Dick Tracy is a long-running comic strip featuring a popular and familiar character in American pop culture. Dick Tracy is a hard-hitting, fast-shooting, and supremely intelligent police detective who has matched wits with a variety of often grotesquely ugly villains. Created by cartoonist Chester Gould in 1931, the strip made its debut appearance on October 4, 1931, distributed by the Chicago Tribune Syndicate. Gould wrote and drew the strip until 1977.
Early years
Chester Gould introduced a raw violence to comic strips, reflecting the violence of 1930s Chicago. Gould also did his best to keep up with the latest in crime fighting techniques and, while Tracy often ends a case in a shootout, he uses forensic science, advanced gadgetry and plain hard thinking to track the bad guy down. It has been suggested that this comic strip was the first example of the police procedural mystery story. Others have noted that actual "whodunit" plots were relatively rare in the stories since the comic strip format is not suited for that kind of plot. The real focus, they argue, is the chase, with a criminal seen committing the crime and Dick Tracy solving the case during a relentless pursuit of the criminal, who becomes increasingly desperate as the detective closes in.
Evolution of the strip
In January 1946, Gould changed Dick Tracy forever with the introduction of the 2-Way Wrist Radio after a visit to inventor Al Gross. This seminal communications device, worn as a wristwatch by Tracy and members of the police force, became one of the strip's most immediately recognizable icons, and can be thought of as an early precursor of later technological developments, such as cellular phones. The 2-Way Wrist Radio was eventually upgraded to a 2-Way Wrist TV in 1964, and again to a 2-Way Wrist Computer in 1987. This development also led to the introduction of an important supporting character, Diet Smith, an eccentric industrialist who financed the development of this equipment.
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