True Dicks

After plowing through the first volume of Walt and Skeezix the other day, I decided to keep exploring Classic Comic Strips, and started reading through the first volume of the complete Chester Gould Dick Tracy. I wasn't really surprised to discover that it reads a lot like classic Batman/Superman comics. I know that newspaper strips were what most comic book creators aspired to create, and I also know that many credit Dick Tracy as the inspiration for many elements of Batman - particularly the crazy, freakish rogues gallery. I'm only a few months in, so the villains have remained solidly real world thus far - gangsters, con-men and the like. I'm having a good time with it, but I'm waiting for it to get insane.

Well, I'm waiting for it to get insane in the ways that it is famous for. There's plenty of crazy in there already. For example - I didn't know that Dick Tracy was NOT a police officer when the series started. When the strip starts he's a dude who is having trouble getting work, but has faith that something will come along. He's just gotten engaged to a pretty young woman and is at her parents' home celebrating. His fiancee's father is a shop-owner who has just paid off all of his debts and has a modest savings as well. Local thugs know that this is a house with cash and pull a home invasion. Dick's would-be father-in-law is shot dead and Dick's fiancee is kidnapped! Dick is beat up, but mostly unharmed. When the police show up they see that he's angry, that he wants to fuck up the thugs, and decide to offer him a job as a plain-clothes detective on the spot.

Let's look at this. This is one of the most famous fictional police detectives of all time and he got his job with no training, no credentials, not even a job application! He's just pissed off after being victimized by crime! That's like if Death Wish had the police offer Paul Kersey a job at the end of the first act instead of leaving him to find his own brand of rough justice. That's pretty awesome, even though it doesn't strike me as entirely smart on their part. Then there's the whole 'unrealistic' factor too. I don't know how things worked back in 1931, but I'm skeptical that a dude would get offered a badge, a gun, and a leadership role on the force simply based on the fact that he was pissed off and wanted to get back at some dudes that done him wrong. I think groups that recruit that way are called 'gangs' not 'police'. Not to say that there aren't similarities between the two groups, but there are also differences that it is good to acknowledge.

Aside from the way that badges and guns are so casually distributed, my favorite part of the strip so far is how fragile women are in it. Women get hospitalized for anything. One of my favorite studies in contrast between the fragility of women and the sturdiness of men in the strip is a point when it is revealed that Dick's girl, Tess, has been in the Hospital for several days for a sprained knee and a bruised shoulder. Hospitalized. And when she's released, it's only under the condition that she take it easy and maintain bedrest. Meanwhile, a few pages later the villains drop a suitcase full of bricks on Tracy's head from a third story window, and this does no lasting damage to him whatsoever. There's also an interesting thing regarding timeline that goes on throughout the strip. The action and the cliffhangers frequently seem to cover moment-by-moment events, but characters will refer to a timeline that matches the measure of time that the readers experience. It seems to be one of the earlier appearances of that nebulous 'comic-book-time' that the Marvel and DC Universe are both so dependent on.

Of course, I'm making it sound as if my only enjoyment of these strips is ironic, and that's just not true. I like the way that it reads as wish fulfillment for people who were struggling in the depression and felt preyed upon by both circumstances and criminals. I love the contempt that it shows for con-men in particular, and how it's concerns are for the victims of crime. I love that it's concerned with justice. It reads better in bulk so far than the early DC stuff that I've read that came from a few years later. The action flows a lot better and Chester Gould is way better at building suspense and tension than most of the 'Golden Age' comic book dudes I've read were. Dick Tracy is just plain more consistently exciting than any of the golden age super hero stuff I've read. While Golden Age super heroes can't be beat for the pure craziness and invention of their ideas, I'm starting to really see that most of the finest craft of the period was happening in the newspapers. Too bad you've been Garfield-ed newspapers. New evidence presented to me shows you used to be awesome.

I've also been reading about a different kind of dick this week. I just finished reading the first fourteen issues of volume two of The Flash. This was the run that began just after the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths and was the beginning of Wally West's inheritance of the mantle of Flash, making him no longer Kid-Flash. There's a few things that were really striking to me as I read these. The first and strongest is that, as written by Mike Baron, Wally West is a total dick. People who are bitching about what a horribly asshole Tony Stark is being portrayed as these days would do well to look at this twenty year old take on a popular character and see how sympathetic, likable, or heroic they find him. The most awkward part of reading the issues for me was that I honestly couldn't tell if Baron means for us to be reading him as an asshole or not. I think that we're meant to like him.

As I read these issues of the Flash I kept thinking that this version of Wally West was the perfect Dittohead Super-Hero comic. The hero not only demands compensation to assist a hospital in saving a life, he also seems to bitch ceaselessly in his inner monologues about the evils of taxes and insurance companies. He wins the lottery at the end of the first issue and, if anything, this just seems to intensify his complaints about the ways that government taxation and evil insurance rates inhibit his freedom. He's a womanizer who both gets with married women and starts making moves on other women when he hasn't broken up with his previous girl. The final story involves yuppies who get addicted to 'speed drugs' (how clever) that give them Super Speed, but the dialogue and text go way, way out of their way to point out how cool yuppies are and that these guys just got caught up in someone else's evil scheme while they were trying to find a new place to put their positive, capitalist energy.

The underlying message of every character and situation seems to be that insecurity and neediness will turn people into villains and threats, while cockiness and selfishness shows them as virtuous. Nothing about this comic aligned with my value system, I thought that the main character was a douche, but I still had a good time.
Kinda makes me wish that there were more comics out there with leads and politics that would annoy me. It's fun to see what the other side thinks is heroic.