Sunday supplement magazine American Profile has a nice feature today: the 75th anniversary of Dick Tracy.
In some ways, the world that Tracy patrols today is much different than the one featured in the Depression-inspired panels that launched the detective into legend. Corporate crimes and international espionage influence today’s Dick Tracy artist and writer, Dick Locher, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who took over the strip after Gould retired in 1977. Locher collaborated on Dick Tracy initially with journalist and crime novelist Mike Killian, who died in 2005.Locher, 77, who lives in Napierville, Ill., says his goal is to create a story that people want to read—and return to—each day. “I like something you don’t give away right away,” he says. “We pick a theme. It might even have a chase, it might have romance or spying, phone taps, theft or endangerment, like Tracy hanging from the top of the Sears Tower, things like that that would keep your interest.”
“Dick Tracy remains appealing to today’s population because he represents the timeless values of justice, law and order, and honesty, but not in a way that is too good to be believable,” says Steve Tippie of Chicago’s Tribune Media Services, which syndicates the Dick Tracy strip. “I think his hard-nosed conviction—that it is the forces of the law that stand between the public and the criminals who threaten them—resonated with the public in the era of Al Capone, and still resonates in the era of Al Qaeda.”
Read the comic strip.
Posted by Alan at October 1, 2006 11:49 AM