Revisiting the strange world of Dick Tracy

When I was a kid first getting into comics, there was something about Dick Tracy that genuinely made me uneasy. I was already into Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, other popular spandex supes. Their worlds felt heightened and fantastic, but also somehow fundamentally safe. Dick Tracy didn’t. Tracy’s hard-boiled world felt meaner, stranger, far more adult. The faces were grotesque and the violence had consequences. Even the technology and architecture felt brutal and uncanny, like a paranoid Cold War vision of a future-present.

That unique, odd quality is a big part of why Chester Gould’s strip still has such power. Gould wasn’t really making superhero comics. He was building a distorted mirror of 20th century American anxiety, organized crime, surveillance, Cold War dread, Space Age hyper-optimism curdling into something weird and obsessive. Dark. The villains, like Pruneface, Flattop, The Mole, and all those other unforgettable, twister human caricatures, felt like they’d broken from a fever dream. (Our current criminal Idiocracy has not made this feel any less relevant and prescient.)

Now Clover Press is bringing Gould’s early-’60s run back into print in an affordable softcover series covering 1961-1964. This was the era where Gould leaned heavily into Space Race imagery, bizarre gadgets, and sci-fi-inflected crime stories, including the epically pulpy “Moon Maiden” storyline. Clover has launched a Kickstarter to get this era back in print.

The books were previously available only as oversized hardcovers through the Library of American Comics and have become increasingly hard to find. These new editions collect the strips year-by-year and feature new covers by artists including Cat Staggs, Brent Schoonover, Howie Noel, and Daniel Hillyard.

Here are a few strips from the collection.

Used with permission.

Used with permission

Used with permission

Used with permission

Used with permission

Used with permission

Used with permission