Happy Birthday Chester Gould
If you ask a random person on the street, odds are they’ve heard of Batman and Superman—they’re pop-culture gods. But nearly a decade before those icons were even a thought, we had characters like The Phantom, The Shadow, and maybe the most famous comic-strip hero of them all: Dick Tracy.
The yellow-trench-coat-wearing, smartwatch-before-smartwatches, crime-fighting Dick Tracy burst onto the scene with one of the coolest rogues galleries ever assembled. A lineup that stands proudly beside the likes of Batman and Spider-Man: Prune Face, Flattop Jones, the Summer Sisters, Mumbles, Mole, and the list goes on and on.
Dick Tracy caught the world by storm when he first appeared in the Chicago Tribune in 1931, quickly becoming a nationally syndicated strip. His creator—and writer/artist for an incredible 46 years—was Chester Gould, a name that sounds like it was destined for the comics page. You cannot see Dick Tracy’s name without seeing Gould’s, and unlike Bob Kane with Batman, this credit was fully earned.
Gould was a small-town kid from Pawnee, Oklahoma, born in 1900, before Oklahoma was even a state. By age eight he was already drawing, encouraged by his father to sketch the politicians meeting at the Pawnee Courthouse during the Democratic County Convention. His father taped those drawings in the newspaper office window for all to see. Gould was thrilled when a Supreme Court lawyer bought one of his sketches.
By sixteen, he was painting advertising signs on barns and lettering names on office doors. In 1922 he landed a job at the Chicago Tribune's Art Services Department, drawing advertising art for the paper.
By 1931, Gould had sent sixty different comic-strip ideas to editor J.M. Patterson—without success. Still working at the Daily News, he mailed in his sixty-first idea. A month later, he received a telegram:
“Believe ‘Plainclothes Tracy’ has possibilities… Please call the Tribune office Monday about noon for an appointment.”
When they met on August 15, Patterson thought the name was too long. “They call cops ‘dicks.’ Let’s call him Dick Tracy.” As with all Tribune-owned strips, Patterson suggested how it should begin:
“Have Tracy call on his girl and have dinner with her family. They want to get married. That night hoodlums break in, stick up her father, and kill him. You take it from there.”
At that moment Tracy wasn’t even a detective—he was a white-collar worker. That simple outline became the beginning of Dick Tracy.
In just four years, Tracy landed his first radio show. By 1937 he starred in his first movie serial, and by 1945 his first feature film. Gould, who wrote and drew the strip until 1977, always wanted the stories to feel authentic. He hired former police officers, spent time in precincts, and did deep research to bring realism to the strip.
Gould passed away in 1985 from heart disease, but Tracy lives on—a lasting legacy Gould would be proud of.
Everyone knows Batman and Superman, but they should know one of the men who helped start the entire crime-fighting wave: the yellow-trench-coat hero Dick Tracy, and his creator.
Happy 125th Birthday to Chester Gould!
