Tracing Gould - o12

The chronological reading pauses.  Two volumes, four years, and all the pieces of Essential Tracy are laid like tile.  The portrait, as a whole, is a curious work:  Tracy himself now bears little resemblance to his pre-cop, gentleman incarnation.  Success has marked him, made him changeless.

The strips I'm reading now skip around.  The art mutates, decade to decade, in increments, in technical adjustments.  Upscale syndication equals downscale production.  Chester Gould learns to work smaller, simpler.  Learns to work with help, accepting Dick Lochner as a partner.

The war is over.  The war never stops.  The enemy concedes.  The enemy adopts fresh disguise.  From bootlegger to racketeer to car thief to art thief to commie spy to terrorist infiltrator.  Tracy duking all comers.  Tracy is less the star, contrasted with his cohorts, the villains.

The villains cannot stop, any more than America can, with its endless enthusiasms and failed fads.  One week it's the Summer Sisters, the next it's the cruel and terrifying Brow; each saga seguing into its successor through a chain of co-stars and joke characters.  Gravel Gertie, a bizarre compulsive doodle worthy of Basil Wolverton, emerges from the dust-up of the Brow's final, fatal hours.  Vitamin Flintheart, gentleman addict and uncanny ham, pants and pops a diet pill and dons his cook's apron.  B.O. Plenty hawks a spit of tobaccy over the fourth wall straight into the audience's face.  Here comes the neighborhood.

Tess Trueheart returns from WWII, herself reborn into success, a graduate of the WAC.  Tracy's life partner and long-suffering admirer becomes an architect.  Designs the house they will come to inhabit, in the 60s--  the house itself, in my reality, drafted by Gould's own daughter.

Dick Tracy Junior adjusts to being a teenager, finding himself fresh place in a temporal medium where Little Orphan Annie is never allowed to grow up.  Falls in first love, finds the emotion as beautiful, blinding and bittersweet as the funeral service where it will be entombed.

And Pat Patton, half-bright sidekick and jokeman, accepts his place in things as Dick Tracy refuses a promotion, becoming chief of police.  The future is coming on fast, and nothing but nothing can keep progress at bay-- not even the law.  Booze is legal.  G-men have replaced gangsters as folk heroes, and John Dillinger will not be remembered for much other than the reverence with which his mourners dipped their handkerchiefs in his cooling blood.

"Snappy summary, kid."  Flatly displaced, Sam's voice does not vibrate, cannot reverberate, shall not echo anywhere except in the mind of an aged / aging / ageless Southern runaway, still too young to hear the music, much less the muse.  "But whatcha forgot was--  whatcha forgot!  Ya can't formulate 'One' if you don't start with Naught.  C'mon.  Let's zero in..."