In the dark of the bridge the sonofabitch nance rogue deputy cop Charlie Rakes takes three bullets and a knife deep in his viscera and that almost begins to make up for the carnage what he brought.
Lawless (2012) is Nick Cave channeling Dick Tracy energy & John Hillcoat catching it in the shadows that connect us to a time & place wrought from bloodfeud and bottled lightning.
Fire in the blood indeed.
"Hey, Dick Tracy, I just wanna die."
The dialogue first emits from the mouth of a child, in Wild Palms, installment 3; and concludes the chapter as a button from the hapless protagonist and father of the same kid.
"Hey, Dick Tracy, I just wanna die."
The child is running a fever when he says it. The father is having a panic attack as his life collapses into weirdness.
Bruce Wagner is The Weirdest. He's been an influence on my life longer than David Lynch, possibly, if one discounts Dune. I first encountered Wild Palms in the back of Details magazine, reading it in the hair salon my aunt Edwina (remember her?) used to attend every Saturday. I fell in love with the art immediately-- not least for its "adult" content. There was a perverse thrill to reading about sex around all these adults spending most of their time pretending sex doesn't exist. That Wild Palms had an absurdist, grotesque fascination with violence didn't hurt, either.
And then Twin Peaks happened, and Details didn't serialize Wild Palms with regularity, so I never got to finish it. I remember there being a trade paperback on the shelves in bookstores at the mall, and I'd leaf through it, scrying for the slightest suggestion of fucking-- but I didn't read it. I honestly knew more about the plot of Wild Palms from its teevee incarnation, than its origin as a comic book serial.
My teen PTSD was such that cause & effect kind of didn't exist in relation to one another. Unless directly addressed, I couldn't make certain connections on my own. I didn't recognize that the Wild Palms teevee miniseries 'Movie Event' was an adaptation. I remember being excited that Ernie Hudson was in it, because the black Ghostbuster was my favourite. I knew Jim Belushi from the movie 'Real Men'. But as a comix-cultural moment, Wild Palms didn't register. The cast was too insanely large and the plot was half-there as something a casual viewer could isolate & identify. There was something about teevee tech, Cronenbergian vibes, and there were occult themes (an occult brotherhood, abductions, enigmatic tattoos) but as to what was HAPPENING, it was all over the place.
Which is why I couldn't really trace the comix incarnation in Details, honestly. Because it ran in two-page instalments, and anyone who's ever been in a hairdresser's salon knows there aren't three consecutive months of *any* magazine in the house. But that art, that art, that art...
"Hey, Dick Tracy, I just wanna die."
"What can we expect from the 'reformed' Frank White?"
Christopher Walken smiles that nervous little needle-toothed grin, an aw gosh spasm of mirth, and the lines around his eyes are swept away by the seriousness of inspiration.
"Do you, know what I want to do to you, counselor?"
The counselor laughs, feeling glamorous as Kim Basinger cast as Vicki Vale-- there's a wallpapered poster just off Times Square covered in the Tim Burton Batlogo and she's wondering how long 'til it peels and starts to tatter and pretty soon junk ad tickertape parade for the paving over of the porno theatres --and she jousts with the freshly showered, freshly sprung mobster.
"What's that?"
"I... want to take you... on, the subway."
And he does. Because, after five years being escorted cage to cage to cage, he can. And when the hoods come they don't come in a dozen, they're kids prowling, not real criminals. Three to one eraserheaded cracker with a piece. The counselor covering her bare breast almost as an afterthought.
Her eyes on Frank. Everyone's eyes on Frank. The grip angled like a hardon. The lady or the tiger.
Frank pulls his money clip with an underhand toss and the wad spins into the skinny kid's damp palm.
"Come down to the Plaza. I got work, for you."
Frank smiles his preferred Trump hotel customer smile. Winks. The kids backing away, eyes big, feeling the luckiest they've ever been, to be able to retreat. Rich, healthy, pants freshly pissed. Feeling wild and a little outta breath, not high. Weirded out.
Thinking 'That piece was real. This money's real. Wazzat motherfucker actually real?'
There's no evidence Abel Ferrara ever gave a fuck about Dick Tracy. But his little electric blue and goldlit epic paen to Christopher Walken's face, it's a Dick Tracy kinda vibe. So this one goes here.
Cut to title card:
Behind the wheel, the weary detective in his trenchcoat races to the scene, police beacon signaling like a defective halo. Inconstant light barely touching his eyes.
The further the D.T. influence spreads, the less identifiable Tracy becomes, the more diluted. Gould's influence circuclates like the very air. Coolly alive, in the flow & pulse of water. In the spark & flicker of fire, as secret and plainly exposed as the very devil. The influence, mutable, immutable, evanescent yet beyond transmutation, inveigling everything like a plague or conspiracy of ghosts.
He arrives. The villain from nowhere.
"All the things that used to be inside me, now they're outside. So I can see all the things inside you.... But the inside of me is empty."
The curious, plodding, sleepy-looking young man with wiry hair walks seemingly in place, growing ever-larger in the mind & eyes of his captive audience. He emerges as if from the horizon itself, a swelling born from the collision of earth, sea and sky. A point against all geometric reason encompassing, absorbing, linearity. The enigmatic villain seems to only speak in questions, his somnolent, placid voice ever on the verge of collapse into ellipsis.
"The detective, or the husband? Which is the real you? Neither one is the real you. There is no 'real you'. Your wife knows that, too."
His only identifying trait, the name sewn into the lining of his coat. Mamiya.
The detective knows who the Killer is: but the detective finds it impossible to Know the man. The killer is a missionary from an occulted past. His methods are inferential, at best; insidious. Involuted. The killer may not be pursued beyond the boundaries of his crimes. Secure in the hollow he's carved inside himself, the killer looks out on the detective with contempt bordering on transcendence.
The killer within looking down on the killer without.
Triggered by the word fate, the detective fires three times.
"Remember now?"
Kiyoshi Kurosawa pivots, abrupt as the final day torn from a calender, from gangster flicks to weird serial murder tinged with hypnotic menace. It's 1998, and the filmmaker is bored by the philosophical quandaries of V-cinema with its inbuilt limitations of commerce and pop genre fiction.
"People like to think crime has meaning. But most of them don't."
Nemesis frees the detective to free the killer. The killer, freed, returns to his origins; origins he can only recognize through inference. The killer does not know who he is, only where he is: in the world, walking up and down, to and fro. Waiting to be found in the hearts of the men whose lives he touched with fingers stainless as unwritten law. Waiting for deliverance.
The gun fires five final exclamation marks. One for each finger on his healing hand.
Eight bullets, total, to kill a man beyond life. Snuffed by an abundance of fortunate death, the dying arc of the murderer's bloody finger paints a ceremony in the expectant air. Evokes something where there is nothing. Falls, use extinguished.
The detective looks around the space of the shrine, mute, his curiosity at its end.
Inner peace restored, the detective takes his dinner. Opting against his trademark trenchcoat, for a change. Retired to the dry cleaners, to exorcise Mamiya's splatter. Leaning away from his table the detective looks spiritually sated. Coffee the perfect companion to a postprandial smoke, he orders from a nearby marionette. The waitress stiff and formal as her uniform. She does not walk so much as obey an invisible mechanism, faultless, guiding her toward the cutlery.
Plate clean, appetite restored, the detective extracts a cigarette and lights it, drawing the smoke into his lungs. Ember tip flaring like a caution signal over the industrial heart of Tokyo.
Wipe to credits.
These dreams are shared. Dreams of stark primary colour and furtive perversion: dreams of weakness manifested in impotent rage: dreams stolen from little boys, given to those starvelings not yet men.
"You must be curious to know. But, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you not only not to tell anybody about your find, but also not to ask more about the case. One day when it's all sewed up, I'll let you know all the details. Right now, though, I can't."
"I understand. I'm just real curious, like you said."
"I was the same way myself when I was your age. I guess, that's what got me into this business."
"Must be great."
"It's horrible, too."
David Lynch's 'Blue Velvet' surely shares in Gouldspace. Influence is manifest everywhere, in unwise love of mystery and tears for fathers stricken; in little agonies, femme fatales & mutilated victims.
The pattern is Crime, and Lawful Wrath, and the Kid inbetween.
The man in yellow teeters, a bullet to the head. One false alarm and the reflex is murder. And where is the villain of our piece? Why, he's queer as a well-dressed man with a gasmask apparatus on his belt.
The kid crouches in the closet and remembers a dream he had, of wanting to break into a stranger's room and watch them unrobe. The kid holds his breath, wondering why there is so much trouble in this world.
The prowling, growling, gray murderer huffs, ridiculous in his fake mustache. "I shoot when I see the whites of the eyes."
It is 1986. The scene is a staged multiple homicide, and the boy who sees it believes he is a man when he is able to say, to himself, with confidence: "I'm going to let them find you on their own."
The kid is not Dick Tracy Junior. The kid is not me. The kid holds his breath, wondering.
But where are the queers, we ask?
If Tracy is, like Chicago itself, a primordial mulch out of which grows America, in all its micro- / macro-cosmic splendour and perfect fuckedness:
Where. Are. The. Queers.
There's queer-ing, certainly! Crossdressing happens with regularity in these comix. Mostly among the dishonorable classes-- qua old Bill Burroughs,* ever notice how lingo circulates from criminals to fags and straight back around, passed like a midnight joint? --so there's always some underling or would-be big figure hipping themselves up in "women's clothes", kvetching loudly about it, as if they donned the complete, inconvenient set and didn't skimp on the garters. 'Mumbles' was among the more successful at drag, somehow, to spite his homely, sleepy expression. Though what he bought with his little routine was a bag of gold that would lead to his strangled suffocation...
* "Ever notice how many expressions carry over from queers to con-men?"
There are a plethora of two-bit dastards of relatively indeterminate gender, such as Larceny Lu, who any average reader in the mid-30s must've suspected of being Other. A figure out of Jack Black's 'You Can't Win', loathsome Lu was so strong & capable she essentially re-built Steve the Tramp like a stockcar, even giving him an accidental facelift when she sews him up, after extracting seven bullets from his head & neck. Larceny Lu terrified Steve and every other man she meets, and even gives Tracy the shakes.
Why? Everyone just knew... there was something Wrong, about Lu. The foggy subtext behind her fleeing darling London town was prostitution, possibly aiding in abortion, certainly she had been a fence for stolen goods. Lu was too queer to be good, with her sagging eye and dockworker's jaw and strangler's hands.
Yeah. Maybe. But Lu saved Steve the Tramp, lousy confidence man, idiot kidnapper, and utter thug, three times running-- the first of Steve's criminal associates to NOT abandon his deadweight to the law, or leave him bleeding out from a gut wound on the side of the road.
There's something queer about that. Because we know what a heel Steve is. We've seen it. And surely Lu had, too?
There is Truth, here: criminals & queerfolk, we share the same air. We are part of the same great american underclass of dispossessed and discarded, poor, fuckers. We share an illegal taste for pleasure; we share the same essential disdain for staid, narrow-ass puritan pricks.
We think it's good fun to give a cop a thrill by blowing him a kiss. We think 'Cruising' is an all-american classic and 'The Boys In The Band' is a grim tragedy.
We think: wherefore we are.
In my early teens, 15 or thereabouts, I encountered a psychology textbook in my aunt Edwina's basement. Edwina used to teach, and she had lots of remaindered schoolbooks. The one I found defined homosexuality as criminal affliction, treatable by electroshock "therapy".** Ergo from my earliest awareness of sexuality was the knowledge that some schoolteacher, cop or judge might feel compelled to designate me a nonce-- nevermind that the textbook was from the 60s, it was still in use in the early 80s, in good old Dogwater, Alabama.
** Shades of Lou Reed. Electroshock is what drove Lou to self-loathing, self-destructive alcoholism. 'Kill Yours Sons' indeed, Lou's own mother had him committed. Which is the complement to my lesson about queerness being equated with criminality-- anyone might fink a body out for being a fag, even one's own family.
But back to Tracy: where are those queers? Vitamin Flintheart's a queer character, and not just for being a pillhead. He's a thespian, given to histrionics and bitchy rejoinders and a great admirer of feminine Talent in song & dance. And what of Pat Patton, who as near as I can tell, from all my research, is a confirmed bachelor in addition to being the butt of all the big jokes in the strip. There was the flapper & writer Jean Pennfield, who tried-and-failed, repeatedly, to turn Tracy's head from the magnetic north of Tess Trueheart's normativity. There's not much to suggest Jean having a lesbian streak, yet it's hard for me to read her obsession with upstaging Tess as anything other than queer.
But maybe that's the Tijuana bible talking.
These are not Drawn Conclusions, "properly" speaking. I've got another thirty-odd years of Tracy to wade through. This assessment is nowhere near complete. So take us away, Sam, sling us in stir, that we may rest unmolested and Think... about Dick.
Let's take it back to zero.
This fixation, the Tracy thing, started with my great-grandfather. Right?
Andrew. Andrew Edward Patty, senior. First of the Patty line to be born in the united states. I saw a picture of him on a log cabin porch, from when he was about four or five, along with a half dozen other gray fuzzy faces, all repressing the urge to pick nits or give the finger because it took near a damned hour to get a picture taken. We paddies took the first fuckin' name they gave us, coming off the boat-- we coulda been McCrackens, or Williamsons, but no, no, we opted for the three-leaf clover of fuckin' names, PADDY, Patty, an absolute cowpie in the face for self-respect, roit? Fuckin' hell.
Andrew had a high mechanical aptitude, and he was co-founder of the first major garage in Anne's Town, recently re-named Anniston, on the maps. He earned enough to buy a few modest parcels of land, and we worked them as gentleman farmers, making just enough produce & fruit to be able to say we weren't speculators. We never really did much with any of it, as my grandfather's generation would be the largest our little clan ever grew, really. Andrew and Elizabeth, his wife-- about whom not much is said, for she was a very religious and generally joyless woman; she developed stomach cancer in her forties and stopped eating; as family lore phrased it, "She turned toward the wall," and starved herself to death --A.E. & Elizabeth had two children, A.E. Junior and Edwina. Edwina would never show any interest in men, beyond taking care of her father, the widow, who retired comfortably and was, as far as anyone can recollect, a very kind, gentle, god-fearing man.
Who loved Dick Tracy comix.
And, lest this whole episode get too teary-eyed, also taught me the N-word.
We'll circle back to that, don't you fret.
So A.E. Junior meets and woos and marries Mary, and they have David Edward and Mark Edwin. David Edward meets Patricia Shea Williams, marries, and they begat my ass. Mark meets Jean, they marry, ten years later Jean realizes she's a lesbian and Mark moves back in with his parents, for a minute. And that's about as big as the family ever gets, right there. By the time I've entered the scene, the numbers start whittling back down. Paw-Paw, as Andrew comes to be known, dies in 1988 or 1989. I run away in 1994. My mother leaves, later that year. Edwina dies, like her mother, of stomach cancer & self-determination. When I come back-- theoretically to see Edwina, before she passes, but she dies as I'm on the road to return, in mid-'03 --I find there's not much left of the various family legacies. Mark's new wife has picked all the things of Edwina's she wants. I'm curious about Paw-Paw's things, but I find they're not really around anymore, Edwina having purged the house of memories in the decade following my midnight disappearance.
Because I disappeared in the middle of the night. No note.
Have I ever mentioned that?
Well. There's a lot I haven't mentioned. But let's stick to the stuff that matters. Namely, what was that shit about sweet kind jesus-loving Paw-Paw teaching his stupid great-grandson america's #1 racial slur?
Andrew and Elizabeth were gentlemen farmers, you'll recall. Lace curtain Irish, basically, though we'd not have called ourselves such. But we were. We were doing our level best to pass for American. So Andrew did what americans did, to get a leg up in the community: he became a joiner. He joined local organizations. He joined the Freemasons. He also had black housekeepers.
And, when I squint at the silver nitrate memory of child Andrew on some ancestor's knee, him being barely big enough to pick out of a family portrait, I wonder how old he was when he joined the Klan.
Because that's a big fat missing piece of this whole Tracy thing I've not been talking about, in this hailstorm of amer-arcana and dropped names, and that's the racial politics of the strip.
They're not terrible. For the era. They're not wonderful, either. Dick Tracy Junior's father has a black housekeeper, who nearly gets framed up into a murder attempt; and of course she dies and there's a deathbed speech, and it's all uncomfortable as hell because the housekeeper is a Mammy caricature. She was a kind of stereotype, but she wasn't a villainous character. The Dick Tracy strip seems to avoid that, overall-- there aren't evil black people. They're just too credulous, generally. When injustice occurs, the black characters that one encounters in the 30s and 40s are its victims. Victims of the cartooning as much as anything...
And there's all kinds of racism, of course. So it's not like we should focus on strictly the aspects which haunt me. My banshee's a pipsqueak, comparatively speaking. My great-grandfather wasn't klan by the time he had kids. From what I know, his membership was never a point of pride; it was compulsory, expected, by the time & environment. I have no idea what he did when he was with them.
I will be honest and say that I do my best not to speculate.
Paw-paw tried to ensure his children were wiser, and kinder. Perhaps we were. But perhaps we were also stupid, prideful, self-deluding potato-eaters.
I say this about myself, because my grandfather taught me the N-word casually-- and curiously.
Do you know what woolly bear caterpillars are? They were a plague on our family's pecan trees. Paw-paw had trimmed the afflicted branches and we had turned them into a pyre. As the fire spit and the raspy webs became soot, Paw-paw remarked, "Watch those _______ burn." He must have been 75, or 76, by the time he said that to me. I thought he would live to be 100.
In any event. This is the subject I zeroed in on, today. I'd meant to dig into it, weeks ago, but I needed to read a little deeper into the comic strip's run before I drew any conclusions.
There's a whole raft of racial issues we can dig into as this series runs on. The stuff with the hillbilly comedy relief should definitely be a focus. Because whitefolk, man.
We're nought if not neurotic as sin.
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..."
"Childhood. Education. Art. Sex. And death." The freckles on Sam's phizz all but glitter. "We leave anything out?"
Our scissors stopped spinning a forever ago. The house is infinitely silent: fathomless stillness in the ventilation ducts, each as wide around as the boy I was. Staring into the ducts elicited a curious sense of coded time-- time suspended in light as perfectly as motes of dust performing a tarantella, the room tone of eternity preserved pristine as pearls of air in honey. Sam won't stop staring at me.
"I'm..." It's impossible to say why I'm nervous. "I don't quite know." Standing, my right knee seems to catch. Favoring the enormous irish-pale scar center outboard of the joint with a glance.
"Yeah, I don't remember you getting that one either." Catching a glimpse of himself reflected in the catatonic eye of the floor model wooden paneled Panasonic, Sam gives a subtle start. "Cripes, Kid. What'd ya picture me as, Ringo Starr in 'Shining Time Station'? C'mon. Shoes the sizea filberts, when I got corns the sizea walnuts, already? Christ!"
"So..." Words stretching and distending in my mouth as the captive afternoon strains to synch with my present. "Sooo... Whaatt ddd
But my words stick and hang, starchy and forfeit, in the bottled moment. Sam is three times my size and height, at the side entrance door, opening it. Kinetic blue discharge escapes, sparking from the hinges, freezedried momentum rasped free. Turned toward the field of red clover, pecan boughs frozen midruffle, adult back to me, Sam clears his throat. Cigarette clicks from left to right, right to left of his profile, visible just beneath the lobes of his ears, and Sam hoists a captain's lighter: the impossible flame there bejeweled in a painterly hash of nib marks and shards of letratone. The precise photo negative of fire.
"My young friend, I dunno whatcha do with whatcha got." Sam tokes, and an ellipses of french curves wafts out through the screen door. He opens the screen door, stepping out onto the creamy faded limegreen porch, heel of his brogan hitting the concrete with an inaudible crack.
The waveform collapses. Memory imploding abrupt as a soap bubble. And what's left...
"And what's left?"
Sam's voice a beacon in the black hollow beneath our dreaming.
“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.
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!
Dick Tracy Jr. is thrown from a bridge.
Dick Tracy Jr. survives the river.
The sodden Dick Tracy Jr. races into a burning cabin to rescue his foster family. He unties Tracy & Tess Trueheart, who flee as the structure begins to collapse...
Leaving the child pinned by burning timber.
He's rescued, of course. It's touch-and-go. Tess Trueheart & Tracy senior comfort each other in the waiting room. The elder Tracy tries to storm the operating room and is escorted out, firmly:
"Now, sir, please wait here."
Swaddled in bandages except for the tip of his freckled nose, Dick Tracy Jr. calls out for his dad...
-tempus fugit- A week later, Dick Tracy Jr., in recovery, is eager to befriend his new room-mate, a mysterious youth hit-and-run while pushing a baby carriage full of war bonds...
But in the dead of night, a pair of cads steal away with a child: Dick Tracy, Jr.!
Realizing they've grabbed the wrong boy, the childnappers wallop DTJ's bandaged skull with a blackjack. Chee, Tracy!
Rising from his concussion, the kid connives to swipe an adult-sized revolver. The toughs try intimidating the kid, but a crack shot at 11, DTJ put a round clean through the grownup's pants cuff.
Dick Tracy Jr. marches them into the street, to the nearest callbox, having rescued himself for the second time in as many weeks.
I read this sequence of weeks of peril and am struck by how like Dick Grayson the "kid" really is. He smiles like Dick Grayson. His loyalty only exceeded by his optimism.
Putting 1933-1935 aside, I extract 'DCU: The Stories of Alan Moore' from my library and start browsing. The very first story in the collection is 'For the Man Who Has Everything', Superman annual #11, 1985. It's a post-crisis riff: old shared universe, new editorial mandates. New Robin, Jason Todd, accompanies Batman & Wonder Woman to the Fortress of Solitude to deliver birthday gifts to Kal-El...
Only for them all to ambushed by Mongul, a horribly-named supervillain with the design signature of a Jim Starlin creation. Moore renders all the adults in the room helpless and leaves young Jason Todd to do the rescuing. Which he does, using only a pair of gardening gloves.
The energy Moore brings to this swift characterization could as easily be Dick Tracy Junior-- young Jason Todd has no interest in "dames" and zero patience for creeps. Self-reliant, this is the street urchin who was stealing hubcaps off the Batmobile. He's in the arctic, out of his element, out of his league. He shouldn't be able to pull it off. I glimpse young Jason Todd in Pictopia, scuttling behind a painted backdrop of chainlink in silhouette, leaving the imaginary scenery swaying...
No direct correlations today, no obvious influence. Just familiarity: the familiarity of generations thrilling at their kinship, in shared dreams of heroism. Of rising from the gutters and succeeding where adults struggle. I imagine young Alan Moore, elbow deep in gore at the tannery, wondering how he'll escape the Poverty Trap, wondering who could possibly give him a leg up. Eyes on breaking coworkers savouring cigarettes with hands encrusted in scab the colour of brick, breathing smoke across rumpled stained funnypages. The coughing is thick with rheum. The barely-circulating air of the tanning house stinking of shit and mildew. It is 196_, and Alan Moore remembers being sick unto death in bed. Eyes bleary with fever, barely able to focus to read.
He wonders, not for the first time, if Northampton will kill him.
I envision young Chester Gould, fresh to Northwestern U., stunned at the scale of Chicago's streets and nervously inspecting the scrap of address in his hand: The Chicago-Tribune. Thinking about his rented room, and the novelty of indoor plumbing. A man who had never sat on a toilet before. A letter from his mother in his pocket, begging he return to Oklahoma, nervous about what 1922 will bring. Conscience inflamed with stories of jagged-minded soldiers smuggling machine guns back to the states, in pieces, along with their dreams. Johnny Torrio runs the Outfit, and the devil runs the rest. Nobody knows what the future holds.
Except, maybe, the Kid. But it's not the kid's picture. Not today.
"Chee, Tracy!"
Instantly Sam's face flips on its vertical axis, the ray of his vision switched 180°. Peering down into the ink-limned paperspace with fondness verging on disdain. The edges of the single panel hovering atop the hardwood honeyglow of the floor. "These damned p.o.v. shots give me spins so hard you'd think I was lit." Sam's face flicks back in my direction. "Kid: I know you're the Kid, here, but there's a problem Back Home. It's Dick Junior."
I know who he means. Simultaneously, I don't. There's Dick Grayson-- the Robin of my day, freshly exported to run a supergroup of JLA junior-leaguers --but Dick Tracy, Junior, the o.g. kid sidekick, doesn't exist in my time. The Dick Tracy comix I grew up with didn't feature Junior much, if ever.
"So you're gonna bail back?"
"Don't let me keep you from thinking of reasons I shouldn't!" Sam's wry smile twinkles and his freckles dance. "Pretty sure the only reason I exist is so our man Tracy can act like a proper dad. Always racing headlong into danger... it's a miracle Dick Junior exists today. I've rescued that runt's bowlcut nearly as often as I've saved his old man. 'Crimestopper' my doda Tante's fat damn fanny!"
My hand sets the slowing spin of the scissors propellering again at the edge of our sunbeam, casting glints around the room. Tracers flying across and through the dark walnut china cabinet with its mirrored interior. The figurines of Little Boy Blue and Miss Moffett on their top shelf giving one another the sideeye. The dustless, bejeweled styrofoam fruit display in the center of the dining room table mocking the reality of the empty memories all around.
"Dick Grayson really was a problem, for me." My voice suddenly strange in my throat, the words overlarge. "Like, even when he graduated to Nightwing. I always wondered how the hell anyone could not know who Batman was: palling around with a tiny acrobat in a domino mask. Batman at least had his cowl, makeup around his eyes, the advantage of shadow. That damned kid blows the cover of Bruce Wayne, instantly!" The proportions of the room swimming like a heat mirage at my ballooning volume. "There's no secret identity when the partner is an adoptee. And what kind of friend, or father figure, are we talking about here? Placing Robin in harm's way day upon day upon day. Batman's a menace! And the cops of the GCPD are only worse, letting Batman do what Batman does, with a kiddy cosplayer riding his cape-tails."
Sam shrugs. "Child endangerment laws were paperthin on the ground until, hell..." Doffs his hat and ruffles his hair, favouring his escape hatch with a skeptical glance. "Must be two years 'fore you were born. CAPTA didn't exist until 1974. And wouldn't get tightened up until after the Satanic Panic ran its course." Repositioning himself, and his topper, the panel at his feet echoing, emptily, again:
"Satan?!? Chee!!!"
With which the vacant scrap is scooped into hand and swiftly crumpled. Cocking my thumb to flick the pellet of pulp. It bounces to Sam, who lifts a foot to set it down, crimping the paperwad beneath the tip of his brogan.
"Let's stick to the present," I say, my baritone vanished. "By '88 Paw-Paw is gone and this idyll..."
"Ain't idling much longer, seems to me."
I'm in my head because of death. I'm into Gould, because of death. I'm a morbid person. I'm into grotesquery, vivid depictions of the severed nerves, the whole shebang. Not ALL death. But the Good Shit, the Artful Shit. True heads know what I mean. It's all down to the way it's delivered. Do I have to justify shit? A lot of people are into horror movies because they're taboo, or weird, or stupid, or funny, or "gross"; a lot of people are into horror shit because they're perverts. Then there's that percentage that find it cathartic. You know, the ones who identified with Laura Palmer. Hi. My mom collected horror comics, married a violent mad scientist, and moved into the deep woods with him to raise a child. Nothing happened.
Just some near misses. Run-ins. Bad accidents. Stitches. Broken bits. Nights I wake up screaming. I mean, hey, it's not unique. These things happen to literally everyone.
"Literally."
I don't use that word casually.
So that's the other thing we haven't been talking about, when talking about Gould: the amount of just full-on, fuck you, death. And how literary he was with it. The punishments were swift, abrupt, sometimes cavalier, but rarely comedic. Death is a solemn moment. Sometimes a richly deserved finale got strung out a while-- Flat-Top slipped Tracy The Reaper once, but rare's the hood to ditch 'im twice. Sometimes death was as abrupt as a bullet's passage thru a forehead; sometimes the round had to pass through a forearm or head to get there; but happy was the villain to simply bite a bullet with Tracy on his heels, because Death dogs Tracy. If a ne'er-do-well gets away from his guns they're just as liable to be beheaded or slowly impaled by falling shards of glass or drown in the fog with a bag of money around their neck, as they are to escape to crime, crime again.
And I mean look.
Look! Gould makes death look good. It's awful stuff. Absolutely horrid. Gould lays death out with all the tact & decorum of a coroner. He doesn't gild the lily about dying. Gould makes the moral of his criminal capers clear: dying is the least fun a body can have.
I'm just putting these thoughts down here, on this subject, at this moment, because that's how I'm treating the Gould fixation generally. As a lens through which to view the preoccupations of the day.
Sometimes the obsessions are sonic. Sometimes they're contextual. Frequently it's whatever I'm reading. And other times...
Sometimes I hear an ex from 30 years ago passed away. My second boyfriend. First sweetheart I had after running away. I loved him. We read a lot of comix together. Sunshine had ALL the Sienkiewicz New Mutants... And I was a bitch to to him. And I don't know why we broke up. But we did.
That's all I'm fucking writing today. Selah.
Traveling, bouncing faster than can be perceived, echoing ahead of itself and backward again, the reflections finding purchase in the present.
The essayist sets his dogeared paperback aside. The bookmark at the halfway point. Page 127, the witness under cross-examination discusses printing leaflets with a mimeograph. "We had a duplicating machine and produced a little news-sheet for distribution to members." A spirit duplicator...
1968: Per Wahloo publishes 'The Steel Spring', chronicling an unnamed nation in the grips of a self-inflicted crisis, made possible by prohibition. "Inspector Jensen gave a shake of his head. He had always thought the plainclothes patrol slipshod & imprecise in its actions." Was Dick Tracy being syndicated abroad, in Scandanavia, in 1968? During the space period, was Dick Tracy translated into Swedish? Why not. The 1940s strips were being translated into Hungarian in the 90s...
Any influence is possible. Passible. Communicable. If Dick Tracy (1933) contains Batman (1939), and Batman contains James Bond (1953), then Dick Tracy (o.g. G-man) contains James Bond (oo7). Everything flowing from wartime, crosstime, informing points in a constellation which may only be read from without. Every influence equal to pastiche.
Now. Cut to then.
"But Kid," says Sam, frame slipping free from the Sunday page, freckles scintillating around his wry smile. He pulls himself bodily from the two-dee space by the narrow black bar of ink, hauling up and out, into memory's atmosphere, thin as the moon, and stands there hands on knees, panting, cartoon cig clinging to the corner of his winded grin: "You can't just draw any old constellation, if ya can't project what the myth is meant to encompass. The story has to map true."
"True," The child echoes. Setting his scissors aside. Studying the fifty year old face he finds reflected in them. "The story has to encompass the imaginary shape; the myth isn't cut to fit the story."
The essayist in his fourth-dimensional window winks, a glint off steel shears. "Sure. But what do you imagine the shape to be? Forty years of dailies. Forty years of work. What kind of silhouette does that provide? Is it flat? Flat, hell: is it even opaque? Can it shade, block, obfuscate? Or is it only an outline, a profile, a précis?" Eyeballing the diminutive Sam as he cocks his derby back with a derisive sniff.
"What's the topography of our myth," says Sam, giving the tip of the scissors a light kick, setting them spinning. "Izzat what you're asking? An implausible ask for an impossible question."
The scissors spin, spin, spin on their axis. Images old and new flashing. Forgotten to the child, immemorial to his quinquagenarian self. Olden anew.
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.
Three of the four corners of the strip clipped at clean right angles, I rotated the sunday supplement and spread the scissors anew. Paused. Listening. Sam's wry eyes a little uncertain.
"Kid, I'm not one to gild lilies. Further you clip into this thing, the woolier reasoning is liable to get."
From deep in the metal throat and lungs of the house, faint chuckles, repeating. Heat register flaps chiming, gently resonant. The subliminal music of the family hearth. Imp giggles. Then: "Neki Hokey!"
"What?"
Elbows on the freed bottom frame of the panel in my hand, Sam sighed a cartoon balloon of smoke. Hanging his head, rubbing his neck. "Just what we needed. Comic relief."
"Neki Hokey!" Shrill with glee. Bouncing through the ventilation.
"What is that, Sam?"
"Fertheluvvamike...." Heaving a sigh like a sack of dry cement. "I thought we left those brats in the 50s!"
The haytangle haired twins tumble, a human wheel free down the sundappled hall adjacent to the kitchen, the pirate map tattooed across their soles flashing. "Neki Hokey!" The cackling tumblers reel across the checkered kitchen floor and through the breakfast nook, their wheel breaking on the threshold. The pair spill against the faux-edwardian walnut chairs and come to a bruised stop.
Massaging reddened shoulders, the comic relief critically eyeballing the leafy, dark, nubbled motifs of paw-paw's prize furniture. "Ugly!" "Dang!" "Smarts!" "Neki Hokey!"
"What the hell are they saying?"
In a snit of agitation Sam lunges, groping impotently from his pane for the blunt outer rim of the scissors. "Just finish, wouldja!?" The cigarette in his mouth switching corners with an audible click, sounding like nothing less than an automated turn signal in a 60s model Ford.
Hesitant scissor hand dropping. "Do I recognize these kids?"
"You shouldn't. But don't let me stop you..."
Mystery moving over the face of the waters of the subconscious.
There is no Gould. Then there Is, glimpsed, in moments, influence, inspiration, in non-submersible units, in all those artists I love. I'll never be quite sure where I glimpsed him first.
It's occurred to me that since Gould passed through so many artistic Modes throughout the course of his Great Undertaking-- there is no other way to think of forty-six years of self-enforced productivity, than as a Great Work --Gould embodies multiple artistic movements. I do not know the scope of his art before the period beginning with Plainclothes Tracy, so it is possible that he encompasses more than the (conservative) three-to-four I believe Tracy exhibits, overall.
So too, then, with the artists he has influenced: they contain multitudes. Gould is perhaps most cleanly glimpsed in Gilbert Hernandez, Beto having boiled to reduction, re-invigorated, and sublimated further still, Dick Tracy back-to-front. Charles Burns' psychosexually anxious heart is shaped like Dick Tracy's own strangely beaten face. Art Spiegleman exemplifies, even as he is my least favourite of The Influenced. But where else might Gould have gotten into the groundwater?
Because in all that you can see I'm talking about Style. And alchemy: infusing one's style with new shapes, methods & ideas. Who else really shines on that technical, formalistic, compositional, workaday "live-IN-the-trenches, motherfucker" level?
Keith Giffen. I mean everyone sees Kirby and Starlin and Buscema and Jose Munoz and Ted McKeever and Simon Bisley and Kevin McGuire in Giffen. Absolutely. But they don't see the In The Trenches Motherfucker who rocked at one job after another, forever refining his thing. They don't see the iterations of Gould mastering ditto machine and Giffen mastering xerox machine in parallel. They don't see these artists learning, through brute repetition, the music in the dancing motes of stillness as they stamp their way across the sequence of pages.
There is no Gould there, you may say, then there is. There is Gould (the gimmick, the sales technique, the brand. witness the example of Capp's Fearless Fosdick, the meta-joke, when Fearless Fosdick usurped Li'l Abner in popularity & brand recognition-- Al Capp losing himself in competition with Gould, losing his satire in self-parody), then there is Gould (the enthusiastic autodidact alone with his pens, paper, and Spirit Duplicator (as the ditto machine was also known) repeating his gags and polishing his schtick).
Then there was Chester Gould, the illustrator and ad hack who pitched sixty-five failed gag strips over ten years at the Chicago Tribune before landing Plainclothes Tracy:
"I'll change the name."
"That's all to the good. I want two weeks of pages. Your deadline's Monday. I want 'em Sunday. And lose the straw hat, fer chrissakes, he looks like a fag."
That's the true substrate of all these ruminations on Identity & Style: Deadlines, and Pages. No time to really plan. Big plots only trip you up when the editor's got other ideas. Pass the hat, take requests. Stay fluid. Fuck style, use a ruler. Hack it out. Keep it current. Work the crowd.
Dance, dance, dance like the face of the waters of the subconscious.
I don't know that Giffen actually dug on Dick Tracy. But we're talking about a guy who drew a double-page spread of every player in the Legion of Super-Heroes like it was a Sgt. Pepper's album cover and he worked fuckin' Garfield in there. Everything was in Giffen, ergo everything that had been in Gould would be in Giffen, too. That's kind of how this art & influence stuff occurs.
Gould, in the Great Darkness before I knew him?
Because I really latched onto Keith Giffen, before Los Bros Hernandez or Charles Burns or Jose Munoz-- because Aleck Sinner grew from a grafted cutting of Tracy, no mistake --before any of the Hep Names I'd check for myself. I'd scan the Sunday funnies when I was at paw-paw's, impatient to catch a ride with my aunt when she went to Get Her Hair Done so I could sneak off to someplace that Sold Comics. Didn't matter if it was Big B's stuffed-to-choking with unsold comix spinny rack or K-Mart's magazine aisle or some dusty hobby shoppe. My mission was always comix.
Maybe Gould was in Giffen. Maybe he wasn't. I'll never catch up with where-all Gould's influence was felt. That's not what this is about.
What is strange to me is the near-religious Recognition I feel, now, examining this comic strip, and seeing its influence refracted throughout my pre-existing enthusiasms.
Where Gould was not, Gould always was.
"Kid, you gonna use those scissors? Or just find your reflection in 'em?"
Sam Catchem casts his sardonic eye my way and says "Kid," around his perpetual cigarette.
Retinas gliding across the surface of his whites with ice-skate, stop-motion celerity. Suppressing a shiver of the uncanny I force my focus in, down, onto the rustling newspulp. Sam's rheumy gaze locked outwith the frame beneath me, making contact, he raises a hand to cock his plum-coloured trilby back.
"Kid," he says, "you're on the level." The cigarette clicks from one side of his freckled mew to the other, almost audibly, as he turns, looking up. "But what level?"
The waxen glow of the hardwood beneath me is gold as sunlight. Redounding off the cut glass corners of the candy dish on the mirrored tabletop, misting butterscotches wrapped in their crisp whispering cello with particulate rays. It's always afternoon in the front living room, by paw-paw's recliner. I'm on my stomach on the floor, elbowpropped, and Dick Tracy's back at war with Big Boy.
"You remember that?" raps Sam. "I mean, actually remember."
"I believe so," I answer, pulling legs beneath me, "Like, I think I recall Paw-Paw telling me Big Boy was a Tracy villain from when he was a kid."
"Interesting," not sounding interested at all. Testing the border of the panel he's speaking from, little exploratory taps with nicotine-stained knuckles. "Think you can help me outta this rig?" His cynical kewpie eyes sliding to the scissors beside my hand.
"I believe so," I answer, admiring the sheer glint of forever afternoon all around me. The reflections off wood and glass and steel all caught and sponged up by the Sunday supplement. The loops of the heavy scissors immense as trigger guards to my adolescent knuckles. "I believe so."
In my psyche there is a direct association between my great-grandfather & Dick Tracy. He used to collect them. His daughter, my aunt, found them appalling & violent & disgusting, so as soon as he died she threw them away.
I did not know this detail until after my aunt's death.
Throughout my childhood, I spent Saturdays "up the drive" at my great-grandfather's house, the hearth of the Patty Family. That place is very imprinted on my subconscious. In my dreams I revisit it, though with significantly less frequency at this distance of decades. My great-grandfather died in 1988, I believe. He found the intensity with which I pored over the Sunday funnies, which they collected for me, amusing, and I know he watched me really grapple with the 80s incarnation of Dick Tracy.
I was fascinated by the faces. Sam Catchem was particularly striking, to my child's eye. But I didn't really know what I was ever looking at, what the stories were, who these characters were. I had inherited the Max Collins / Kurt Lochner era of the thing, the attempted "modernization" of D.T., and it was completely impenetrable to me. I understood Peanuts, and Garfield, and Calvin and Hobbes. Dick Tracy was just thing full of talking about "cases" and "criminals" and I was just a kid who stared at teevee passively trying to understand what the fuck a Brady Bunch was and why it looked exactly like the Partridge family, and why did adult stuff seem so fucking stuck in the past?
But this was the 80s in Dogwater. It was a bubble. I didn't know who Chester Gould was. I didn't see the effect he'd had on the culture I came to love because I didn't read the creators of my favourite comix lauding Gould, y'know? I'm sure los Bros were talking about Dick Tracy but I didn't read those interviews. I just didn't hear people talk about the effects, the influence. I was a Bat-Fan like anyone who got secondhand toys and books and grew up with Adam West. I didn't know how rooted in D.T. Batman was-- because DC made an editorial POINT of not talking about Gould, or the debt owed. Crime fic writ large owes to the popularity of D.T., and the determination of Gould to bluff & hack his way through producing a daily strip for forty-six years.
I feel like I've spent my entire life tracking influence & interpreting the greater historical context of all this mishegas, catching up with the past, in an attempt to understand & accept the present that we've all been borne into. Surely cooking my brain in the process. Ah, the joys of being a human, walking to & fro, up & down this wired-ass world.
The point is, there's no one good reason I've discovered the Need to learn more about Gould and his work. It's what I'm supposed to do. It's an alternative to the deadspace that daily comix have become, in my attentions. I grew up reading dailies. In a way comix are an integral part of how I learned to read. And probably why I was so credulous and literal-minded in my adolescence. Not to diss on dailies. But the stuff kids dig on? Oof. I'm not revisiting fucking Garfield, even ironically.
But then Sam Catchem casts his sardonic eye my way and says "Kid," around his perpetual cigarette...
