On August 13, 1931, Captain Joseph Medill Patterson of the "New York Daily News" sent a telegram to Chester Gould, the man who created Dick Tracy, that read: YOUR PLAINCLOTHES TRACY HAS POSSIBILITIES STOP. Within the pages of "Dick Tracy: The Official Biography" you will find the great adventures of the greatest detective in the funny pages, his unforgettable enemies from Flattop to Pruneface, his allies from Pat Patton to Diet Smith, his 2-way radio (late 2-way TV), and Tess Trueheart, his long-suffering sweetheart and eventual mate. Jay Maeder, a top editor at "The New York Daily News" might be providing an official biography, but he is doing so from a pop culture perspective. Consequently, we begin with Dick Tracy, square-jawed and straight-shooting, a creation of the time when crime was rampant in 1931, but trace his entire career, both in comics, radio and the movies. As you would expect, this book is loaded with black & white strips as well as 24 pages in color.

The character that Chester Gould created was absolutely dedicated to getting rid of the crime gangs afflicting the big city. Like the real-life Eliot Ness, Dick Tracy was brave, incorruptible, and sworn to making the world clean again. The catalyst for his career was the murder of Tess Trueheart's father in his deli by a robber. Gould had worked on earlier comic strips, "The Radio Cats" and "The Girl Friends," when he came up with the submission idea for "Plainclothes Tracy." The idea was refined before the first strip appeared on October 12, 1931, with Dick calling on the Truehearts for dinner. But the Big Boy, the first official Tracy villain, sent some boys to rob the Truehearts deli and Emil Trueheart ended up dead with Tracy vowing a blood oath over the body. The rest is the history that Maeder is detailing.

The approach of "Dick Tracy: The Official Biography" is basically chronological, beginning with the effort to bring Big Boy to justice, which was followed over the years by the Buddy Waldorf kidnapping, working as a G-Man across state lines, and, of course, all those battles with the Grotesques which would end up defining the strip for the world: The Blank, Pruneface, Flattop, Wormy, Flayface, and the rest. Maeder also devotes chapters to not only Tess and Junior, but the atonement of Stooge Viller and Steve the Tramp, which shows there was rehabilitation as well as justice in the Dick Tracy universe. Then there is Sparkle, B.O., and the other Plentys, along with Moon Maid and the whole Space Period of the strip. The result is not a strict chronology, but more of a constant circling forward, which reflect an effort to provide each chapter with thematic unity. Bu the primary goal remains to tell the story of how Chester Gould created a great and enduring American icon.

However, Maeder deals as well with the twilight period of the story of Dick Tracy when the culture turned against the character as he does with the original glory days and the later period of cultural retrieval. The major strength of the book is the way he puts all the pieces together, so that there is a sense of progression and character growth. Maeder is able to not only provide a concise description of Dick Tracy dealing with a terrorist-bomb incident or an adventure with Nilon Hoze, but also takes pain to show what was different or special that time around. I did not exactly work it out, but it sure looks like Maeder literally accounted for every "Dick Tracy" strip ever drawn by Gould. While I was never all that interested in the comic strip I found this to be a fascinating look at the over half-century that Dick Tracy fought his never-ending battles against the most memorable bad guys ever to embody evil. Oh, and do not forget to pay attention to the great tips provided in those Crimestoppers Textbooks!

This overview of the DICK TRACY comic strip coincided with a plethora of books that were part of the hype machine for Disney's movie extravagaza, and it was the best. Written by Jay Maeder, an historian of sorts for New York's Daily News, this "Official Biography" lovingly revisits the plot lines and characters of Chester Gould's 70 year old comic strip and brilliantly summarizes what it has become: an enduring pop cultural epic.

When Gould first created the exploits of his young gangbuster he was merely following the crime filled headlines of the day with crude, childlike artwork and a storytelling style that read like a cornball silent matinee. This, however, was the Depression and readers starving for breathless thrills found themselves hooked. Gould, who himself stated he never knew how the plotlines would evolve, became both a master puppeteer and an enthusiastic front row spectator. Soon, the plots became more intricate, the criminals became uglier, the violence became unflinchingly bloodier (a bold move when you consider today's hightened sensitivity), and the crude artwork became a style onto its own. All the while Dick Tracy, and his immediate family of cops and others became like friends we earnestly knew.

That was the beauty of comic strip storytelling from its golden age in that it was to unfold like a saga and in the case of DICK TRACY it was a saga that spanned the life of the 20th Century. The Depression, World War 2, Eisenhower's 50's, the psychodelic 60's- Tracy rode his police car through all of this and writer Maeder critically keeps his eyes on how the strip stayed the course (or derailed in the 60's...remember the Moon Maid?) and managed to entertain ever changing taste. With plenty of illustrations and a cogent reading style, this out of print book is an underrated gem.

I searched high and low for this book until I found it for sale on line through Amazon. I first read this collection of Dick Tracy comic books at the age of 10 and have been hooked ever since. Reading through it a second time was even better because I now had a historical context to enjoy some of the references and greater awareness of some of the unfortunate racial stereo-types sometimes depicted. The cases include criminal minds like Flat Top, Pear Shape, Gravel Gerty & BO Plenty, The Blank, 88 Keys, Jerome Trohs & Mamma, Little Face Finny, The Mole, The Brow, Breathless Mahoney and Mumbles. Some color pages. This is a must read and must have for all Tracy fans and fans to be.

This book is superb way of learning about one of the best, and easily the most violent, adventure strips ever made. This book highlights the complete history of the strip with its major stories, characters and the context in which the stories were told.

Best of all, although the author admires the strip, he is still honest enough to show the strip's decline as the creator, Chester Gould's artistic instincts abruptly abandoned him in the 1960's. To that end, the author does talk about Gould's stupid moon period and his ossified "damn the rights of the accused" stance that turned the strip into predominately rightwing ranting forum.

All in all, an excellent book.

This is the perfect companion piece to the book THE CELEBRATED CASES OF DICK TRACY as well as Warren Beatty's DICK TRACY movie. The book collects the early 1930's exploits of the most famous comic strip detective of them all and one can see the evolution of writer Chester Gould's storytelling style. In his heyday Tracy, like Beatty, seemed lean and boyish (his sharped-cut nose and chinned developed slowly) as he matched fists and bullets with bloated mobsters like "Big Boy." The early stories, themselves, play like matinee melodrama as young Tracy's misadventures with his girlfriend Tess Trueheart and "son" Junior (the comic's first "boy-sidekick")border on being pure soap opera. Still, while the artwork and plotting seems childlike and crude, these 70 year old adventures hold up due to a breathless mix of danger and innocence.

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.