Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy Volume 9

The Complete Dick Tracy #9

by Chester Gould

Chester Gould's fertile imagination continues at a breakneck pace, as he introduces The Brow, Flattop, Shaky, Breathless Mahoney, Measles, Gravel Gertie, B.O. Plenty, and the Summer Sisters! Edited and designed by Eisner Award-winner Dean Mullaney, and containing all daily and Sunday comic strips from March 23, 1944 through September 19, 1945, this volume features an introduction by Max Allan Collins, and includes a special feature by Jeff Kersten of the Dick Tracy Museum about the famous radio program, Dick Tracy in B-Flat, starring Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Durante, and Bob Hope!

Genres: Comic Strips, Graphic Novels, Comics, Crime

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Chester 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.

Reviews

[Michael Emond · Rating 3 out of 5]

After being pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed volume 8 (the first volume I read) this volume was a bit of a let down. I am grading these on a sliding scale (i.e. not the same standard I hold a modern graphic novel) for the obvious fact these were newspaper serials so the art had to be more simplistic and the stories had to have a certain repetitive pacing. reading them in a collection like this is not the way they were designed to be read. So I take that into account.

But after seeing how great a writer Gould was in the last volume in terms of villains and plots and clever twists, this volume suffered from lamer villains, annoying side characters who took up too much space and far too many coincidences that kept the story going or helped catch the crooks.

Compared to Pruneface we get Breathless Mahoney and B.O. Breathless' story goes on far too long and basically involves her being on the run with a lot of money. We also have Measles whose story involves him being on the run for far too long, and a flood. the Brow was actually a cool villain but sadly involved using the Summer sisters who were annoying. But the most annoying was Vitamin Flintheart who was just a side character who shows up in the stories and crosses paths with the villains. I guess he was supposed to be funny but for me he was just annoying. And him marrying Snowflake a woman 50 years younger than him was just gross in any time period.

The collection does look great and full stars for IDW and their reproduction. However I will note there was two cases where they made printing errors. one time they repeated the same strip twice and another they print a strip from months before at the top of a page. Not sure how the editor missed these obvious errors. Not a huge deal but I would be embarrassed if I was that editor.

Overall - a bit of a let down after the last volume. I prefer more clever adventures with some good detective work but this one Gould seems more focused on trying to do humour and focus on side characters that are (for me) annoying. Poor Tess - Dick's girlfriend - barely shows up this time and it is only by the biggest coincidence imaginable she does.

[Ronald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Covers last half of what some say was Gould at his creative best(1944) and in to 1945 with Vitamin Flintheart, the Brow, B.O. Plenty, Gravel Gertie, Breathless Mahoney, Flat Top, and others

[Jeffrey Greek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gould was definitely firing on all cylinders at this point.

[Dan Blackley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The edition has Flattop and The Brow. Both villains are Gould at his prime. Make sure to get the next edition to get the entire Brow story.

[Dominick · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great set of continuities. We get the end of Flattop (but, frustratingly, not the entire continuity), the Brow, Shaky, and Breathless Mahoney, as well as the first appearances of Gravel Gertie and B. O. Plenty, both of whom are far more interesting in these earlier incarnations as at best morally challenged, if not actively evil, figures, rather than the comic relief into which they evolved in short order. The Brow may well be the most disturbingly-designed villain in Gould's canon; even today, he comes across as creepy. The stories here flow seamlessly, each arising from the previous, even looping back at times, and driven by fast pace and action. The criminals barely have time to do anything crooked before they're on the lam, looking for ingenous ways to escape rather than to bilk folk. The violence is unbelievable (in a good way); every time I read one of these early collections and see the shards of glass penetrating eyes, bullets going through heads, mangled corpses and so on, I am amazed that this stuff was allowed to run in the comics section in newspapers. And Gould does not hesitate about killing off sympathetic characters, either, such as the somewhat crooked but essentially naive Summer Sisters, who are summarily drowned mid-story. It's elemental stuff about the basest human desires trumping all values (Breathless Mahoney and her mother try to kill each other over $50,000, for instance), reflected in the frequency (relatively speaking) with which the elements themselves figure in the plots: Flattop also drowns, Shaky (ironically enough) freezes to death, Breathless Mahoney gets plowed into a field (though she survives), and so on. The one narrative weak spot is Gould's overfondness for coincidence, and even that probably was far less noticeable when one read only a strip a day, not weeks of continuity in quick succession. Still, it's so common a device that when a character actually comments on it (Breathless Mahoney, when she ends up highly improbably running into B.O. Plenty again), it's probably funnier than Gould intended. The only real complaint I have about this book--and it applies to many of these IDW releases--is that it both begins and ends mid-continuity. Admittedly, Gould's stories do tend to flow into each other, but still, there are often far more obvious break-points, a few weeks in either direction, that would make for more natural stopping points. If the aim is to recreate something of the cliff-hanger nature of the original reading experience, I suppose I can see how that makes a sort of sense, but for me it's just irritating. Also, I really wish they'd do the Sundays in colour; they do for Terry and Little Orphan Annie, so why they don't for Tracy is a mystery to me. Maybe they think the stark moral universe of the strip benefits from black and white, but the Sundays were designed to be seen in colour, so should be. Still, these are prime Tracy continuities from Gould at his peak; anyone interested in comic strips should give this one a look.

[David R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely some of Gould's best work. And it was great to finally see the panels for Breathless Mahoney!