Exit the kid's stuff. Enter Jenn Pennfield: who, with her toontown leer, could be first cousin to Betty Boop. There hasn't been much spiciness since year one, with the gratuitous Tess Trueheart bubble bath-- I'm sure Gould blushed at the Tiajuana bible going around, preoccupied as he seemed to be by rearing Dick Tracy Jr. --.but there's a hellzapoppin amount of of lingerie & boudoir stuff going on in this kid's adventure strip now. And catfights. Keep it classy, Dick!
You nasty mans.
No wonder Dick Tracy Junior ran off with Starfire and started the New Teen Titans.
"Think Clean Thoughts, Chum." Batman smirks over his shoulder at the confounded Jason Todd-- in german, tod means "death"; in morguetalk, T.O.D. is an acronym for time of death --as young Robin gawps at demigod Diana sauntering in her start-spangled bikini toward Superman's Fortress of Solitude.
Sex, that world behind the world. The Fortress of Solitude-- stolen wholesale from Doc Savage, and used, like Savage, as a weapons cage --a northern, arctic remove-- north is, traditionally, the land of the dead --only accessible through a giant lock & key. Only Superman can open that door. Alfred Jarry's Supermale, maybe?
Although I've got to say, it's rare I see Tracy bricked up for anything other than machine-gunning racketeers. Sex is that side of things you don't really see represented in Tracy's psyche. He cares about puzzles and protecting orphans and solving murders, and maybe he gets off on the death traps-- we're all grown-ups here, if it takes being tied by the neck to a burning log to get you off, hey, we don't kinkshame. So long as it's consenting! Dick Tracy doesn't seem to have one of those nonconsensual consent kinda minds. Unlike Tess.
I'm not just posting this in celebration of the o1o that tops the page: I'm posting this because it's entirely possible that THIS IS GOULD. There are a lot of Tijuana Bibles featuring Dick Tracy, but this is the only one that has all the earmarks of the style & general linework. It's the cartooning of Gould, and the lettering, and the word bubble format & placement... The storytelling, the "action", etc. I've not seen any Dick Tracy tijuana bible that could pass for the man, except for this. I'm really given to wonder.
If it wasn't him, then maybe an art assistant? Did Gould have art assistants before 1950, and Dick Lochner?
Anyway. What were we talking about?
Well, let's stop calling this entirely an essay. There's obviously some journaling in the mix. The Gould Thing that you've been listening to, for nine episodes-- or not, and no-one could blame you, least of all the poor bastard who has to inhabit this skull --is also Research into how to reverse-engineer a webcomic out of my obsessions with science fiction, and sex, and william s. burroughs, and clive barker, and michael moorcock, etc. --and the mechanics of how to machine a slow strange sprawling fucker like that out, especially now, in this era where any content goes. God help who-ever reads it, but I want to write & draw a cautionary queertopia, and I'd like to use the daily strip format to explore it. Sex should be part of the exploration, I firmly believe. But drawing sex, lighting sex, framing sex, staging sex... That's difficult business. Not for the faint of hard.
It intrigues me to speculate, today, that Chester Gould authored one of his own tijuana bibles. He's the only one who credibly could, I think. So yeah. Filing this here:
Eddie Campbell made porn, Carla Speed McNeil made porn, Alan Moore reinvented himself as a pornographer, and my husband makes the cutest smut, too.
It's only lines on paper, folks!
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