Chester Gould

Chester Gould
Born	November 20, 1900(1900-11-20) Pawnee, Oklahoma
Died	May 11, 1985 (aged 84) Woodstock, Illinois
Nationality	American
Occupation	Cartoonist,
Spouse(s)	Edna M. Gauger
Children	Jean Ellen O'Connell

Chester Gould (November 20, 1900 – May 11, 1985)^[1][2] was a U.S. cartoonist and the creator of the Dick Tracy comic strip, which he wrote and drew from 1931 to 1977. Gould was known for his use of colorful and monstrous villains.

Blowing into the Windy City

Chester Gould was born and raised in Pawnee, Oklahoma. In 1919, his family moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma where he attended Oklahoma A & M (now Oklahoma State University) and was a member of the Lambda Chi Alpha Fraternity until 1921. That year, he moved to Chicago where he transferred to Northwestern University. He graduated from Northwestern in 1923. Fascinated by the comics since childhood, Gould quickly found work as a cartoonist. He was hired by William Randolph Hearst's Chicago Evening American newspaper, where he produced his first comic strips, "Fillum Fables" (1924) and "The Radio Catts". He also drew a topical strip about Chicago, "Why It's a Windy City." Gould married Edna Gauger in 1926, and their daughter, Jean, was born in 1927.

Dick Tracy

In 1931, Gould was hired as a cartoonist with the Chicago Tribune and introduced Dick Tracy. He drew the comic strip for the next 46 years from his home in Woodstock, Illinois. Gould's stories were rarely extensively pre-planned since he preferred to improvise stories as he drew them. While fans praised this approach as producing exciting stories, it sometimes created awkward plot developments that were difficult to resolve. In one notorious case, Gould had Tracy in an inescapable deathtrap with a caisson. When Gould depicted Tracy addressing Gould personally and having the cartoonist magically extract him, publisher Joseph Patterson vetoed the sequence and ordered it redrawn.

Gould visited the workshop of an engineer friend named Al Gross who invented the walkie-talkie, a portable two-way radio and the pager. Gross was working on a wrist-watch version of the two-way radio which he showed to Gould. Gould asked Al Gross if he could use this concept in Dick Tracy. Gross said yes, and in January 1946, Dick Tracy started wearing the wrist radio.^[3] Gould created a cartoon character named Brilliant, an engineer who worked for a company run by cartoon character Diet Smith. Brilliant was modeled after Al Gross. Whenever Gould needed a futuristic invention that his cartoon characters could use, Al Gross would give him ideas, such as the video security camera, handheld video camera and wrist video camera.

Late in the period of Gould's control of it, the Tracy strip was widely criticized as too right-wing in character, and as excessively supportive of the police. This commentary argued that Gould was using the strip to push his own political agenda such as attacking the rights of the accused at the expense of storytelling. Additionally, the late 1950s saw a changing newspaper readership that was perhaps less tolerant of Gould's grotesque style. Whereas in the 1940s when Gould introduced an odoriferous, chewing tobacco spitting character, B.O. Plenty, with little significant complaint from readers; the later introduction of the crooked lawyer named "Flyface" and his relatives, all of whom were surrounded by swarming flies at all times, created a negative reader reaction strong enough for papers to drop the strip in large numbers. There was then a dramatic change in the strip's paradigm to feature science fiction plot elements, with regular visits to the moon. This led to an increasingly fantastic procession of enemies and stories that largely abandoned the strip's format of urban crime drama. The Apollo 11 moon landing prompted Gould to abandon this phase. Finally, Dick Tracy was beset by the overall trend in newspaper comics away from strips with continuing story lines and toward those whose stories are largely resolved within one series of panels.

Gould, his characters and improbable plots were satirized in the Fearless Fosdick sequences (supposedly drawn by "Lester Gooch") appearing within Al Capp's comic strip Li'l Abner; a notable villain was Bomb Face, a gangster whose head was a bomb.

Awards

Chester Gould won the Reuben Award for the strip in 1959 and 1977. The Mystery Writers of America honored Gould and his work with a Special Edgar Award in 1980. In 1995, the strip was one of 20 included in the Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative postage stamps and postcards.^[4]

Gould retired December 25, 1977 and died May 11, 1985 in Woodstock, Illinois^[2] of congestive heart failure. His life and creations are memorialized in Woodstock's Chester Gould-Dick Tracy Museum. Gould is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Woodstock.

Books

In 1983, two years before Gould's death, his only child, Jean Gould O'Connell, recorded extensive interviews with her father, who spoke at length about his early attempts during the 1920s to get syndicated and the birth of Dick Tracy. These interviews became a major source when she wrote his biography, Chester Gould: A Daughter's Biography of the Creator of Dick Tracy, published by McFarland in 2007. A resident of Geneva, Illinois, Jean Gould O’Connell contributed to the Dick Tracy storylines, appeared as a character in the strip and helped create the Chester Gould-Dick Tracy Museum. Her book was an Edgar Award nominee in 2008.

The entire run of Dick Tracy is being reprinted in a book series by IDW Publishing.

References

External links

• Commemorative Mural in Pawnee
• The Chester Gould - Dick Tracy Museum
• NCS Awards
• Article "'Dick Tracy' Turns 75"
• Article "75 years of Continuous Crime-Stopping"
• IMDb page on Chester Gould