Whenever my son Peter has to go for a long ride alone in his car, he asks me to keep him company. I usually go with him. It always turns out to be an adventure. One of the reasons is that we always talk or fight about something bizarre. The other day, his first question was “What was so special about Dick Tracy?” I remembered Dick Tracy. I even remember when the newspapers were on strike and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia read them to the public on the radio. But, I digress.
My answer was about his wrist radio and his villains. “I know about his wrist radio and Vitamin Flintheart who made it. Did Tracy come before James Bond? Was Flintheart like Bond’s Q who provided him with all kinds of crazy stuff? Tracy preceeded Bond by about thirty years, I guessed. And no, the only thing of note was the wrist radio. “But that couldn’t be the reason for his success,” he said. I don’t know but in my mind, it was his weird villains, like Batman’s. There was Flattop, a guy with a weird head and some others I don’t remember. “I can’t believe that’s the reason. Lets ask Chatgpt,” he said and that’s what we did.
According to Chatgpt there were a few reasons. The most significant one, probably, was that most comic strips were funny or cartoonlike. Dick Tracy was serious. It preceeded Dragnet by years. It was about realistic investigations. There was certainly the wrist radio and later the wrist TV. But for me, the interest was the villains who looked weird even grotesque. Flattop looked like he was hit on the head with a frying pan. Pruneface you can imagine. No face cream would work for him. There were others, too. The strip had violence and was occasionally very bloody, with gory details. You could call it comic-noir. Chester Gould wrote it from 1931 to 1977. It was a serious enough comic strip so that there were Dick Tracy movies and weekly movie serials. In those days, one went to the movies once a week to see the latest chapter in the serial.
So that settled the discussion for both of us. Things were quiet for a while, that is until we started to talk about politics. I won’t discuss that here.
