Written and Drawn by Chester Gould
Color by Summer Hamilton
Published in September of 1990 by Gladstone Publishing.
Dick Tracy vs Mrs. Pruneface storyline was originally serialized in the Chicago Tribune July 16, 1943 through September 30, 1943.
. . .
“He must not choke to death.-Not now.”
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
You ever read the comic strips? Like they publish in the papers?
Do they still do those?
Do they still print comic strips in the papers?
Do they still publish newspapers?
I confess that even though I’ve always read comic books I never liked comic strips. Especially when I was a kid. Nowadays, I get the appeal. There are hardback book length collections of strips printed on high quality paper which gather entire story arcs into one place. You can read the storylines in sequence. You can appreciate the craft and ingenuity of artists working on deadline and within the strict limits of a few panels on the page. Peanuts. Doonesbury. Flash Gordon. Calvin and Hobbes. The Boondocks. Prince Valiant.
Dick Tracy is the one I’m talking about right now. It was created in 1931 by Chester Gould. Gould drew it from 1931 until 1977.
Think about that.
1931 to 1977.
Think about doing one job for 46 years.
I’m thinking about it . . . and, well, I can’t really get my head around it.
So, I’ll move on.
Now, strictly speaking, I’m not talking here about the Dick Tracy strip as its own thing. I’m talking about a 64 page comic book titled The Original Dick Tracy #1 published in September of 1990 which reprints one of the storylines which originally ran in the Chicago Tribune in four panel increments from July of 1943 through the end of September of that same year. The storyline is titled Dick Tracy vs Mrs. Pruneface. So, this comic book reprint is not starting from the first strip published in 1931 but is jumping ahead to 1943 for whatever reason. In an earlier strip, supercop Dick Tracy-who tends to be tough on crooks-killed a villain called Pruneface. Mrs. Pruneface is his vengeful widow. She’s determined to murder Tracy in a most gruesome fashion. Storm and stress ensue.
I dug The Original Dick Tracy #1 out of a completely non-organized longbox at a comic book store that seemed to be making more money off of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh than comics. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a dollar book. It was three bucks plus applicable sales tax. I clenched up. I worried that this was going to be twenty-some pages plus ads-a ripoff, in other words. I gave in to temptation. I paid the money. I liberated the comic from its bag and board prison, which went directly into the trash. I opened the book itself and read 64 pages of pictures’n’words with not a single advertisement to interrupt the flow which constituted a story with a beginning, middle, and end. I was not ripped off.
The story is mostly told from Mrs. Pruneface’s perspective. She’s a huge, strong woman with a ghoul’s face. She stalks, kidnaps, and tortures Dick Tracy. She leaves him pinned down by an innovative, if somewhat unlikely, deathtrap. She takes on a new identity as a French chef. Soon, she’s employed at a fancy hotel. In a fit of anger over having her belongings tampered with she bashes a man’s head in with a lamp. Her life is one of disguises and barely suppressed homicidal rage. This is not the Disney Version. This is a creepy trip into a psychopath’s inner hellscape. The cops aren’t even the ones who save the day. Mrs. Pruneface’s timebomb psychology collides with some civilians forced to defend themselves, and her ultimate end is kinda pathetic, really. Supercop Dick Tracy is basically a victimized onlooker in his own strip. When you lay the four panel increments end-to-end across 64 pages the whole thing has a relentless momentum to it. I was not ripped off.
So, I bought a comic book.
But it wasn’t really a comic book.
It was, in actuality, a run of comic strips extracted from the more than a decade old soap opera of Dick Tracy reprinted and recolored to fit into a comic book format as a complete story that you can read and enjoy.
And it was better than most actual new single issues of comics titles I’ve read in recent years which tend to be incremental hustles of never-to-be-resolved pseudostories that are, themselves, subaltern to ancillary movie, streaming, and videogame derivatives.
What a world.
