Where does Dick Tracy stand in the echelons of American pop culture? Or more importantly where does this iconic police detective stand in our memories; when we were kids and comic heroes such as Phantom, Mandrake, Captain America, and Dick Tracy provided us hours of fun and pleasure. Comics that have stayed with us from boyhood to manhood and ones that if we are lucky and our kids have that reading habit, we will get a chance to revisit again and again.
Dick Tracy was created by Chester Gould and debuted in 1931 and since then the Dick Tracy phenomenon has made its presence felt in media as diverse as comics, TV serials, animation characters, radio, and film. Tracy brought to the comic strips a level of violence hitherto unknown. His hard-nosed police detective act using the latest gadgets was something new for comic book fans of the period. Comics have always portrayed good and bad in black and white but seldom have the bad guys been so bad that it reflected in their names and physical characteristics. Dick Tracy comics always had villains that readers loved to hate – these included Little Face Finney, Pruneface, The Brow, Shakey, Pear Shape, and of course Flattop Jones,who came within a hair’s breadth of bumping off Dick Tracy.
Dick Tracy comics reached a level of absurdity in the 60s with weird gadgets and weirder settings for the drama. Atomic-powered cars, flying cylinders, friendship with humanoids on the Moon were things that didn’t quite go down well with loyal readers who longed for the urban crime stories of the early years.
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