Dick Tracy Celebrates 75th Anniversary

Posted on November 24, 2006

The Dick Tracy comic is still going strong on his 75th anniversary. Dick Tracy fans are going to the Chester Gould-Dick Tracy Museum to celebrate. Chester Gould was Dick Tracy's creator.

Reuters reports that detective Dick Tracy is still catching bad guys on his 75th anniversary. The comic strip is written today by 77-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Dick Locher.

Tracy admirers have flocked to the Chester Gould-Dick Tracy Museum in this quaint northern Illinois town this month to mark the 75th anniversary of the comic strip hero and remember his creator, Chester Gould.
Gould, who lived for about 50 years in Woodstock, launched the cartoon in October 1931 and drew the strip until 1977. He died in 1985, aged 81, but his creation lives on.
For the "funny pages," the Tracy strip was a departure from the usually upbeat fare. It offered often violent reflections of Prohibition-era lawlessness in a fictional city modeled on Chicago.
Big Boy, the strip's first villain, stood in for legendary gangster Al Capone. Later came memorable grotesques such as Flattop Jones, Pruneface -- and Mrs Pruneface -- and the Brow.
"The success of Dick Tracy is in the characters. Tracy holds up the tent, and the characters act as a three-ring circus down below," said Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Dick Locher, 77, who now draws and writes the strip for Tribune Media Services.

The museum's website has some great information about Chester Gould and Dick Tracy including some of Gould's comic inventions that later came to be used in law enforcement.