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The Complete Dick Tracy #11
The Complete Dick Tracy Volume 11: 1947-1948
This volume introduces Mumbles - one of Dick Tracy's greatest villains - and sees Tracy form the Crime Stoppers Club, teaching young boys and girls crime detection techniques. The fascinating (and sometimes grotesque) parade of characters continues, including Coffyhead, Hypo, Bronko, Kiss Andtell, Acres O'Riley, Heels Beals, and Autumn Hews. Plus, everyone dreads seeing what the baby born to B.O. Plenty and Gravel Gertie will look like Edited and designed by Eisner Award-winner Dean Mullaney, with introductions by Max Allan Collins and Jeff Kersten, this collection contains all the daily and Sunday comic strips from March 17, 1947 through September 26, 1948. -The Library of American Comics is the world's #1 publisher of classic newspaper comic strips, with 14 Eisner Award nominations and three wins for best book. LOAC has become "the gold standard for archival comic strip reprints... The research and articles provide insight and context, and most importantly the glorious reproduction of the material has preserved these strips for those who knew them and offers a new gateway to adventure for those discovering them for the first time." - Scoop
264 pages, Hardcover
First published January 25, 2011
About the author
Chester Gould
337 books24 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 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 23, 2012
I read through the first 50-60 pages of this in one sitting, then stretched the rest of the book out over more than a year, reading a single strip each day. Why? Because I'm a connoisseur of Dick Tracy. Reading them all in a jumble makes them seem too much like a haphazardly plotted comic book, which isn't fair, since Chester Gould designed them to be read in a daily newspaper. Gould was a master of storytelling in this format. He drives the plot forward each day in a fun or shocking manner. The reader never loses sight of the overall story arc, but also never gets bored with constant exposition to explain what's happened already.
This collection features one of Dick Tracy's most memorable nemeses, the low-talking, jazz-music-playing, expensive-clothes-wearing hood called "Mumbles." Mumbles does not look unlike Robert Mitchum, and has conversations with his henchmen that go like this:
"Star tover."
"What did he say?"
"Quits aying whadee zay."
"What did he say?"
"He said for you to quit saying, 'what did he say?'."
Mumbles is more than just a menacing hood who talks out of the corner of his mouth, he's a sadistic killer unafraid to murder police officers, punch his girlfriend Kiss Andtel in the face, or leave all his men behind to die.
Gould brought his right-wing social philosophy to the pages of the funny papers day after day, but he created such a brilliant phantasmagoria that readers of any political stripe could enjoy his violent fantasies, provided they could deal with his cheerful sadism.
Of course, there are some weeks in the Dick Tracy strip that are less exciting than others. For every brilliant creation like Mumbles, there's a less-than-brilliant creation like Coffyhead, who drinks a lot of coffee and whose head is shaped like a coffee pot.
With the exception of Coffyhead, Dick Tracy's rogues' gallery is pretty great in this volume: Acres O'Riley, who's an essentially good-hearted taxi driver, but whose enormous stature makes her a danger when she's enraged; her boyfriend, the tiny midget forger and hustler named Heels Beals (he wears lift heels in his shoes); Mrs. Volts, the gangster leader of an energy concern; Hypo, a twitchy drug addict, and Shoulders, a smooth-talking man with enormous shoulder pads for smuggling jewels. While Shoulders as a concept sounds kind of silly, his storyline here is really well-done. He's on the lam, hiding out as the husband of a woman who has a young daughter from a previous marriage. There's a sense of menace and unease in the scenes of Shoulders at home, and the story plays out in a suspenseful fashion.
Gould also presages the widespread use of security cameras. At the end of this volume, a new storyline is beginning in which the millionaire entrepreneur Diet Smith perfects a "television burglar alarm" which is officially known as the Dick Tracy Teleguard, allowing banks, homes, and government buildings to be watched at all times. There's even an option for motion-activation.
This is great stuff. I've loved Dick Tracy since I read a collection in high school, which was awesome, but being able to read a strip a day and get lost in Gould's crazy world has been a real treat.
This collection features one of Dick Tracy's most memorable nemeses, the low-talking, jazz-music-playing, expensive-clothes-wearing hood called "Mumbles." Mumbles does not look unlike Robert Mitchum, and has conversations with his henchmen that go like this:
"Star tover."
"What did he say?"
"Quits aying whadee zay."
"What did he say?"
"He said for you to quit saying, 'what did he say?'."
Mumbles is more than just a menacing hood who talks out of the corner of his mouth, he's a sadistic killer unafraid to murder police officers, punch his girlfriend Kiss Andtel in the face, or leave all his men behind to die.
Gould brought his right-wing social philosophy to the pages of the funny papers day after day, but he created such a brilliant phantasmagoria that readers of any political stripe could enjoy his violent fantasies, provided they could deal with his cheerful sadism.
Of course, there are some weeks in the Dick Tracy strip that are less exciting than others. For every brilliant creation like Mumbles, there's a less-than-brilliant creation like Coffyhead, who drinks a lot of coffee and whose head is shaped like a coffee pot.
With the exception of Coffyhead, Dick Tracy's rogues' gallery is pretty great in this volume: Acres O'Riley, who's an essentially good-hearted taxi driver, but whose enormous stature makes her a danger when she's enraged; her boyfriend, the tiny midget forger and hustler named Heels Beals (he wears lift heels in his shoes); Mrs. Volts, the gangster leader of an energy concern; Hypo, a twitchy drug addict, and Shoulders, a smooth-talking man with enormous shoulder pads for smuggling jewels. While Shoulders as a concept sounds kind of silly, his storyline here is really well-done. He's on the lam, hiding out as the husband of a woman who has a young daughter from a previous marriage. There's a sense of menace and unease in the scenes of Shoulders at home, and the story plays out in a suspenseful fashion.
Gould also presages the widespread use of security cameras. At the end of this volume, a new storyline is beginning in which the millionaire entrepreneur Diet Smith perfects a "television burglar alarm" which is officially known as the Dick Tracy Teleguard, allowing banks, homes, and government buildings to be watched at all times. There's even an option for motion-activation.
This is great stuff. I've loved Dick Tracy since I read a collection in high school, which was awesome, but being able to read a strip a day and get lost in Gould's crazy world has been a real treat.
October 20, 2019
more fun with the postwar Tracys
March 8, 2011
The artwork is incredible in this collection representing most of 1947-48 but the story lines are much weaker than the earlier 40s. The standouts are Mumbles and Coffeyhead; everyone else, including the ludicrous Sparkle Plenty storyline is forgettable.
June 7, 2020
Mumbles is in this one.
January 14, 2013
Lots more great stuff, despite a few uneven patches (e.g. the Crime Stoppers stuff with Junior and the neigbourhood kids out solving crime). Only a couple of really well-known villains--Mumbles, and Shoulders, in his return engagement-but the ones I hadn't heard of before were interesting as well, notably Mrs Volt, a genuinely bizarre creation with one drooping eye and a propensity to torment her dog constantly. Lots of violence and sudden death, lots of ingenious crime--and detection--and some of Gould's oddest sequences (e.g. the Acres O'Reilly/Heels Beals story, in which for several strips Acres--a very big girl indeed--runs amok dressed in a tarp covered in luminous paint and is mistaken for a ghost). B. O. Plenty and Gravel Gertie give birth to Sparkle, as well, another major development in the strip, though I don't share Gould's evident fascination with these comic relief figures.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews