Tracing Gould - o1o

“That’s the sex that passes the censor, squeezes thru between the bureaus, because there is always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness, spurting out like breaking boils, throwing out gobs of that un-D.T.* to fall anywhere and grow into some degenerate cancerous life-form, reproducing a hideous random image.”

* [un-differentiated tissue]

 

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 Tijuana 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 star-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 cache, a cabinet of curiosities, a lair for speculation  --hidden at a northern, arctic remove--  north being in many traditions, the land of the dead  --only accessible through interlacing an immense lock & key.  Only Superman can open that door.  Or Alfred Jarry's Supermale.

And what rough beast, its keyholder shredding contract to nofap

edges towards Tijuanabible.org to be horned?

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.

 

The Jazz age indeed.

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?

 

 

Oh yeah, "action".

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!

boring is beautiful

I'm not typing here much right now because I'm working on making comix.

Also, usually anytime I type something, I'll glance at the datafeed on my menu bar and notice that we've bombed a series of cruise missile launching sites defending the strait of Hormuz or some such, and I'll feel like, Hey, kids! comix isn't exactly the energy I can bring to the internet in 2026, so why pretend?   This has never been a site poppin' with Hawt Content anyhoo.

Most of my spare mental energy that isn't dedicated to my husband, my job, or my art is dedicated to a late in life discovery of Chester Gould's cartooning prowess and the weird machine that he created.

Because Dick Tracy is an engine, my friends, that never stops running.  Dick Tracy is a perpetual comix machine, created & designed to last Gould's lifetime, and beyond.  I'm only interested in the bit Gould's hands were on, of course, but fuck, that's forty years of productivity.  Piss on Dave Sim's paltry 300 issues.  Dingus cheated with all those text pages anyhow.

It's been instructive to look at on any number of levels of craft, but foremost is its gridwork and its pacing, and how the strip adapted itself to the rigors of the publishing format it was alotted.  (Also how the strip was adapted, in its anthologized & reprinted incarnations, where the strips are cut-up and re-configured to more fully fit the dimensions of north american newsstand comix.  Which changes the rhythms of the story, seemingly, though how could it?  Spatial re-orientation of integers in a numerical chain doesn't change the value of the numerical chain if you're just linewrapping the digits, and this is all a comix reprinting of Tracy technically does; yet somehow re-orienting entire tracy arcs, as Blackthorne famously did with its weekly series, wholly changes the delivery mechanism of the strip format therefore the way it hits is just. different.)  Because webcomix have returned to my mind.  And I have a thing called 'The Hero of the Fever' that I'd liked to serialize here.  So reading Tracy is helping me think through how I'd like to approach webcomix.  Because I've been here before.  I've turfed out, too.  So Tracy is guiding me by example.  Gould didn't turf out.  Go on vacation or abandon it to his art assistants.  Gould stuck to it, and he was plotting on the balls of his feet most of the time.

So yeah.  This is what I'm thinking about, most of the time.  Staring at clouds that aren't there.  You know how I get.  It's pretty boring.  But it's boring like walking the beach and observing the quality of light beaming through fog transmuting into cloud is boring.  I do it every day and it doesn't lose its lustre.

I did a little of the beach thing already.  Stretches and yoga and studying the clouds and watching ducks nap.  Did some drawing.  So it's back to Tracy.  Volume Two of the complete dailies & sundays.  Let's see if Steve the Tramp gets what he richly deserves--  I mean motherfucker spent half the first volume earning it!  Like, Steve is the heeliest heel to've ever heeled.