Tracing Gould - oo1

In my psyche there is a direct association between my great-grandfather & Dick Tracy.  He used to collect them.  His daughter, my aunt, found them appalling & violent & disgusting, so as soon as he died she threw them away.

I did not know this detail until after my aunt's death.

Throughout my childhood, I spent Saturdays "up the drive" at my great-grandfather's house, the hearth of the Patty Family.  That place is very imprinted on my subconscious.  In my dreams I revisit it, though with significantly less frequency at this distance of decades.  My great-grandfather died in 1988, I believe.  He found the intensity with which I pored over the Sunday funnies, which they collected for me, amusing, and I know he watched me really grapple with the 80s incarnation of Dick Tracy.

I was fascinated by the faces.  Sam Catchem was particularly striking, to my child's eye.  But I didn't really know what I was ever looking at, what the stories were, who these characters were.  I had inherited the Max Collins / Kurt Lochner era of the thing, the attempted "modernization" of D.T., and it was completely impenetrable to me.  I understood Peanuts, and Garfield, and Calvin and Hobbes.  Dick Tracy was just thing full of talking about "cases" and "criminals" and I was just a kid who stared at teevee passively trying to understand what the fuck a Brady Bunch was and why it looked exactly like the Partridge family, and why did adult stuff seem so fucking stuck in the past?

But this was the 80s in Dogwater.  It was a bubble.  I didn't know who Chester Gould was.  I didn't see the effect he'd had on the culture I came to love because I didn't read the creators of my favourite comix lauding Gould, y'know?  I'm sure los Bros were talking about Dick Tracy but I didn't read those interviews.  I just didn't hear people talk about the effects, the influence.  I was a Bat-Fan like anyone who got secondhand toys and books and grew up with Adam West.  I didn't know how rooted in D.T. Batman was--  because DC made an editorial POINT of not talking about Gould, or the debt owed.  Crime fic writ large owes to the popularity of D.T., and the determination of Gould to bluff & hack his way through producing a daily strip for forty-six years.

I feel like I've spent my entire life tracking influence & interpreting the greater historical context of all this mishegas, catching up with the past, in an attempt to understand & accept the present that we've all been borne into.  Surely cooking my brain in the process.  Ah, the joys of being a human, walking to & fro, up & down this wired-ass world.

The point is, there's no one good reason I've discovered the Need to learn more about Gould and his work.  It's what I'm supposed to do.  It's an alternative to the deadspace that daily comix have become, in my attentions.  I grew up reading dailies.  In a way comix are an integral part of how I learned to read.  And probably why I was so credulous and literal-minded in my adolescence.  Not to diss on dailies.  But the stuff kids dig on?  Oof.  I'm not revisiting fucking Garfield, even ironically.

But then Sam Catchem casts his sardonic eye my way and says "Kid," around his perpetual cigarette...