Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy Volume 1
Dick Tracy's pop-cultural profile has receded since Warren Beatty's flop movie adaptation. Whereas 700 newspapers once carried the strip, it now appears in only about 50. But here the venerable comic-strip detective receives the kind of handsomely mounted representation in chronology thatPeanuts, Dennis the Menace,andGasoline Alleycurrently enjoy. The inaugural volume in this effort to completely reprint creator Gould's 46-year run contains the first strips published from October 1931 to May 1933. The artwork is initially crude even by the standards of the day, and the plotlines are mundane. Tracy comes up against petty mobsters--the main villain here is Big Boy, an Al Capone takeoff--rather than the evil grotesques that would become the strip's staple. The stories have the unassuming verve and period charm of precode gangster movies, and within six months, Gould's art evolves into a prototype of his signature style.Gordon FlaggCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved