“Yesterday’s” Comic> Four Color/Dick Tracy #8 (Dell newspaper strip reprints)

“How do these ants keeping getting in here!

Four Color Comic Series: Dick Tracy #8

Dell Comics (January, 1940)

WRITER/ARTIST/CREATOR: Chester Gould

There are a few reasons I’m starting 1940 with this comic, despite previously stating I wasn’t going to cover the comic strip collections. For one, Dick Tracy comics usually get pulled by Comic Book Plus for not being in public domain…somehow…in anthology collections, so actually getting to read his adventures from the newspapers of this time is a new experience for me.

For another, it’s rare to see a Golden Age comic that isn’t an anthology. While I’m expecting multiple stories going into this, we’re looking at all Dick Tracy tales. No guest stories, no back-ups, no other stories but this for 68-ish pages. I kind of want to see how that plays out, so that’s what we’re doing this week.

[Read along with me here]

Apparently this story comes in from comic strips dated from November 6, 1938 to somewhere in April, 1939. That sounds like a lot until you remember comic strips by nature take that long to get a full arc going. Or longer if you’re a soap opera comic like Apartment 3G or Mary Worth.

The first storyline actually continues from at least the previous issue. Tracy and company are after poison gas manufacturers. The leader gets away but Tracy gets a faceful of gas, damaging his eyes and his lungs enough to be put into an iron lung for a good while. Meanwhile, the leader, who attempted to double cross his gang and left his girl to die at the hands of a bear that was taken out by the cops, goes back to the woman who betrayed him because they’re both on the run. Going undercover as a baker, he makes the mistake of working for Tess’ mom, not knowing her connection to Tracy and never having seen him. An exploding boiler sends him to the hospital, mere feet from Dick’s room. The two even have a conversation, where the crook tries to destroy a sketch of him. Seen by Pat Patton and Trailer, they compare hairs from his haircut to ones in the bear’s claw and they match. They confront him, but he has a hidden gun thanks to his partner. She’s captured but the ether he uses on the cops gets onto his robe and when he goes for a cigarette the fumes catch fire, burning him.

Tracy is barely in this tale, but it does give us a chance to look at the other characters. We also see he’s not indestructible and this will play into the next storyline. The problem I have is how many coincidences are involved. The villain, Karpse, just happens to go Tess’ mom’s bakery, showing he can cook but he’s too dumb to wait for the boiler to be finished connecting, the first of two times he does himself in with the other being the ether on his robe catching fire. (A good unintentional “don’t smoke, kids” message.) It was overall an interesting story, one that showed Tracy isn’t the only smart one on the force.

The next arc has Tracy going to a retreat, Pop’s Rest Farm, to rest up from the gas now that his eyes are starting to heal and his lungs are working on their own. Of course it wouldn’t be a cop story if Tracy just got some R&R. We want to see him fishing for crooks, and one of them has a tie to the retreat’s owner. I won’t say anymore because I did link to it and want you to be surprised as to what comes. They aren’t super huge twists or anything but the whole story is done well. This time it’s almost all Dick Tracy, possibly to make up for so little of him last time, and we see his amazing skills and that he’s smart enough to know his limitations and when to call for help and spill the beans he’s back early and has been working a case.

This leads into the final story as one of the gang escapes and teams up with a smaller time crook, who paints his car different colors for each crime, using a solution to make it easy to wash the paint off and fool the police. This is the closest we get to the infamous disfigured criminals and all we get is a really big forehead. Why he wants to go from hitting gas stations to killing cops after accidentally killing one I have no clue. It seems an odd shift just to have a redemption story.

Overall this was a very enjoyable read. The science of the period and how Tracy uses it, what little time we get with his supporting cast at the time, and just really good storytelling. Plus it’s all Dick Tracy, not an anthology of a bunch of different characters like so many books of the period, even ones with a title character.  I hope more of these are available to me, given how many time Dick Tracy had to be pulled from anthologies along with Li’l Orphan Annie and Tarzan. Despite the inherent clunky nature of the presentation (newspaper strips get maybe three panels a day, four if you force it, plus the Sunday strips having maybe double that), I really liked this one.