A Good Influence

After writing my comic book supervillain post, I felt the sudden urge to ramble about Dick Tracy bad guys. Instead of overwhelming this blog with evil, I graciously relented until today, when criminality got the better of me.

Dick Tracy was a phase I went through after cars, dinosaurs, and superheroes. Chester Gould created such vivid characters that I would spend endless hours acting out battles and scenarios. In fifth grade, my culminating piece of writing was modeled on Dick Tracy. No one died, but my protagonist did pop the tires of a gangster's car with bullets from a Tommy Gun. Mrs. Elder didn't approve of the violence, and my masterpiece got a V (for very good) instead of the desired E (for excellent).

Gould would have probably received a U (for unsatisfactory), because he exploited every conceivable form of death and mutilation in Dick Tracy. Flattop drowned after getting caught between the struts under a dock. Littleface's ears were amputated after a frostbitten night in a freezer. The Brow was impaled on a flagpole after placing Tess Trueheart's foot in a time-released spiked clamp. (Actually, Tracy knocked him out a window onto the pole after flinging a glass inkwell into the Brow's grotesque forehead.)

In the heyday of Dick Tracy, most of the villains were gangsters or Nazis. Pruneface (real name, Boche, an offensive name for a German in French) was a Nazi agent who tinkered with poison gas. Flattop was modelled on Depression-era gangster Pretty Boy Floyd; both harkened from the Cookson Hills of Oklahoma. Tracy's archenemy was the Big Boy, a crime boss modeled on Al Capone, who masterminded a litany of crimes and attempts on the yellow-coated detective's life. Early in the strip's history, the Big Boy bumped off Tess Trueheart's father, Tess being the girlfriend of Tracy.

The greatest facet of Dick Tracy's enemies was the vivid physical manifestation of their evil. The Mole issued orders to the underworld from his subterranean lair. Large claws, beady eyes, and a pointed snout made him a facsimile of his insectivorous namesake. Gargles ran an extortion ring, forcing his victims to buy fake mouthwash. The Evil Influence used his overpoweringly hypnotic eyes to rob and murder. For three consecutive Halloweens, I dressed up as Influence by blanching my face and adorning trenchcoat and fedora, attempting to imitate Gould's cadaverous creation. In Dick Tracy, as in comic books, the criminal is as indispensible as the crime fighter. Although comic villains never benefit from lives of crime, my imagination has stolen from them countless treasures.