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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Tracy hits the reset button

Published: September 30, 2011 1 minute 2 comments

  Tracy
This past March, artist Joe Staton and writer Mike Curtis took over Dick Tracy and brought it back from a level of conceptual chaos that had gradually gone beyond appealing camp into unreadable nonsense.

Over the past half year, they're returned it to a basic cops-and-robbers strip with shorter, more coherent plot lines and villains that are still delightfully over the top but without being utterly ridiculous.

Staton has also softened up the artwork so that it retains the basic feel of the creator, Chester Gould, but is no longer the slavish, graphical self-parody it had come to be under caretaker artists.

In short, Dick Tracy has gone from a strip mostly beloved by people who get a particular kick out of watching train wrecks to something an average comics fan might want to give a second look.

This would be a good time to do so: They're re-telling the story of how Tracy went from being a uniformed cop to detective.

To bring you up to date: The chief who promoted him and mentored his early days has been shot in a robbery of his retirement business, setting up the flashback. Tracy, having just foiled a robbery, has been summoned to dinner with the chief. We also know that some bad guys are planning to kidnap Tess Truehart. 

Give it a shot. I'm opposed to the legacy strips (aka "zombie" strips) that creak along after the original artist is gone, taking up space on the page that could go to a deserving, new strip, but I'm not entirely against them when they bring in some new ideas and approaches, and there are a couple of legacy strips that are actually more entertaining now than they were to begin with.

Not sure Tracy is one of those special cases yet, but I'm enjoying the ride and getting a sense that Staton and Curtis are getting their legs under them and beginning to make the strip their own.

 

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Comments 2

  1. I have collections of some of the old Dick Tracy strips from the 40s and 50s and love them. A couple years ago I picked up a bio of Chester Gould. The more I read about him, the less I liked him. I rather wish I hadn’t read it, (he came off as an authoritarian a*hole) but I still enjoy many of the old strips.

  2. A part of the question for any long-running strip may be that the stuff was great in its time and in context, but that, even if it had remained 100% true to the master’s vision, would that be what anyone wanted now?
    When I read old strips, I enjoy them but I also have a sense of reading them in the context of their time — whether it’s Krazy Kat or Orphan Annie or whatever.
    In this case, as the strip moved forward and changed, it was neither Gould’s vision or a new one that worked. I think the Moon Maid years were better than what followed.
    The current stuff gives Gould a hat tip, but I think it works well in the here and now.

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