"Plain Clothes Tracy" wouldn't do.
Statues must be hard. Because it's so easy to get them wrong. In June, I observed how significantly off the statues of Barack and Michelle Obama are at the new Obama Presidential Center. Not a lot. But enough, and what was extra surprising was that no one else remarked upon it, not that I heard anyway. Maybe it's considered impolite. Maybe pointless — the statue is cast in bronze and there. Not a lot anybody can do about it at this point.
Because I am such a critic of statues — I tend to speak up when I find one lacking — I should take a moment to say how much I admired this statue of Dick Tracy, which I noticed earlier this summer strolling the hopping Riverwalk in Naperville after dinner with friends. Maybe cartoons are, counterintuitively, easier to render in three dimensions. Also notable is who the artist is — Dick Locher, the cartoonist who took over drawing Dick Tracy from Chester Gould, creator of the strip. I actually spoke to Gould, once, asking him to draw the cover of a magazine I worked for. He agreed.
Now that I think of it, I have a vignette about Gould developing the strip in my recent book, "Every Goddamn Day.' This might be an apt time to share it.
Oct. 4, 1931: He was supposed to be a modern version of Sherlock Holmes. The deerstalker hat swapped for a snap brim fedora. But the same sharp nose for clues, the same determined jaw. The idea came the previous May to Chester Gould, an artist for the Chicago Daily News who draws other people's comics and illustrations of oriental rugs. All these headlines about gangsters murdering each other, only to go smirkingly free. Law-abiding citizens are fed up. Criminals ought to be caught. Somebody ought to catch them. Gould drew up some sample strips of what he called “Plain Clothes Tracy” and sent them off to the Tribune Syndicate — his 61st comic idea sent over the past decade. On Aug. 13, he received a telegram. “Your Plain Clothes Tracy has possibilities. Would like to see you when I go to Chicago next.” Two days later he was in Joseph Medill Patterson's office. “I think the name is too long,” Capt. Patterson said, promptly solving the problem himself. “John Tracy ... Fred Tracy ... Dick Tracy. Let's call this fellow 'Dick Tracy.' They call detectives 'Dicks.'” Patterson also suggested the backstory: the murder of his fiancé's father prompts Dick to join the force. That plot line runs today in the debut Sunday strip, kicking off a saga that will continue unbroken for 90 years, spawning radio spin-offs, movies, toys. The comic becomes famous for its rogues' gallery of villains whose appearance reflects their criminality: Pruneface, Flattop, Wormy. And of course that prescient two-way wrist radio. Gould will keep this first strip framed on his office wall for the rest of his life, along with the telegram delivering the good news.
I finally had to give up on reading Dick Tracy last year.
ReplyDeleteIt has become utterly incomprehensible under the current writers!
Not, I’ll say. I wonder it would make any more sense if was all in a comic book to read as a story rather than 3 frames a day.
DeleteDick Tracy made his comic book debut soon after the strip began. In 1936, he appeared as as one of the features included in the first issue of Dell's Popular Comics. These were reprints from the newspaper strip, reconfigured to fit the pages of a comic book, as was the case with most Tracy comic book appearances. The first comic book to feature Tracy exclusively was the Dick Tracy Feature Book, published in May 1937.
DeleteIn 1938, Tracy became one of several regular newspaper strips featured in Dell's regular monthly Super Comics, remaining a regular part of that publication until 1948. In 1939, Tracy was the sole feature in the very first issue of Dell's Four-Color Comics, which put out more than 1,300 issues, starring hundreds of characters, between 1939 and 1962.
Dick Tracy was revived in 1986 by Blackthorne Publishing, which began as a monthly series (also called Dick Tracy Monthly) but became a weekly one (Dick Tracy Weekly) with issue 25 and lasted 99 issues. Disney produced a series of three issues as a tie-in for their 1990 film. [Wikipedia]
The two-way wrist radio.was later superseded by the two-way wrist TV.
ReplyDeleteWe have both now, of course. But they're carried in palms, not worn on wrists.
Tracked down uninsured motorists for Allstate in the early 90s.
.My last job before leaving Chicago for good..
One of the computer operators called me Skip Tracy.
Ah, Grizz - I always enjoy your posts. This one made me laugh out loud!
DeleteNeil have you ever thought about publishing a book of your columns from over the years? (Sorry if you already have and I didn't know it). Some of these little trinkets should be immortalized forever where the public and your fans can read them all!! Love this one!
ReplyDeleteThat's very kind. But collections of columns do not sell. Or so I am told.
DeleteI don't know if this is necessairly true. Red Smith started wrting long before I was born. I have some some collections from writers I hadn'r read early in their careers. Rot yko, Roger Angell, Red Smith. I don't have a collection of Mencken but the library has one book os some his columns. Maybe it just very few of us but like reading what writers from long ago had to say.
DeleteFor those of you who might want to spend 1300 dollar you can buy all of Gourld's Dick Tracy strips. https://libraryofamericancomics.com/product-category/loac/dicktracy/
DeleteYes, Sanford, but those collections are 50 or 100 years old. We're talking about now. At least I am. And not everybody is you. A big concept for you to wrap your head around, I know.
DeleteStatues of people are the stained glass in modern cathedrals.
ReplyDeleteThey can be beautiful, they can help tell a story, but their original role and need has been replaced by newer technology. The masters of sculpture have moved on from the perfect representations and are trying to create art, instead of copies.
While I don't think we have record of the critics of Julius Cesar's bust I have no doubt those close to him would argue that it looked nothing like him; that nose, they eyes, by Diana, those eyebrows!
For most of human history, the art created of people was seen by people who never saw that person. The details could be off and still achieve exactly what was needed. If our photo archives go poof in 50 years, the people who never saw pictures of the Obamas would have no idea that they just seemed a bit off.
Since photo's can capture fidelity and accuracy no other form of art can, the statue fails. Dick Tracy was never more than a sketch, the rough lines grown bigger allow for us to get lost in his imperfections, since after all, we've never seen him in perfect detail. Let's also not forget, many people have played and drawn Tracy, he is as inconsistent as he is consistent. We know his nose, his hat, his jacket, his shadow...
When pictures replace the statue the creators of sculpture have to pivot. We get Miro, Agora, Deborah Butterfield, Dessa Kirk, Ju Ming.
Technology changes life; so must art.
I had the same reaction to the Obama’s statue at his new center as you Neil. The eyes on both of them are so not them. Love the rest of it and love them though!
ReplyDeleteThe difference between Tracy's statue and any other portraying a real person is that the sculptor had to bring it into the third dimension from its 2D origin. Makers of the old live-action movie serials, TV series and feature films had to do the same. How well that works depends on who does the work. I would suggest that it's a bit easier to sculpt a fictional character than a live person and have it come out "right" in the eyes of the viewer.
ReplyDeleteParenthetically, I really like that Tracy statue for its exaggerated emotion, just what you want in a comic character, and I notice that the sculptor even found a way to render the stripes on his tie. I also highly recommend the 1990 Warren Beatty "Dick Tracy" film, for not only giving us the comic-strip character but also immersing us in his entire world. The Oscar for Art Direction was well-deserved.
Yet the Tracy statue is immediately recognizable without any context, whereas the Obama statues are agonizingly "off," even though the whole world knows whom they are supposed to represent.
ReplyDeletetate
But we're still talking about those statues weeks after first seeing them and I'm sure months from now and even years which is better than having a spot on likeness that nobody pays any attention to anymore after the first time they see it
DeleteI agree with NS that statues are almost always off (the Lincoln Memorial, possibly being an exception). I always thought the Wrigley Field statues of memorable. Cubs were far too caricaturized.
ReplyDeleteThere is no way a sculptor working in 3D can emulate what a living being is. I look at photos of my ancestors and know they were living beings whose 2D images have no way of capturing their humor, personalities or mannerisms as they aged. To be frozen in time is not the same as being in the moment. There is no substitute for the real thing in real time. On the subject of Dick Tracy, don't exclude Ray Shlemon who was his comic illustrator for many years. The stories are one thing, the image is quite another. Same for Tracy as for Obama.
ReplyDelete