selected
by Max Allan Collins and Dick Locher
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The Dick Tracy Casebook: Favorite Adventures 1931-1990 1990 (SC) 273 pgs.
selected
by Max Allan Collins and Dick Locher
Reprinting: "The Hotel Murders" 1936, "The Brow" 1944, "Crewy Lou" 1951, "Model" 1952, "The Spot" 1960, "Big Boy's Open Contract" 1978, "The Man of a Million Faces" 1987
Rating: * * * * (out of 5)
Number of readings: 1
Published by St. Martin's Press
Prior to this, my only experience with comic strip cop Dick Tracy was the 1990 movie with Warren Beatty and a couple of the films from the '40s -- none of which had exactly won me over to the granite-jawed sleuth and his rogues gallery of grotesques. I'd never even seen the daily newspaper strip, or any of the sundry other compilations (meaning I have nothing to compare this collection to). But reading The Dick Tracy Casebook, I'm beginning to get an idea of the strip's popularity.
The book contains story lines selected by the current (at least as of 1990) producers of the strip, writer (and novelist) Max Allan Collins and artist Dick Locher. Included are five by Tracy creator Chester Gould, and two story lines from the post-Gould period by Collins and artist, the late Rick Fletcher, and Collins and Locher respectively.
The Chester Gould stuff is a genuine eye-opener. I don't know how this material would read in daily doses, but put together, there's a breathless pacing and genuine excitement exploding out of the bizarrely cartoony images mixed with film noire grittiness, colourful action, human drama, off-beat quirkiness, and light sci-fi touches (like wrist radios). The strip was also more sophisticated than the 1990 movie. Admittedly, though, Gould's stuff can get pretty grisly in spots (for all the talk of modern media violence, I find it hard to believe some of this stuff would be printed in newspapers today).
Chet Gould, generally using four panels per day, crams a lot of information into the strip, with a true talent for reiterating information without seeming to be repeating the last day's episode. Trying to imagine reading a strip at random, I get the sense you could pick up the necessary information quickly, but read together, there's little sense of obvious recapping that would impede the narrative flow. It's an impressive achievement.
Unfortunately, it's a talent that wasn't entirely passed on to the next generation. Max Allan Collins' first story is O.K., but still not on the same level as Gould's, while the final story I found dragged some. Gone are the jam-packed four panels, with Collins and Locher utilizing three -- sometimes only two -- panels per day, with heavy use of repetition. At times the first panel is a virtual reproduction of the last day's panel, making the whole thing an exercise in "two steps forward, one step back". The pacing drags and the drama (and comedy), and the characters themselves, seem less real than in Gould's hands. Too bad.
In their editorials, Collins and Locher explain that they wanted to include stories that hadn't been collected much before (at least in their entirety) and, as the sub-title suggests, these are personal favourites, selected subjectively. As such, one infers, some obvious stories may have been ignored.
Overall, the choices are good (at least of the Gould stuff) -- though I have nothing to compare it to, wwhether there might have been better stories included, or how well this reflects Dick Tracy overall. In a number of spots Collins makes allusions to Gould's right-of-centre politics, but it's little in evidence here. And there's nothing as odiously right-wing as, say, the 1990 motion picture (produced by Warren Beatty, a supposed Hollywood Liberal -- go figure). Gould's Tracy, at least in these stories, doesn't brutalize suspects for information, he doesn't rant against civil rights, and he doesn't shoot first. Compared to most cops in novels, TV, movies and comics, that makes Dick Tracy a veritable bleeding-heart-hippie-do-gooder -- but, as I say, that's based solely on theese stories.
What stops the book from being a perfect encapsulation of Dick Tracy is that, because these are personal favourites, Collins and Locher skip over an entire period in the '60s when Tracy, apparently, relocated to the moon. Although this was during a science fiction boom, and could be clearly seen as a mercenary attempt to catch a wave, Collins implies that Chester Gould was genuinely enthusiastic about the shift to the fantastic...to the consternation of fans like Collins. As such, Collins and Locher have chosen to jump over that period, leaving novices like myself rather curious about what those stories were like. Likewise they skip over a period when Gould tried to modernize Tracy by giving him longer hair and a mustache.
And, of course, even the erstwhile colour Sunday Funny strips are here printed in black and white.
Ultimately, whether this is a great collection when compared to other Dick Tracy collections, I don't know. I'll admit that the post-Gould period left me unimpressed (which is a shame to say, because the enthusiasm of fans-turned-pros Collins and Locher is clearly genuine) but the Chester Gould stuff was quite entrancing. Admittedly, I don't know if I've been turned into a true, dyed-in-the-wool fan or not, but I do have an irresistible urge to shout into my watch, "Calling, Dick Tracy!"
Original cover price $15.95
Dragon
Lady 2000 (SC TPB) 144 pages
Written and Illustrated by Milton Caniff.
Reprinting: Amazing Comics #1-4 (which reprinted a storyline from the 1930s newspaper strip, Terry and the Pirates) plus a couple of non-Caniff short stories
Rating: * * * 1/2 (out of 5)
Number of readings: 1
Published by ACG Comics
Terry and the Pirates was a newspaper strip that followed the adventures of young Terry Lee, an American boy living in the Orient, and Pat Ryan, a rugged soldier-of-fortune type who acts as his guardian. At least that was how the strip started out (Terry grew older and became a young man as the strip progressed). This particular storyline (which ran from the end of August, 1937, to the middle of February, 1938) features the introduction of the Dragon Lady, an Oriental femme fatale who just may develop a soft spot for Pat as the story progresses. Despite seeming to meet her demise at the serial's conclusion, the Dragon Lady would reappear in the strip, becoming highly identified with the series overall.
Terry and the Pirates is something of a benchmark in the evolution of the newspaper strip, and Caniff is an artist who had enormous influence on succeeding generations of comicbook artists, so I'd been wanting to read some of the strip for a long time.
A single story stretched out over so many months could become tedious, but this turns out to be a convoluted affair, almost like two or three stories that segue one into the other. Pat is hired to help catch a spy stealing documents for a new plane. That spy turns out to be the Dragon Lady. But soon the story has taken an unexpected turn and Pat is in the Chinese jungle at the mercy of a warlord, with Terry and manservant Connie in pursuit (despite being called Terry and the Piates, here adult Pat is more clearly the main character).
The unfortunate thing about newspaper adventure strips is that their artistic heyday was probably in the 1930s and 1940s and, like Golden Age comicbooks themselves, it means that they reflect antiquated attitudes. With Terry and the Pirates set in the exotic Far East, you can't avoid noticing an underlying racism. Right in the opening strip we meet a series regular, Connie -- Terry and Pat's comic-relief Chinese manservant. Connie, unlike everyone else, isn't drawn particularly realistic; with his huge teeth and big ears, he's a caricature. Dimwitted and goofy, he's more uncomfortable that amusing. Though, to be fair, he is portrayed as having a good heart. Which is better than most of the other Asian characters, who are drawn less grotesquely, but are generally villains. Throw in ostensibly good guys occasionally using racial slurs and it's enough to make most modern readers cringe.
Though, and here's the paradox, there are occasional Oriental characters who are not portrayed in quite so dismissive a light. And the Dragon Lady herself is intelligent and seductive.
So, does that make Dragon Lady unreadable. Well, no. If we dismissed every book or movie that was tainted by racism (or sexism), we'd eliminate 60 percent of stories told prior to, say, the mid-1950s at least. But we don't. If there's enough entertainment value inherent in the rest of a story, we can hold our noses through the more offensive bits.
I say "can", not necessarily "should". If someone feels it would sour the story too much for them to enjoy it, then I respect that. For my part, though, I found myself willing to look past the occasional lapses.
Milton Caniff was considered a master of his craft, and this epic storyline shows some of why. Older strips had more room to work with than the few adventure strips remaining today: four panels a day, often of enough size to fit in a fair amount of verbige. There was also a defter handling of repitition, with less obvious reiteration of information, making for a smoother read when the strips are assembled back-to-back (though there's still enough repetition that its newspaper origins are evident). It's a technique that has been lost somewhat in modern North American adventure strips, though the British (at least into the early 1980s) were still expert practitioners of the craft with strips like Modesty Blaise and Axa, where repetition was kept to a minimum.
The exotic, Far East locale full of junks (Chinese boats), warlords, and Chinese architecture is well depicted, making the story decidedly atmospheric and enthralling. I'd never read Terry and the Pirates before, but there's something delightfully evocative and nostalgic about it all, as if I had read it long ago, in another life.
The story is well-paced and clever, taking unexpected twists. The nice thing about these older newspaper strips is that they had enough room to inject a little bit of characterization, to keep things from being too breezy, and a touch of humour, even as they're written to be fast-paced, like a movie serial.
As noted above, Caniff was an influential artist, which is more clearly obvious in his later work which influenced the likes of Frank Robbins and others. I actually find this, his early style, more pleasing. He utilizes a less stylized, generally realistic art that I quite enjoyed.
The format for this book is worth commenting on. Firstly, the first two issues contain a back up story not by Caniff (a horror story culled from some old Charlton Comics title and a war story culled from Fightin' Marines). Neither story is especially memorable, nor thematically connected to the main story. The final two issues dump the back up story, and switch to reprinting the strips in a vertical format (meaning you have to turn the book on its side to read it). Although that's not such a bad idea when published in its comic book format, in this TPB it's a bit awkward as the spine isn't as limber, forcing the pictures to curl a bit toward the spine. As well, the editors were rather lax in reprinting the accompanying Sunday strips -- sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. As such, there are occasional jumps in the story (though with a text blurb to tell you what you missed) and a whole week or so of dailies are skipped at the end (though you don't notice it). There's also a couple of pages in the first issue that got switched with each other. All of this means that, though not a bad re-presentation of these strips, it's not the best, either.
This TPB is dubbed a "Special Collection", and it doesn't so much reprint Amazing Comics as it literally collects them between a single cover. It really seems as though it's the four issues glued together, complete with front and back covers of a different paper than the story pages, plus ads. It's also worth noting that this was apparently limited to only 600 copies.
Unavoidably dated by some of its sensibilities, nonetheless this collection of Terry and the Pirates is an entertaining adventure harkening back to a bygone day of adventure and mystery. It gives an idea of why the strip, and Caniff, is so well regarded all these decades later.
Cover price: $__ CDN./ $10.95 USA.
Dreadstar - The Definitive Collection, vol. 1
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The Drowned
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