Dick Tracy
Entry updated 30 December 2024. Tagged: Character, Comics.
US Comics character, created in 1931 by Chester Gould, who has long appeared in daily comic strips as well as books, comic books, radio, cinema, and television programmes; after Gould retired in 1977, several other artists have continued the strip. In his first three decades, Tracy's exploits as an urban detective fighting colourful criminals (see Crime and Punishment) were realistic, though one item of mild sf interest was introduced in 1946 – Tracy's "Wrist Radio", later upgraded to a "Wrist TV", which Tracy used to communicate with colleagues. (This is sometimes said to have anticipated the smart watch, though its sole function was as a miniaturized walkie-talkie.)
The strip lurched fully into sf territory in the 1960s, when Tracy acquired a Spaceship, the Space Coupe, and travelled to the Moon, where he met a race of humanoids with antennae and soon was regularly interacting with them (see Aliens). One lunar resident, the Moon Maid, came to Earth, married Tracy's adopted son Junior, and had a daughter with him, Honey Moon Tracy. Tracy was also given a helpful item of advanced lunar technology, an individual flying vehicle called the Air Car (see Transportation); this was powered by Magnetism, like other lunar inventions, and Gould repeated as a mantra that "The nation that controls magnetism will control the universe", a belief purportedly based on secret information Gould had obtained. Other high-tech devices acquired by Tracy include an advanced laser beam (see Rays). These sf stories were unpopular, resulting in many newspapers dropping the strip; in light of the success of long-running sf comic strips featuring Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, this suggests that the genres of sf and detective fiction blend uneasily, a theory also supported by DC Comics' forgotten Star Hawkins stories in Strange Adventures and the lamentable Gerry Anderson television series Space Precinct (1994-1995). Jay Maeder summed up this era of the strip by saying "Dick Tracy had obviously gone mad."
In any event, after the Apollo missions confirmed that the Moon lacked inhabitants, the Moon people were phased out of the strip, and Tracy as written by Gould and his successors returned to mostly realistic stories, though Max Allan Collins (who wrote the strip from 1977 to 1993) confronted the realistically portrayed Tracy with assorted sf Inventions and Villains with Superpowers. The various Tracy adaptations in other media rarely if ever employed fantastic elements, with minor exceptions in the animated series The Dick Tracy Show (1961-1962), which is rarely seen today because it focused almost exclusively on four of Tracy's comic assistants who were all offensive racial stereotypes (see Race in SF). Dick Tracy (1970) by William Johnston novelizes the screenplay of a never-produced television series pilot with sf elements. [GW]
further reading
- William Johnston. Dick Tracy (New York: Grosset and Dunlap/Tempo Books, 1970) [tie: pb/]
- Jay Maeder. Dick Tracy: The Official Biography (London and New York: Plume Books, 1990) [nonfiction: pb/Chester Gould]
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