Happy 58th anniversary, Dick and Tess Tracy!
On this day in 1949, Dick Tracy married his sweetie of 18 years, Tess Trueheart. Here’s to the lovebirds.
Tagged: Dick Tracy
BIG BROADCAST: Calling All Crimestoppers!
For over 75 years, this copy has put away more bad guys than Batman, the CSI Guys and Joe Friday combined. He’s gone from comic strips to radio, movie serials, TV, comics and even a big screen flirtation with Madonna. Now there is a group working hard to give Dick Tracy the credit he deserves – and you can help! On other fronts, today’s Big ComicMix Broadcast tells you how NBC makes sure you don’t miss a new show, DC gives you some big hoops to jump through to get variant covers and Canada gets a really cool cartoon channel!
No need to whip out that widescreen surround-sound wristwatch home theater system – just PRESS THE BUTTON!
MIKE GOLD: My All-Time Favorite Comic Book Cover
They don’t draw comic book covers like this any more. And, well, that might be a good thing.
These days, we’re in a phase where covers are particularly boring. When it comes to the great American staple, the heroic fantasy comic, most are over art directed and too posh for their own good. Few actually have anything to do with the story inside; they are simply generic poster shots. When I stare at the big Wall-O-Comics at most shops, my eyes quickly glaze over. They generate little enthusiasm and manage to completely ignore the sense of wonder that makes comics magic. At best, I walk away from the Wall thinking “gee, that Captain America cover sure would make a swell statue.”
Yes, I still use the word “swell.” I’m trying to bring it back.
Look at a few of the really great covers. If you’re at all interested in the genre, how can you pass ‘em up? They are exciting, intriguing and most of all, they appeal to the sense of wonder.
Yeah, they’re all ancient. But don’t try to tell me they’re childish. Putting on a mask and fighting crime and/or evil as the result of some event that wouldn’t even cut it in Greek tragedy is childish. We’re simply negotiating the price.
However, some covers were simply wonderfully absurd. They are so far over the top you’ve just got to check them out. In fact, there are so many of them that there’s an entire website devoted to the topic, run by cartoonist Scott Shaw!. It’s called Oddball Comics and you’ve got to check it out. He’s got about a trillion such covers there. But I don’t know if he’s got my all-time favorite comic book cover.
DENNIS O’NEIL: Continued stories (continued)…
(If) you’re…young; you don’t remember a time when continued stories were rare. But until Stan Lee made them standard procedure at Marvel in the 1960s, they were next to unheard-of.
Those words seem familiar to you? Certainly not, unless you read this department’s blather three weeks ago, when I began a discussion of continued stories in comics, where they – the words – appeared in a slightly different form. And in reprinting them, in a column which is – let’s face it – a continuation of a previous one, I’ve tried to deal with a paramount problem writers face when doing continued narratives: clueing in readers who either don’t remember the earlier stuff or are new to the series.
There is a difference between continuing characters and continuing stories. Continuing characters have been with us a very long time. Even if you ignore the many tales of the various gods and goddesses, those rascals, you can find a continuing character as early as 428 BC, give or take a few years, when Sophocles followed up his smash hit Oedipus Rex with a sequel featuring the same poor bastard, Oedipus at Colonus. Then, over the centuries, there have been various adventures of King Arthur’s knights and other heroes. But these were not continued stories, not exactly. An adventure or episode ended and the characters went into Limbo and reappeared to solve new problems and encounter new hassles. That kind of storytelling continued through the invention of high speed printing, which made books relatively cheap and accessible at about the same time that a lot of people were learning to read.
Which brings us to the pulp magazines, a publishing form that began about 1910 and was one with the dinosaurs by the middle 50s. A lot of these cheaply produced entertainments featured continuing heroes. (We’ve discussed perhaps the greatest of them, The Shadow, in this department earlier, and I won’t be surprised if he gets mentioned here again.) Meanwhile, over in another medium, movies were also featuring continuing heroes, ranging from that loveable scamp Andy Hardy to a legion of bad guy quellers, including noble cowpokes and suave detectives. And…in yet another medium, that newfangled radio was presenting weekly dramas about cowboys and detectives and police officers and even federal agents, like the movies only more often. And…here might be an appropriate place to mention comic strips, which began doing stories, as opposed to daily jokes, in 1929 with Burne Hogarth’s comic’s adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan, and since the introduction of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy in 1931, were sometimes stretching plots over many weeks.
Those were continued stories featuring, of course, continuing characters. But there were others…Oh my goodness, look! We’re almost at the limit of our allotted word count and we have so much more to discuss. I suppose I could go on for a couple of paragraphs more, but that wouldn’t begin to exhaust the topic, so I guess we’ll just have to – yes! – continue this next week.
RECOMMENDED READING: The Creators, by Daniel J. Boorstin
Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.
Artwork copyright Tribune Media Services. All Rights Reserved.
MICHAEL H. PRICE: Dick Tracy, from Strip to Screen
Much as the crime melodrama had helped to define the course of cinema – especially so, from the start of the talking-picture era during the late 1920s – so Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy proved a huge influence upon the comic-strip industry, beginning in 1931. It was something of a foregone conclusion that the paths of Tracy and the movies should intersect, and none too soon.
It took some time for both the talking screen and Dick Tracy to find their truer momentum. Bryan Foy’s Lights of New York (1928), as the first all-talking picture, marked a huge, awkward leap from the part-talking extravagances of 1927’s The Jazz Singer. And Lights of New York proved impressive enough (despite its clunky staging and the artists’ discomfort with the primitive soundtrack-recording technology) to snag a million-dollar box-office take and demonstrate a popular demand for underworld yarns with plenty of snarling dialogue and violent sound effects. Gould launched Tracy with a passionate contempt for the criminal element but made do with fairly commonplace miscreants until his weird-menace muse began asserting itself decisively during 1932-1933.
Chet Gould’s fascination with such subject matter, as seen from a crime-busting vantage as opposed to the viewpoint of outlawry, appears to have influenced Hollywood as early as 1935 – when William Keighley’s “G” Men and Sam Wood’s Let ’Em Have It arrived as trailblazing heroic procedurals. These watershed titles posed a stark contrast against such antiheroic sensations as Roland West’s Alibi and The Bat Whispers (1929-1930), William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931), and Mervin LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931). It bears wondering whether Edward Small, producer of Let ’Em Have It, may have taken a cue from Tracy, for the film pits an FBI contingent against a disfigured human monster (played by King Kong’s Bruce Cabot) whose scarred face and vile disposition seem of a piece with the grotesques whom Gould would array against Dick Tracy.
I’ve been on a renewed Tracy kick since the arrival last year of IDW Publishing’s The Complete Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, a debut volume covering 1931-1933 (the second volume, going up to 1935, was released earlier this month). The interest extends to a re-watching of the Tracy movies that began in 1937 with Republic Pictures’ Dick Tracy serial. Cable-teevee’s Turner Classic Movies has staged recent revivals of the (considerably later) Tracy feature-films from RKO-Radio Pictures, and various off-brand DVD labels have issued dollar-a-disc samplers of the (still later) live-action Tracy teleseries. An audio-streaming Website has come through with two Tracy-spinoff record albums from the post-WWII years; one, The Case of the Midnight Marauder, involves a ferocious encounter with Gould’s most memorable bad guy, Flattop. (The less said, the better, about UPA Studios’ animated Tracy series of 1961. And likewise for Warren Beatty’s 1990 Dick Tracy, which commits the sin of “cartooning the cartoon,” its live-action basis notwithstanding.)
MICHAEL H. PRICE: Movies Is Comics and Comics Is Movies
I’ve gone into some detail elsewhere about how my Forgotten Horrors series of movie encyclopedias (1979 and onward) dovetails with my collaborative comic-book efforts with Timothy Truman and John K. Snyder III. More about all that as things develop at ComicMix. This new batch of Forgotten Horrors commentaries will have more to do with the overall relationship between movies and the comics and, off-and-on, with the self-contained appeal of motion pictures. I have yet to meet the comics enthusiast who lacks an appreciation of film.
Although it is especially plain nowadays that comics exert a significant bearing upon the moviemaking business – with fresh evidence in marquee-value outcroppings for the Spider-Man and TMNT franchises and 300 – the greater historical perspective finds the relationship to be quite the other way around.
It helps to remember a couple of things: Both movies and comics, pretty much as we know them today, began developing late in the 19th century. And an outmoded term for comics is movies; its popular usage as such dates from comparatively recent times. The notion of movies-on-paper took a decisive shape during the 1910s, when a newspaper illustrator named Ed Wheelan began spoofing the moving pictures (also known among the shirtsleeves audience as “moom pitchers” and “fillums”), with cinema-like visual grammar, in a loose-knit series for William Randolph Hearst’s New York American.
Christened Midget Movies in 1918, Wheelan’s series evolved from quick-sketch parodies of cinematic topics to sustained narratives, running for days at a stretch and combining melodramatic plot-and-character developments with cartoonish exaggerations. Wheelan’s move to the Adams Syndicate in 1921 prompted a change of title, to Minute Movies. (Don Markstein’s Web-based Toonopedia points out that the term is “mine-yute,” as in tiny, rather than “minnit,” as in a measure of time. No doubt an intended sense of connection with the Hearst trademark Midget Movies.) Chester Gould showed up in 1924 with a Wheelan takeoff called Fillum Fables – seven years before Gould’s more distinctive breakthrough with Dick Tracy.
Comic book Starz
From April 4 through May 4, the Starz cable network will promote the new movie, Spider-Man 3. The month-long event features behind-the-scenes footage, a sweepstakes, and a day-long marathon of super-hero movies.
The "Starz Spider-Man 3 Sweepstakes" begins on Wednesday, April 4 and runs through Sunday, May 4. One grand prize winner will be awarded a Sony Bravia 40" LCD HDTV and 100 first prize winners will receive a Spider-Man 3 poster. Enter to win the "Starz Spider-Man 3 Sweepstakes" by filling out the entry form at http://www.starz.com.
The "When Comic Books Attack" marathon airs on Starz Thursday, May 3 and will feature "On the Set: Spider-Man 3" and other comic-book inspired films including Sin City, Underworld: Evolution, Silver Hawk, Blade, Judge Dredd, Dick Tracy, Darkman, and Batman and Robin.
Underworld?
