This collection covers the first two years (1931-3) of the famous comic strip DICK TRACY (except for its very first story, reprinted in an earlier collection). It's fascinating to see how the strip evolved. Chester Gould's artwork started out very poor, but we can see it gradually improving. Tracy's character also evolved. He started out as a weenie by today's standards, and the character paradoxically benefited from being reduced to a square-jawed icon. Notice that in the first year he sometimes used disguises; he didn't do this much in later years, since his visual presence is the strip's anchor. Notice also that few of the stories were about bootleggers: the public was already turning against Prohibition.

Yet much of the first-year work in this collection could have been dispensed with. I enjoyed the Hammettesque story of Texie Garcia, a gun moll blackmailing a politician. (Texie: "Think what you could do with a thousand dollars." Tracy: "Yeah? I could roll it up in a wad and cram it right down your slippery throat.") Ditto the Lindbergh-like story of Big Boy Caprice kidnapping Buddy Waldorf Jr., with its knock-down dragout fight at the end. But editor Herb Galewitz himself admits that the stories of Tracy's demotion to a beat cop; con man turned kidnapper Broadway Bates, who resembles Batman's foe the Penguin; bond forger Alec Penn; and dope smuggler-blackmailer Kenneth Grebb are somewhat below par ...

Of course, after a year the strip really came to life, and gained readers and newspapers, when Junior first appeared. This was also the occasion for introducing the thug Steve the Tramp, the first of the strip's great villains. He and counterfeiter Stooge Viller dominate the second year, even escaping prison together.

The editors would have been well-advised to drop much of the first year, and their selections from the first six months of the Sunday strips, which weren't yet connected to the daily continuity. The space saved would have been better spent on some later stories such as Junior's mother, or Jean Penfield's fight with Tess Trueheart.

This id one of the greatest bookes i have ever read. It had some great quotes from famous authors and some not so famous. A must read for this extremely low price.

The quotations in the book encompass a gamut of variances. From those so profound you have to read them twice to those that you groan at and wonder what possessed the editor to add them. Overall the book is worth the money... all 80 cents.