<Archive Obituaries> Chester Gould (May 11th 1985)
Bill Schenley
Chester Gould, Cartoonist, Dies At 84
Photo:
http://www.library.northwestern.edu/archives/exhibits/alumni/gould2.jpg
FROM: The New York Times (May 12th 1985) ~
By Albin Krebbs
Chester Gould, who created Dick Tracy, the durable comic-strip
detective who began fighting outlandishly colorful criminals in 1931,
died of congestive heart failure yesterday at his home in Woodstock,
Ill. He was 84 years old and had been in ill health after having
suffered a heart attack recently.
In creating Dick Tracy, Mr. Gould shattered the American comic-strip
tradition.
He invented a hero who was not intended to be humorous. Tracy dealt
grimly with murderers and racketeers - he was not the standard ''funny
papers'' hero who was obsessed with the pleasures of eating spinach or
hamburgers. In short, Mr. Gould's ''Dick Tracy'' was the first uncomic
comic strip.
Thousands of devotees of the square-jawed Tracy did, of course, find
humor, most of it perhaps unintentional, in the strip. But the strip
also drew protests from some that Mr. Gould's depiction of crime was
too gruesome, that he poured on too much gore and carnage, and that
his
villains, such as Flyface, Pruneface and the Mole, were not only
exaggerated in concept, but also loathsome to look at.
Far-Famed Sleuth
That the strip was one of the most popular ever to appear in
newspapers
is indisputable. In the late 1940's, the dapper Dick Tracy was found
to
be the second-best-known American - just behind Bing Crosby and ahead
of President Truman - in a poll of teen-agers.
At one point, in the late 1950's, the Tracy strip was carried in
nearly
1,000 newspapers worldwide, and was said to have been read by an
estimated 65 million people a day.
Al Capp, a fellow cartoonist who created the popular ''Li'l Abner''
comic strip, paid Mr. Gould a high compliment by regularly inserting
into ''Li'l Abner'' a takeoff of Dick Tracy called ''Fearless
Fosdick.'' It was a comic strip-within-the-strip that featured a
granite-jawed detective with a manic fondness for perforating both
criminal suspects and innocent bystanders with multiple bullet holes.
Mr. Gould continued to draw and write ''Dick Tracy'' until his
retirement in 1977, when the strip was 46 years old. It has lived on
as
the work of two other artists, and in 1983 Paramount Pictures
announced
it would produce a movie based on the exploits of the dauntless
detective in the black suit and the snap-brim fedora.
Of the Tracy strip's impact on his readers, Mr. Gould once commented,
''I just want them to say, 'I wonder what that damned fool Gould did
today.' ''
Specialist in Mayhem
Some of the things he did were quite attention-getting, particularly
when he decided to kill off one of his villains. The demise of the
fiendish hag Mrs. Pruneface was comparatively mild -she drowned in a
swimming pool in 1943. Flattop, whose head was modeled after a World
War II aircraft carrier, also drowned, wedged in underwater pilings.
But to do in a particularly repulsive criminal called the Brow, Mr.
Gould contrived to have him impaled on a flagpole. And the villainous
Doc Hump was killed by a mad dog.
Then there was the Midget, whose wife carried him around in a satchel.
He was scalded to death in a Turkish bath. And the nefarious B. B.
Eyes
met a most timely demise by being smothered under the cargo of a
garbage scow.
Such violence brought complaints from readers and from the editors of
some newspapers that carried the strip. They said Mr. Gould depicted
violence too often, allowed his hero to shoot first and ask questions
later in his pursuit of law and order, and splashed blood a bit too
indiscriminately. To such criticism, the cartoonist replied:
''So long as the violence doesn't go too far, and I have never let it
do that, it's valid. Blood in itself is not repulsive. Police work is
the most bloody and miserable on earth. Any policeman on night duty
sees far more blood than I ever put in my strip. Of course, brutality
for its own sake is taboo.''
Early Work
Chester Gould was born Nov. 20, 1900, in Pawnee, Okla., and was reared
in Stillwater, Okla., where his father was the editor of a weekly
newspaper.
At age 15 he took a $20 correspondence course in drawing, and while a
student at Oklahoma A. & M. University contributed cartoons to The
Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City. In 1921 he transferred to
Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., having decided, he said,
that ''I wanted to get rich, and the way to do that was to draw
cartoons that The Chicago Tribune would syndicate.''
While finishing college, Mr. Gould had a series of small jobs drawing
for newspapers and commercial art studios. In 1924 he was hired by the
Hearst Corporation to draw ''Fillum Fables,'' a syndicated comic strip
for King Features, a division of Hearst, that burlesqued the movies.
That strip, along with another he created later called ''Radio Cats,''
were ''strictly stinkeroo,'' Mr. Gould said.
All the while, he kept trying to get the attention of Joseph Medill
Patterson, a co-editor of The Chicago Tribune and founder of The Daily
News in New York. Mr. Gould bombarded his office with ideas for comic
strips.
In 1929 Mr. Gould went so far as to quit his job and follow Mr.
Patterson to New York, where the artist submitted five comic strips to
him. All were turned down, and Mr. Gould returned to Chicago and a job
with The Chicago Daily News as a staff artist.
'Serious' Dick Tracy
The genesis for the Tracy strip lay in Mr. Gould's preoccupation with,
and hatred of, gangsters such as Al Capone. ''Why doesn't someone just
meet the louse and shoot him?'' Mr. Gould said. He decided that other
Americans shared his loathing for the underworld and would appreciate
a
comic strip devoted to fighting crime.
In the past, detective comic strips had featured wacky, boobish heroes
like Hawkshaw the Detective and Hairbreadth Harry, who blundered into
cases and wound up being lashed to railroad tracks by mustachioed
villains.
Mr. Gould decided to create a ''serious, lifelike cop who used the
latest police methods to solve his cases.'' He also decided that
although violence and bloodshed were not the ordinary ingredients of
comic strips at the time, he would make his strip realistic by
injecting those elements into it.
The Chicago Daily News rejected the idea for ''Plainclothes Tracy,''
as
Mr. Gould then called the strip, so he submitted samples of it to Mr.
Patterson, who bought the idea. ''But he didn't like the Plainclothes
Tracy name,'' Mr. Gould said, ''and he told me: 'People call
detectives
dicks. Dick Tracy -that sounds all right.' ''
Romance and Technology
Mr. Patterson, much admired by cartoonists of the day because of his
apparently keen instinct for what the funnies-reading public would
like, also dictated to Mr. Gould the story line that would get Dick
Tracy onto the police force:
The hero is an ordinary young man, in love with Tess Trueheart,
daughter of a grocer. In the first murder in comic-strip history, Mr.
Trueheart is killed by thieves, and Tracy, vowing vengeance, goes to
the police to offer his help in capturing the criminals. In the course
of bringing them to justice, he is hired as a detective.
The Tracy strip made its debut on Oct. 4, 1931, in the now-defunct
Detroit Daily Mirror, a Tribune paper, and a week later in The Daily
News in New York, which still carries it. It is syndicated by the
Tribune Company Syndicate.
In the first episodes, Tracy and Tess embarked on what became one of
the world's longest engagements, for it was not until 18 years later
that Mr. Gould decided to marry them off. They had a son called
Junior.
In order to keep abreast of police methodology, Mr. Gould took courses
in ballistics, fingerprinting, forensics and investigative procedures.
He was proud of the fact that he had introduced in the Tracy strip, in
1946, the two-way wrist radio his hero wore, and, in 1947, the
closed-circuit television lineup, both of which now actually exist,
albeit in forms somewhat different from Mr. Gould's creations.
The Villains
Most of Mr. Gould's villains had a life of about three months in the
comic strip because, he said, ''I figure that if I get tired of them,
the reader is tired of them, too.''
Mr. Gould made all his villains -such as the maniac piano player 88
Keys, the hideously wrinkled Pruneface, the insect-surrounded Flyface
and the vermin-visaged Mole - look so repulsive because, he said,
''that way, the reader knew at first glance that they were the bad
guys.''
He also created some lovable villains, such as the seedy, bewhiskered
and odoriferous farmer, B. O. Plenty, and the banjo-playing Gravel
Gertie. Those two proved so popular with readers that Mr. Gould turned
them into model citizens, had them marry and gave them a beautiful
daughter, Sparkle Plenty, who was born with shoulder-length golden
hair, no doubt a miracle that could be achieved only in the funny
papers.
The Tracy strip generated millions of dollars in merchandising
tie-ins.
There were Tess Trueheart and Sparkle Plenty dolls, toy Dick Tracy
two-way wrist radios, Tracy belts and clothes and snap-brim hats, and
even Gravel Gertie banjos.
Work Was Exhibited
Mr. Gould maintained that he was ''no great shakes at cartooning'' and
said he had made his drawings of Tracy and his enemies as simple as
possible. (He used labeled arrows to point out items such as ''two-way
wrist radio'' and ''poison pills.'') The artist did, however, take
pride in his plotting and dialogue, even though much of it necessarily
ran along the lines of ''Drop that gun!'' and ''Take that, you dirty
crook!''
In 1982, five years after Mr. Gould's retirement, an exhibition called
''Dick Tracy by Chester Gould'' opened at the Graham Gallery in New
York. John Russell, art critic of The New York Times, wrote:
''Looking at the originals of the Dick Tracy cartoons, we realize that
this was the 'Dallas' of its day - the long-running serial with which
people loved to identify. Dick Tracy added excitement and continuity
and a weird coherence to the lives of hundreds of thousands of
people."
''And Chester Gould gave value for money. Rare is the novelist who
could not learn something from the concision, the pace and the
unfailing momentum of his dialogue. As for the image, we soon see that
the emphasis - which was heavy - fell just where its weight was
needed.
He was a workman of a very high order in a craft that is much harder
than it looks. The images survive surprisingly well as exhibition
material, and as tokens of a time when issues were clear-cut, when law
was law, order was order and the best man won out in the end.''
Mr. Gould, who had lived in Woodstock since 1936, is survived by his
wife, the former Edna Gauger, whom he married in 1926; a sister, Helen
Gould Upshaw, of Plano, Tex.; a daughter, Jean Gould O'Connell, of
Geneva, Ill., and two grandchildren.
Funeral services are to be held Tuesday in Woodstock. Arrangements
were
incomplete yesterday.
---
Photo: http://cartoon.org/gould.gif
---
Cartoonist Chester Gould, 'Dick Tracy' Creator, Dies
FROM: The Los Angeles Times (May 12th 1985) ~
By Jerry Belcher, Staff Writer
Chester Gould, who created the comic strip "Dick Tracy " and a horde
of
unlikely villains to plague the heroic, square-jawed detective, died
of
apparent heart failure Saturday at his home in Woodstock, Ill.
Gould was 84. Tracy's age was never revealed, although he appeared to
be in his late 20s or early 30s from the moment of his creation 53
years ago.
Tracy O'Connell, Gould's grandson, said the artist had been in ill
health for several months. "I think he was just getting old and things
were wearing out," O'Connell said.
At the peak of his popularity, Dick Tracy was far and away the most
widely followed adventure strip in the world, appearing in 550
newspapers here and abroad. Radio, Saturday afternoon serials,
full-length movie and television versions of his adventures also were
produced with varying degrees of success.
"Chester Gould was a legend," said Mark Evanier, a collector and
historian of comic strips and comic books. "Dick Tracy was the
greatest
detective strip ever, a strip with the most fantastic collection of
characters." Evanier, a Los Angeles writer of comic books and
screenplays, is a contributing editor to "The Encyclopedia of Comic
Art."
Evanier said Dick Tracy was one of the first strips to break away from
"the funnies" concept -- it was a morality tale of good versus evil,
with good always winning out in the end, most frequently through
graphic if unrealistic violence.
The path of a bullet fired from Tracy's trusty automatic was always
drawn from barrel to target, usually the villain's head, where it
always made a neat round hole. Often, however, villains died in the
most grotesque ways -- one was scalded to death in a Turkish bath,
another was impaled on a flagpole. Tracy himself was often shot,
bludgeoned and otherwise ruinously abused, but always survived.
Gould turned over the writing and drawing of the strip to others in
1977. The strip is now drawn by Dick Locher.
Gould once attributed the success of the serial "60% to story, 40% to
drawing."
The strong-lined drawings were impressionistic rather than realistic,
the stories slam-bang and simple, if not simplistic. Tracy himself was
rarely seen except in profile -- hawk-nosed, steely-eyed and wearing a
neat snap-brim fedora. There was no mistaking him for anyone but the
hard-boiled hero.
And there also was no mistaking the villains as anything but Bad Guys:
Flyface was a crooked lawyer so rotten that his head was always
surrounded by flies; the Mole was a sinister criminal who not only
resembled the animal but hoarded his ill-gotten gains in underground
burrows; Pruneface was as wrinkled and ugly in the flesh as in soul.
But some of Gould's villains were peculiarly likable.
Flattop, a dull-witted and murderous thug whose head was as flat as an
aircraft carrier's deck, was perhaps the greatest (and the most
stupid)
of Gould's innumerable oddly named villains.
When Flattop met his freakish end by drowning, mock funerals were held
in many places, and fans across the country sent flowers and cards of
condolence.
Most of Tracy's associates and friends -- his young protege Junior,
Police Chief Pat Patton and his sweetheart Tess Trueheart -- were less
interesting than the Bad Guys. Even Tracy didn't find Tess too
interesting. Dick and Tess were engaged in the strip's very first
episode, but the detective was so preoccupied with crime-busting
(which
often required rescuing his fiancee from hideous hoods) that he didn't
get around to marrying her for 18 years. But B. O. Plenty, a secondary
character who first appeared in 1946 as a bewhiskered, malodorous rube
who squirted a stream of tobacco juice in every other panel, became
such a favorite that Gould was forced to use him, sometimes most
improbably, in story after story.
Eventually B. O. (for Body Odor) met and married an equally aromatic
and ugly eccentric named Gravel Gertie, and fans sent bottles of
deodorant as wedding gifts. After a time Gould caused them to have a
child, the paradoxically sweet-smelling and beautiful Sparkle Plenty.
When she was born, Gould was deluged with baby clothes and toys.
Spin-off products from the strip (Dick Tracy automatic cap pistols
were
a sure-fire sales item) had been big almost from the beginning, but
Sparkle Plenty Dolls were the biggest, with sales of about $3 million
in the first year.
Gould, through a mysterious and inventive character named Diet Smith,
anticipated by several years a number of technological breakthroughs
that actually came into use in police work, among them the two-way
wrist radio and closed-circuit television.
A native of Pawnee, Okla., Gould set his sights on fame and fortune as
a cartoonist when still in knee-pants. He entered a cartoon contest
when he was 12 and won $5. He studied cartooning by correspondence
course, went to Oklahoma A&M and later to Northwestern University
night
classes in commerce and marketing. At the same time he was working at
his art and stories, submitting them constantly to Capt. Joseph Medill
Patterson, then co-publisher of the Chicago Tribune.
After graduating from Northwestern in 1923, Gould worked for several
Chicago newspapers, later syndicating comic strips called "Fillum
Fables" and "Radio Catts," both "funnies" which met with no particular
success.
In 1931 -- inspired by outrage at gangsterism in Chicago -- Gould came
up with a new strip about a fearless mob-fighting policeman called
"Plainclothes Tracy." Capt. Patterson liked the idea, but not the
name.
The publisher suggested the first name of Dick, then the slang term
for
detectives. Gould, as was customary among aspiring young newspaper
cartoonists of the era, enthusiastically accepted the suggestion. The
first Dick Tracy strip was published in the Patterson-owned Detroit
Mirror on Oct. 4, 1931, appeared in Patterson's New York Daily News
eight days later and shortly thereafter went national with the
Tribune-News Syndicate.
Gould is survived by his wife, Edna, a daughter and several
grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are pending.
---
Photos:
(Dick Tracy) http://www.marel.pro.br/chester.jpg
(Dick Tracy strip)
http://www.askart.com/photos/her1262002/6336.jpg
(Two-way radio) http://www.worldsendimages.com/DickTracy.jpg
(Sparkle Plenty) http://stlcomics.com/gallery/sparkleplenty215.jpg
(Villians) http://www.kenpiercebooks.com/dt-move.gif
(Dick Tracy comic books)
http://www.vintagepbks.com/images/publisher/dell/dick_tracy.jpg
http://stlcomics.com/gallery/dicktracy4.jpg
(Dick Tracy book) http://www.broward.org/library/images/036.jpg
(Dick Tracy at the movies)
http://radio-canada.ca/television/cinema/img_films/Dick_Tracy.jpg
(Dick Tracy postage stamp) http://www.trussel.com/detfic/tracy.jpg
(Al Capps' Fearless Fosdick)
http://www.deniskitchen.com/docs/bios/bio.fosdick.jpg