Capt. Marvel and Serial Retro-Mania, by Michael H. Price
Apart from some chronic bouts of concentrated cliffhanger enthusiasm in visits with the pioneering Texas cartoonist-turned-fine artist Frank Stack, I haven’t paid a great deal of attention in recent years to the extinct form of Hollywood filmmaking known as serials, or chapter-plays.I’ve overcome that neglectful tendency lately with an assignment to deliver a foreword for IDW Publishing’s The Complete Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, Vol. 4 (due in print by March 25), which covers a stretch of 1936–1937 and thus coincides with the early-1937 release of the first Dick Tracy serial by Republic Pictures Corp. George E. Turner and I had covered the Republic Tracy in our initial volume of the Forgotten Horrors books – but a great deal of information has come to light during the nine years since that book’s last expanded edition.
The transplanting of Tracy from the newspapers’ comics pages to the big screen figures in an earlier installment of this ComicMix column. So no point in re-hashing all that here, or in spilling any fresher insights that will appear in the IDW Tracy edition.
Anyhow, I had expected that these strictly-research refresher screenings of Republic’s Dick Tracy and Dick Tracy Returns and so forth would bring on an attack of Serial Burnout Syndrome – but no such. If anything, the resurrected Tracy cliffhangers have stoked a level of interest that I hadn’t experienced since I had been granted my first looks at the Republic serials via teevee in 1966. (Those attractions were feature-lengther condensations, roughly half or less the running time of a theatrical serial, prepared expressly for broadcast syndication, and re-titled to compound the confusion: 1936’s The Undersea Kingdom, for example, hit the tube as Sharad of Atlantis.)
I had wondered aloud while comparing notes recently with Frank Stack, whose lifelong fondness for the serials influences his own approach to storytelling, as to how Dick Tracy in particular could have adapted so brightly to movie-serial form – given that Republic’s adaptation had altered many key elements of Chester Gould’s comic strip. Frank’s lucid reply:
There may be some practical reasons why the grown-for-television superheroes dress in plain clothes rather than the colorful garb of their comic book and movie counterparts.
One of the panels I was most looking forward to at Wizard World Chicago was the 
Writer John August 
