Customer Reviews

Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy Volume 3

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

 

 

A great comic strip that holds up beautifully. Once you start you are hooked. There is a major drawback, though.

The sundays are almost impossible to read as they are cruelly reduced in size. An owl would have trouble. You must somehow enlarge them to appreciate them.

Still, a 5 star book as are all Tracy books. And most of the great stories - and villains - are on the horizon in volumes 4 and 5.

This is the Golden Age of early (pre 1940) comic strips. Also highly recommended are...
Terry and the Pirates
Little Orphan Annie
Krazy Kat
Gasoline Alley - possibly the greatest comic strip
Moon Mullins - published by a small publisher but worth the trouble

Hopefully we may soon see The Gumps, Ella Cinders, Bringing Up Father, Polly and Her Pals and Barney Google.

Back to the days of the Sunday Funnies and comic books, Of characters who lived in your memories, before television took hold of everyone. Flat-top, Pruneface, Big Boy...Tess Truehart and the Kid... The fun and memories are all here in Dick Tracy - Volume3. Now I have to go and get Volumes 1,2,4 and whatever else they have. If you remember the days of comics and funny papers, or to introduce your son or daughter,or grandchild, I recommend this highly....Dick Tracy...The 'Bulldog' Jaw.

This is the third volume of the series that proposes to reprint the complete run of the Dick Tracy comic strip. This particular volume prints the strips from January 30, 1935 to July 12, 1936. Some of the notable events in this volume include: Junior reuniting with his mother, Boris Arson escaping from jail, Dick Tracy temporarily becoming police chief of a small town and Tracy attempting to reform "Lips" Manlis. This is great, exciting stuff, which I recommend to anyone who enjoys vintage adventure comic strips.

In this latest chunk of Gould-plated detective action, the fantastic still takes a decided back seat to the mundane -- not to mention the intensely melodramatic. Junior Tracy is reunited with his mother, Mary Steele. Tracy nearly dies in the course of a ghastly shoot-out that rubs out gangster "Cut" Famon and his gang. Dick takes it upon himself to convert a former hoodlum, "Lips" Manlis, to the side of good. A naive cashier and her gambling-addicted boy friend suffer dramatic payback for their sins -- a hair-raising stay in a women's prison followed by temporary blindness in her case, the "big sleep" in his. Similarly soap-operatic stuff would always be a part of Tracy's universe, of course, but with the legendary grotesque villains still some years away, these melodramatic sequences seem all the more potent somehow.

Max Allan Collins correctly points out in his introduction how Gould continued to draw story lines from contemporary headlines during this period. Boris Arson -- who started out as a vaguely sinister Lenin look-and-act-alike before eventually being reduced to the standard strong-armed thuggery -- bluffs his way out of prison with an iodine-dyed potato gun, in an homage to John Dillinger's escape from a small-town jail. Boris' sister, Zora, is a Bonnie Parker wannabe (with the extra touch of men's clothing suggesting lesbianism). Famon, who'd been sent to an Alcatraz-style rockpile for income-tax evasion, is obviously modeled on the late-period Al Capone. Gould also dips heavily into the stock ethnic stereotypes of the period, with mixed results. The amiable Indian Chief Yellowpony is a major -- and worthy -- player in the caper that brings the Arson duo to justice, and bit appearances by a Jewish peddler and Italian coffee-shop attendant are perfectly fine by me, but "darkie" valet Memphis is, as Collins admits, pretty embarrassing even by the standards of the day.

My favorite story arc in this volume is "The Hotel Murders," which I'd originally read in a paperback collection. This 1936 continuity is more of a "true" mystery than the typical Tracy yarn, with Tracy and the cops baffled by a disappearing bullet that's killed a high-rolling confidence man. Alas, Gould makes an unfortunate continuity goof, actually introducing the killer as a poor pencil-peddler BEFORE we learn that he's really a retired manufacturer! Still, I do like the story, not to mention the fact that the guilty party merits at least some sympathy for being one of the con man's victims.

The ancillary material's already getting a bit thin after just three volumes -- a brief piece by the inevitable Collins and an equally short article on Tracy's various appearances in Big Little Books. Not a good sign. Still, it's more than readers have gotten in the last several volumes of THE COMPLETE PEANUTS.

This has already been mentioned by other reviewers. There are plenty of melodramatic elements in this volume. Junior being reunited with his mother, the blinding of a cashier at Junior's mother's lunch counter, Pat Patton giving Tracy a blood transfusion to save his life and the conversion of a hoodlum. That about covers this volume and once again, I couldn't put it down and I look forward to beginning volume four!