up in a wad and cram it right down your slippery throat."

Wow! Does this hit right between the eyes! And the book is packed with dialog like that!

As if this wasn't enough, the book itself is a sheer joy to look at and to hold; it's the highest quality comic reprint I've ever seen. The paper has a great look and feel, and the printing is so crisp, it looks like the strips were drawn yesterday. IFG has set new standards for comic strip reprints.

If you like hard-boiled, hard-hitting crime fiction, you will be thrilled with this book. I already can't wait for the subsequent volumes.

Collins' Introduction cites some key points of interest in the long-running Dick Tracy comic strips. In choosing a fedora and trench coat for his character over the deerstalker hat and cape associated with the widely-known Sherlock Holmes character, Chester Gould created the typical wear of detectives in American fiction and film for the longest time. Collins also points out that in its early days, the comic strip was basically a police procedural with Dick Tracy making use of ballistics tests, the lie detector, and even the relatively new teletype machine. A 1980 interview with the comic-strip artist Chester Gould follows the Introduction. After this are the five four-paneled comic strips Gould used to market his idea in the early 1930s. The name of the strip was changed from "Plain Clothes Tracy" by a newspaperman who first decided to take it on; and Gould changed Tracy's original straw hat to the fedora before the first strip ran. The hundreds of four-paneled black-and-white strips appearing in numerous dailies are followed by the 34 eleven-paneled color strips which appeared in newspaper Sunday comics sections starting in May 1932. The work offers a bonanza for the Dick Tracy fan, and also much of interest for the art and popular culture historian on the classic comic strips whose continuing influence on popular culture, the media, and entertainment is evidenced in the popularity and growth of the relatively new genre of illustrated books.

This is the first volume in a hardcover book series that intends to reprint Chester Gould's entire run on the Dick Tracy comic strip. Gould did the strip for over 40 years, so it could take a few years for the series to be completed. This particular book reprints the strips from October 1931 to May 1933. The reproduction of the strips is of very high quality, especially considering how old they are. These weren't the strip's best years, but they are excellent nonetheless. The strip begins with Dick Tracy joining the police force after his fiancee's father is murdered. He starts right off at the top, as a plainclothes detective, without even going to the police academy. Anyway, this is pretty much a straightforward police detective comic, with occasional humor provided by Tracy's comic relief sidekick, Pat Patton. Tracy doesn't face any of the bizarre villains the strip would later become know for; instead, there are more or less realistic criminals like Big Boy, Broadway Bates, Steve the Tramp, Larceny Lu and Stooge Viller. Despite not being "weird", these villains are still pretty colorful. Probably the thing that most helped to popularize the strip was the introduction of Dick Tracy, Jr. in September of 1932. Despite his name, Junior was not actually the son of Dick Tracy. Instead, he was a homeless boy without a name who decided to name himself after his idol (he was eventually officially adopted by Dick Tracy). The character of Junior gave kids someone to relate to, which was a big help. Dick Tracy is one of the greatest comic strips of all time and I highly recommend this book.

Tracy has been reprinted to death, and rightfully so. But here finally is the end-all do-all collection starting from the very beginning. Not considered to be Gould's very best period (he was learning and improving with each passing year), these are still quality strips, at times approaching great. And of course they lay the groundwork for what was to follow with the origin of Tracy, of Junior, and the introduction to many of the key players who would stick around for years.

The black & white reproduction is excellent. The layout is very easy on the eye and superior to most of the comic book reprints which arrange the panels haphazardly, enlarging many to awkard sizes to fill the page. The layout here is uniform, as published, as intended. My one gripe involves the color section of Sunday strips at the rear of the book. A great idea, as they are not in the same continuity of the dailies, I like them here at the end, and in color to boot. But, the colors are faded, the text seems a bit harder to read. That said, I'm not sure how they'd improve this beyond recoloring or retouching the sunday strips which I would most definitely not want. So even this small gripe all but vanishes.

I really hope IDW sticks this out to the end (or at least through the 1950s strips) as this is a project that will take nearly a decade to complete at the planned rate of three books a year.

DICK TRACY has long been an important part of Americana, as ingrained in the American consciousness as Popeye, Babe Ruth, Astaire & Rogers, and the Big Mac. Yet, because of the unavailability of the original sources (combined with such caricatures as the Warren Beatty movie), to most people under 50 "Dick Tracy" has been reduced to a mere name, vaguely associated with police work.

Now comes this volume, the first of a series which promises to offer COMPLETE reprints of the original "Dick Tracy" comic strip from its inception on 12 October 1931, both in its daily-strip and Sunday-page version.

This handsomely produced first volume contains clear, readable reprints of the first two and half years of the feature, from October 1931 to May 1933. The strips are reproduced on slick, thick, white paper which, paradoxically, will allow a new generation to be introduced to this American pop cultural masterpiece in a much more appealing (and durable) medium than the cheap newsprint in which their grandparents first read them.

This is clearly a labor not merely of love for its subject, but also of respect and pietas for both the comic strip medium and Dick Tracy's creator, Chester Gould. The enterprise is in expert hands, under the consulting editorship of Max Allan Collins, who took over the writing of the Dick Tracy feature in 1977, when Chester Gould retired.

Like DVD releases of old movies, this volume of reprints contains numerous "extras." Among these the most interesting and informative is certainly the interview with Chester Gould conducted in 1980 by Collins and Matt Masterson, the world's foremost expert and collector of Dick Traciana.

I've been a huge fan of the Dick Tracy comic strip since I picked up my first comic book reprint of the strip sometime in the latter '40s in the middle of the "Boris Arson" narrative arc from the mid-'30s. It was great stuff, and even at my young age I knew it was the real deal and drew upon some actual events for plot points; "Arson" used an iodine-dyed dummy pistol carved from a raw potato to break out of jail! (Ah there!, John Dillinger!)

I was hooked, and became a dedicated collector with issue #29 (toward the end of the "Flattop" arc) and had every single issue from that point forward 'til #137! (Somewhere, inexplicably, they all disappeared! They survived the disapproval of my father, but not, apparently, my first wife!)

Over the past 30 years I've acquired virtually every "Tracy" reprint I could get my eager mitts on, and they've been for the most part excellent. But due to the selectivity of the reprints (none of which touched on the "Boris Arson" arc), there's been no continuity of the Chester Gould oeuvre until this series debuted, and I was all over it!

I've purchased the first two volumes, devoured both, and, O joy!, "Boris Arson" has appeared toward the end of the second one. The publication date of Volume III is a month away, and I'm like a kid awaiting Christmas morning!

I imagine the reason this "Complete Dick Tracy" project wasn't previously attempted had to do with some sort of "rights" issue, but I'm delighted that it's underway... and I know that unless they accelerate the present two-a-year schedule, I probably won't live to see the "Moon Maid" years, but that's okay!

These early strips show how polished Gould had become since his rather crude beginnings, and how much he developed his technical and creative "chops" over the decades. The format is fine... anything larger to accommodate a fuller sized Sunday strip would probably have put the volumes well above the "widely accessible" price point... so it's but a minor inconvenience for me to wear my reading glasses.

Kudos to IDW Publishing.

After receiving this first volume of IDW Publishing's ambitious Dick Tracy reprint project, I am in awe. I buy practically all the current reprints of classic newspaper comic strips (Peanuts, Walt & Skeezix, Segar's Popeye etc) but I was still happily surprised to see how much tender care IDW has invested in this project. Excellent reproduction and printing quality, at least of the b/w material, gripping tales from the prohibition years, breathtaking classic design (if you don't mind that it at first glance looks similar to Fantagraphics' Peanuts volumes) and at a very affordable price. What more can I say? I made the trip 70 years back in time and I almost didn't want to come back.

This book is awesome! It shows that the people of the 1930's knew how to tell a good story. The stories are so gripping that I couldn't put it down! I read the whole thing in about 4 days. The cliffhangers between strips keep the pages turning until the end! Can't wait for Volume Two either!