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 these 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. We're the cutouts. We're paper dolls, dressing ourselves to match...
I'm trying my city on for size. D.T. 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 ruins of the white city, through the flames of prohibition into the electric light of our present/future police state-- his own creator a kid raised without indoor plumbing. Of the three the most winking invention is probably Batman, that mob-busting vigilante-cum-rich kid, whose multi-billion dollar likeness was owned & printed by a mob front publishing outfit, looking to launder money-- here's looking at you, Johnny DC --with Bob Kane's vainglorious signature stenciled atop art he never saw let alone touched: I'd say Gotham is New York and Manhattan Island and New Jersey in the bargain. And then there's Joe's sweet Mega-City One, America's terminal Sprawl, a nubbled & mushrooming coastline, as imagined from the Firth of Tay...
The scissors close. Reflections fall away.
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