The reflections are something else.
There's the obvious: Dick Tracy & his orphan partner in crimestopping, Dick Tracy Jr: 1933. Bruce Wayne & Dick Grayson I940. Easy parallels. Deathtraps. Shared (stolen) villains. The fetish for grotesquery. The influence shines clear. But change the angle of the shears in your hand.
There's a weirder, narrower resemblance: Dick Tracy & Joe Dredd. Lawmen who've survived countless deadend hells. Witnessed the devil's worst, climbed over corpses wracked with torment, had the soles of his feet flayed, been starved, blinded, shot in the head and abandoned down cravasses in desert wastes. Dick & Joe, refusing promotion in favour of staying On The Prowl, On The Streets, forever in syndication, applying the law to scum.
These likenesses neither begin nor end at the chins. There's an unholy implacability to this characters, a momentum of moral force, that marks them, now. It was never there in the beginning. But fifty years on, the characters carry themselves differently. They are marked by their villains. They have shaped themselves against their stone & steel & forgotten future metropoli and become celebrated, for better or for worse, as reflecting Us.
Dick Tracy contains Chicago, as Wayne contains Gotham, as Dredd contains Meg-1. Each its own ironic tweak on the times they inhabited. Tracy, emerging from the flames of prohibition into the electric light of the future police state-- his creator a kid raised without indoor plumbing. Of the three the most ironic is probably Batman, a mob-busting vigilante owned & printed by a mob front publishing outfit-- here's looking at you, DC --with Bob Kane's vainglorious signature stenciled on pages he never saw let alone touched: I'd say Gotham is New York and New Jersey in the bargain. And then there's Joe's sweet Mega-City One, America's Sprawling, fungally-nubbed coastline, as imagined from the Firth of Tay...
The scissors close. Reflections fall away.
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