Curt,
Re your question below:
"Mention of SIN CITY started it, but Eisner's SPIRIT has also
come up. What do you all think about DICK TRACY (I've got
CELEBRATED CASES OF on the way right now!)?"
Funny you should mention that. As I've mentioned once or
twice here, I write a column on hard-boiled and noir crime
fiction called "I Like 'Em Tough" for the on-line magazine
MYSTERICAL-E. My most recent two columns were devoted to
Tracy. The first one, "75 Years of Continuous
Crime-Stopping," can be found here:
http://www.mystericale.com/index.php?issue=072&body=file&file=like_em_tough.htm
It deals with the TRACY comic strip and its importance, not
just to the comics medium, but to the entire mystery genre,
and particularly to hard-boiled crime fiction.
I'll warn you that it's kinda long, so you might want to
print it out and read it at you leisure rather than read it
at your screen.
Interestingly, given the recent off-shoot of this discussion
of hard-boiled comics regarding whether or not comics
translate well into prose, the most recent
"ILET" column, "75 Years of Continuous Crime-Stopping, Part
Two," available here:
http://www.mystericale.com/index.php?issue=current_issue&body=file&file=like_em_tough.htm
is about Tracy's appearances over the years in novels and
short stories.
This seems like a good time to mention that, for any of you
living in the Chicago area, I'll be teaching a course about
Dick Tracy as a character in the movies this January at
Oakton Community College.
FWIW, I think you might find THE CELEBRATED CASES OF DICK
TRACY something of a disappointment. The stories included are
pretty good, but the publishers only printed the daily
strips. The Sunday strips were excluded, which meant that
there were huge gaps in the plot.
You might find more satisfaction with the 1990 collection,
THE DICK TRACY CASEBOOK, the 1992 follow-up, DICK TRACY'S
FIENDISH FOES, or the recent series of reprints put out by
Idea & Design Works, THE COMPLETE CHESTER GOULD'S DICK
TRACY, an ambitious project to reprint, at the rate of three
or four volumes a year, every single TRACY strip Chester
Gould ever did from 1931 to 1977.
Info about the IDW series can be found here:
http://www.idwpublishing.com/titles/dicktracy/1.shtml
Dick Tracy is a pivotal character in our particular sub-genre
of mystery. Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett may have
created the hard-boiled detective, but the visual image we
associate with that figure, tall, trim, taciturn, and
trench-coated, all under a snap-brim fedora, comes to us
courtesy of a visual artist named Chester Gould.
JIM DOHERTY
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