It's our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! This year, the theme is A Comic Strip Christmas! Each day will spotlight a notable comic strip, and at least three Christmas-themed comics from that strip. Today's comic is Dick Tracy.
Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day's Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened, and you can see what the "treat" for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries.
The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Santa Claus giving out presents to comic strip kids (although instead of a present for Charlie Brown, his dog, Snoopy, gets a present instead), is by Nick Perks.
Day 11 is now opened (once opened, the door will feature an image from the featured comic strip)...
WHO IS DICK TRACY?
Spurned on by the widespread coverage of Prohibition agent Elliot Ness and his long-running attempt to take down the powerful gangster, Al Capone, which came to an end in 1931 with Capone sentenced to eleven years in federal prison for tax evasion, cartoonist Chester Gould pitched the idea of doing a comic strip based on a plainclothes detective that Gould was familiar with from the news. Originally titled Planclothes Tracy, the Detroit Mirror purchased the strip and began publishing it in October 1931, but said it should be retitled Dick Tracy. The Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate then began to nationally syndicate the strip.
Dick Tracy was a sensation. It was soon one of the most popular strips in the country, and Dick Tracy was one of the most famous comic characters for DECADES after this. In fact, in the 1960s, when ABC was curious about doing a TV series based on a comic hero, Batman was not their first target. No, according to their internal surveys, the comic hero with the most brand-name awareness at the time was Dick Tracy. NBC, however, had already optioned the character, so ABC was "stuck" with Batman instead.
One of the things that makes Dick Tracy stand out a bit is that 1931 was sort of the sweet spot for comic strip debuts, as the format had knocked out a lot of the early learning curve in the 1920s, so there was much more of an established format for comic strips by 1931, and that helped Gould a lot. In addition, Gould was 31 when the strip began, and he actually stuck with it for over 40 years. A lot of other strips lost their famous creators fairly early on, whether from tragedy or from better opportunities, so Gould remaining on the strip into the 1970s was a big boon for the strip.
Dick Tracy was famous for its main romance between Dick Tracy and Tess Trueheart, but mainly for the fantastical villains that Tracy took on over the years. He had one of the greatest Rogues Galleries in comic history, on par with the Flash and Batman. Over time, though, the strip, which had been lambasted for many years for being too violent, stopped being qutie as grounded as in its earliest, Ness-esque, days, and the strip started doing a lot of science fiction stories in the 1960s.
When Gould retired in 1977, he was replaced by the brilliant mystery writer, Max Allan Collins, who would famously write the strip until he was fired in 1992. First, Rick Fletcher drew the strip until he died in 1983. Dick Locher, who had assisted Gould in the 1950s and 1960s, took over as artist on the strip. After Collins was fired in a cost-cutting move, Mike Killian took over writing duties until he passed away in 2005. Locher then wrote and drew the strip until 2009, when Jim Brozman took over art duties until 2011, when Locher retired and the strip was taken over by writer Mike Curtis and artist Joe Staton. Staton left the strip in 2021, replaced by his inker/letterer, Shelley Pleger, the first female lead artist on the feature.
HOW DID DICK TRACY HANDLE CHRISTMAS?
Christmas was very important to Chester Gould, and as a result, it was featured prominently in the Dick Tracy comic strip.
Even BEYOND the strip, Gould famously would do Christmas cards every year for his friends and family. Here is one, courtesy of the Dick Tracy Museum.
Just a few months after the strip debuted, Gould was doing a Christmas strip, as the relationship between Dick and Tess Trueheart hit a snag when Dick ditches her at Christmastime...
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One of the funny things about Dick Tracy Christmas strips is that they were sort of just worked into the strip's overall continuity, like this 1939 strip where Dick has taken down some poison gas purveyors, but has been blinded in the process...or HAS he?
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In 1936, the Christmas strip was just totally part of a then-current plot...
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One of the all-time great Dick Tracy rogues was Flattop Jones, and he made his first appearance on December 21st, and so when the Christmas strip came out, Gould gave a section of the strip to Flattop talking about how he was going to take Tracy down...
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But of course, the most notable Christmas in Dick Tracy history occurred in 1949, when Dick and Tess married in a Christmas ceremony...
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18 years for a couple in a serialized strip to get married is practically light speed! Interestingly enough, Gould's friend and fellow superstar cartoonist, Al Capp, also had his Li'l Abner character get married to his sweetheart after 18 years.
Is it just me, or does this strip from a few years later suggest that they're SINGING "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," right?
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Gould was a very talented creator.