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The Complete Dick Tracy #14
The Complete Dick Tracy Volume 14: 1951-1953
What does Crewy Lou do with Bonny Braids? Dick and Tess's baby isn't the only child in danger in Volume 14: wait 'til you meet Sparkle Plenty's new best friend, "Little Wings," and discover the ominous reason she appears to glow in the dark! Chester Gould also ramps up the violence and death traps, introduces more inventions (closed circuit surveillance, the first broadcast police line-up), and more crazy characters such as Tonsils, Dot View, Mr. Crime, Odds Zonn, Newsuit Nan, and Spinner ReCord, plus the touching story of the girl known as Model. Including all strips from September 16, 1951 - April 18, 1953.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published January 15, 2013
30 people want to read
About the author
Chester Gould
335 books23 followersChester Gould was a U.S. cartoonist and the creator of the Dick Tracy comic strip, which he wrote and drew from 1931 to 1977. Gould was known for his use of colorful, often monstrous, villains.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 4, 2015
Another of the fine IDW reprints which are trying to cover the entire Chester Gould run of Dick Tracy, moving into the early 1950s. As mentioned in the Max Allan Collins introduction, the stories shifted focus a bit. Dick Tracy is a full time father now, and those concerns take up some of his time. As well, forensic science was beginning to catch up with the comic strips, so more of that was included as part of the action.
The volume begins with Crewy Lou’s flight from justice, which is complicated by the fact that she’s accidentally abducted Bonny Braids, Dick and Tess’ infant daughter who started the whole plotline when Crewy Lou photographed her. They go deep into the mountains, and the desperate woman finally abandons the baby in the smashed-up car. It’s late fall, and the temperatures are dropping…Bonny Braids is turning blue…would Chester Gould really go ahead and kill the baby?
With his family reunited, Tracy then finds himself the subject of investigation–evidence has gone missing from the police station, evidence Dick was the last to touch. It didn’t help that Dick Tracy had just built a fine new house and had a brand new car on a cop’s salary. The main villain this time is “Spinner” ReCord, an electronic entertainment and record store owner. He was especially cold-blooded, crating himself up with a corpse for hours on a train. But not, as it happened, quite cold-blooded enough as he is eventually caught due to his body heat.
The supplemental article in this issue talks a bit about how this sequence was modified for comic book publication a few years later when the Comics Code was in force. A girl’s arms were crudely erased to avoid showing bondage, and a particularly brutal beating was replaced with a text panel that skips over that.
This is followed by one of the most striking Dick Tracy sequences, as Junior Tracy falls in love for the first time (and is now established as a teenager.) Model Jones is a lovely young woman of decent character, but saddled with drunkard parents and a juvenile delinquent brother. Gould’s point here is that neglecting your children for alcohol will destroy the family. Model is killed by her brother (mostly accidentally) and he and their parents mourn the wasted lives as he is sent to prison.
Junior mourns as well, but the world moves on with the initially kind of silly Tonsils story. Tonsils is a young man with a loud clear voice and a strange way of moving his hands when he “sings.” He has a poor memory for lyrics, and can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but his manager Dude thinks Tonsils is the next sensation. Dude wants to quit the rackets, but still has a racketeer’s way of doing things, using a gun to coerce people into giving Tonsils a shot.
Surprise! Tonsils is exactly the sort of giftedly bad novelty singer the American public wants, and he becomes locally famous. Unfortunately, Dude’s old racketeer buddies decide that he should not have left the rackets, killing him and nearly killing Tonsils. This unbalances the lad, and he winds up getting himself on the run from the law due to his mistaken belief that he’s been betrayed.
At this point, Tonsils is picked up by a far more dangerous villain, Mr. Crime. From his hidden lair beneath a barracuda-infested swimming pool, Mr. Crime is the current leader of the rackets. He coerces Tonsils into making an assassination attempt on Dick Tracy, and then starts moving against the detective himself. Mr. Crime is ably assisted by Newsuit Nan, a fashion plate biochemist who has a fascination with blood.
With Mr. Crime and his gang out of the way, there’s a power vacuum in the underworld, which gambler Odds Zon plans to fill. He tries a combination of torture and bribery to get Dick Tracy off the case, but it obviously doesn’t work. Things get more complicated when the Plenty family takes in his daughter Susie, who becomes known as Little Wings due to her hair looking like a pair of angel wings. And this angel glows in the dark! Uh-oh.
This volume holds off on the truly grotesque looking villains; the most odd appearance is Tonsils’ habit of squinting one eye and bugging out the other. The Model Jones story is the most “real” seeming due to its down to earth nature. There is of course considerable violence, and some torture.
This isn’t the most famous period of Gould’s work, but it’s good solid adventure strip territory. The end piece talks (in addition to the bowdlerization of the comic books) about what Mr. Gould was up to in real life in those years, and the strip’s effects in real life.
Recommended to fans of classic newspaper comics.
The volume begins with Crewy Lou’s flight from justice, which is complicated by the fact that she’s accidentally abducted Bonny Braids, Dick and Tess’ infant daughter who started the whole plotline when Crewy Lou photographed her. They go deep into the mountains, and the desperate woman finally abandons the baby in the smashed-up car. It’s late fall, and the temperatures are dropping…Bonny Braids is turning blue…would Chester Gould really go ahead and kill the baby?
With his family reunited, Tracy then finds himself the subject of investigation–evidence has gone missing from the police station, evidence Dick was the last to touch. It didn’t help that Dick Tracy had just built a fine new house and had a brand new car on a cop’s salary. The main villain this time is “Spinner” ReCord, an electronic entertainment and record store owner. He was especially cold-blooded, crating himself up with a corpse for hours on a train. But not, as it happened, quite cold-blooded enough as he is eventually caught due to his body heat.
The supplemental article in this issue talks a bit about how this sequence was modified for comic book publication a few years later when the Comics Code was in force. A girl’s arms were crudely erased to avoid showing bondage, and a particularly brutal beating was replaced with a text panel that skips over that.
This is followed by one of the most striking Dick Tracy sequences, as Junior Tracy falls in love for the first time (and is now established as a teenager.) Model Jones is a lovely young woman of decent character, but saddled with drunkard parents and a juvenile delinquent brother. Gould’s point here is that neglecting your children for alcohol will destroy the family. Model is killed by her brother (mostly accidentally) and he and their parents mourn the wasted lives as he is sent to prison.
Junior mourns as well, but the world moves on with the initially kind of silly Tonsils story. Tonsils is a young man with a loud clear voice and a strange way of moving his hands when he “sings.” He has a poor memory for lyrics, and can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but his manager Dude thinks Tonsils is the next sensation. Dude wants to quit the rackets, but still has a racketeer’s way of doing things, using a gun to coerce people into giving Tonsils a shot.
Surprise! Tonsils is exactly the sort of giftedly bad novelty singer the American public wants, and he becomes locally famous. Unfortunately, Dude’s old racketeer buddies decide that he should not have left the rackets, killing him and nearly killing Tonsils. This unbalances the lad, and he winds up getting himself on the run from the law due to his mistaken belief that he’s been betrayed.
At this point, Tonsils is picked up by a far more dangerous villain, Mr. Crime. From his hidden lair beneath a barracuda-infested swimming pool, Mr. Crime is the current leader of the rackets. He coerces Tonsils into making an assassination attempt on Dick Tracy, and then starts moving against the detective himself. Mr. Crime is ably assisted by Newsuit Nan, a fashion plate biochemist who has a fascination with blood.
With Mr. Crime and his gang out of the way, there’s a power vacuum in the underworld, which gambler Odds Zon plans to fill. He tries a combination of torture and bribery to get Dick Tracy off the case, but it obviously doesn’t work. Things get more complicated when the Plenty family takes in his daughter Susie, who becomes known as Little Wings due to her hair looking like a pair of angel wings. And this angel glows in the dark! Uh-oh.
This volume holds off on the truly grotesque looking villains; the most odd appearance is Tonsils’ habit of squinting one eye and bugging out the other. The Model Jones story is the most “real” seeming due to its down to earth nature. There is of course considerable violence, and some torture.
This isn’t the most famous period of Gould’s work, but it’s good solid adventure strip territory. The end piece talks (in addition to the bowdlerization of the comic books) about what Mr. Gould was up to in real life in those years, and the strip’s effects in real life.
Recommended to fans of classic newspaper comics.
January 22, 2013
Gould's work in the early 1950s is beautifully drawn (he continues a run of masterful use of constrasts) but the story lines are merely so-so. Among the villains in this round are the forgettable Crewy Lou, Odds Zonn, and Mr. Crime. There's rather too much of the badly rendered little girls (Bonny Braids, Sparkle Plenty, and Little Wings -- ack! please STOP!!) and readers were distracted by a soapy segment involving the rapidly aging Junior (I think he gained about ten years in 1951) and his doomed girlfriend Model. As always, P.O. Plenty provides dubious comic relief, and, Tracy emerges miraculously from certain death at least twice.
June 26, 2013
Chester Gould is one of my all-time favorite comic artists. My favorite part of the Sunday funny papers when I was a kid was always Dick Tracy. Seeing these strips again brings back many happy memories. The stories themselves are peppered with brutal scenes and with very repulsive, evil villians, but they are always, always, riveting. Maybe Dick Tracy lived in a world where good was good, and evil was very bad, with no shades of gray, and where the bad guys always got their just desserts, but what's wrong with that? The whole idea of comics, to my mind, is escape from reality, and it is good to see evil punished and people paying the consequences of their actions.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews