Customer Reviews

Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy Volume 4 (v. 4)

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To anyone who is a fan of Dick Tracy, or just a fan of the old "adventure" comic strips, this series is essential! These are well bound, high quality printings, showing the complete run, no skipping a strip to save space.
In this volume you have the finish of the Lips Manlis/Bob Honor saga, in which Tracy tries to set a well known crook on the straight and narrow. You have the Purple Cross gang, Johnny Mintworth, and the first of Chester Gould's famous Grotesques, The Blank! This is crime-busting at it's best.
Throw in the introduction by Chester Gould's successor in writing the strip, famed mystery writer Max Allen Collins, and you have an enjoyable read, with the only downside that it leaves you impatiently waiting for the next volume to come out!

This latest collection showcases the landmark appearance of the first major "grotesque" villain in the "Tracy" pantheon: "The Blank," a.k.a. Frank Redrum, a disfigured killer who's engaged in getting revenge on the members of his gang while wearing a piece of cheesecloth (and no, Ralph Kramden, it's not French, so far as I know) that renders his face a featureless tabula rasa. "The Blank"'s almost matter-of-fact approach to his gruesome business makes him seem twice as creepy, at the same time as it demonstrates just how well Gould could characterize his bad guys. Compared to the faceless felon, the rest of the adversaries in the volume are positively mundane, though The Purple Cross Gang, a bunch of bank robbers who wear masks and quasi-Fascist uniforms and have the titular emblem tattooed on their tongues, skirts the edge of grotesqueness in their own way. (Wiping away the story's air of conspiratorial, secret-society goofiness in one fell swoop, the gang's leader tommy-guns his compadres, a la the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, after they get a little too uppity regarding a fairer division of the loot.) Wastrel rich kid Johnny Mintworth provides the obligatory cautionary tale, getting mixed up with a crooked lawyer and an insurance scam before coming to his senses and helping Tracy and the cops nab the atrocious attorney, losing his life in the process. Tracy's weirdest "case" of all (and calling it a "case" is putting it kindly) runs him up against a bunch of comely female crooks who siphon expensive perfume from department-store shelves for sale on the black market. Tracy frees himself from their scent-sational clutches by snagging one member's hair with his teeth until she unties him. Yowtch! Other features in the volume include the standard intro by Max Allan Collins and a piece on the earliest "Tracy" film projects. An obvious must for "Dick Tracy" fans.

This is the fourth volume of the series that plans to reprint the complete run of the Dick Tracy comic strip. This particular volume reprints the strips from July 13, 1936 to January 20, 1938. This is great stuff, with the highlights being Tracy's battles with the Purple Cross Gang and The Blank (Tracy's first "grotesque" villain). If you are interested in old time adventure comic strips, you should read this.

I love these books. They include both dailies and Sunday comic strips from the past

I enjoy the stories well enough, but a number of Gould's panels impress me with the way they work as simple black and white drawings.