Comparing, contrasting,
and contextualizing the comics’ most enduring detective.
In 1931, Chester Gould
debuted his comic strip Dick Tracy;
Gould go on to write and illustrate Tracy’s hard-hitting adventures for
forty-six years, until his retirement in 1977, and the series has continued with
new authors and teams in the decades since, making it one of America’s
longest-running comics. Tracy’s popularity can be attributed to a number of
factors, from his outrageous
adversaries to his decades-long courtship of Tess Trueheart; but I
would argue that it is the character’s strikingly hard-boiled perspective and
philosophy that particularly define his appeal. As the Library of American Comics site linked above notes, “I’m going to
shoot first and investigate later” (apparently an actual line) sums up Tracy’s
crime-fighting style quite concisely and effectively. In the era of Al Capone
(the model for Big Boy, Tracy’s
first opponent), such a perspective surely spoke to the American psyche.
For further
proof for that collective perspective, and for an important artistic context
for Gould’s creation, I’d point to the first two novels published by seminal
mystery writer Dashiell
Hammett: Red
Harvest (1929) and The
Dain Curse (1929). Hammett’s narrator and protagonist in these debut
novels (and in other later stories) is a detective so hard-boiled he doesn’t
have a name; known only as The Continental Op
(short for operative), this detective weathers (and contributes to) the titular
bloody harvests and family curses without blinking an eye, seemingly unaffected
and unchanged by even the worst of the world around him (a characteristic that
is of course even more pronounced for a multi-decade character such as Tracy).
While they had various influential ancestors (including Western lawmen and
heroes such as the title character of Owen Wister’s The Virginian), it’s fair to say
that between them Tracy and the Op really inaugurated the hard-boiled detective
as a popular American character and type.
Neither Tracy nor
the Op changed much over time; but less than a year after publishing The Dain Curse, Hammett would release
his third novel, The
Maltese Falcon (1930), and interestingly revise the hard-boiled detective
type in the process. Falcon’s
protagonist, Sam
Spade, is certainly just as hard-boiled as either the Op and Tracy; indeed,
without spoiling the novel’s climax I’ll note that Spade takes an action there
that’s perhaps a bit harder still than any taken by those men. Yet unlike the
Op, Sam doesn’t narrate his novel, and Hammett’s third-person narrator is able
to develop a more nuanced perspective on his detective as a result. The novel’s
opening paragraph and initial description of Spade, for example, concludes with
the sentence, “He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan,” a line that it’s
impossible to imagine appearing in a Dick
Tracy strip. Such details don’t necessarily make Spade any less of a hero,
ultimately, than his counterparts—but they make clear that the Dick Tracy type
was already, in its own moment of creation, being complicated as well as
popularized.
Next heroes
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on these characters? Other comics you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment