Comic Artist Showcase - Chester Gould

So now that my blog is up and running, it's time to introduce one of many sections of this blog (yes, I'm so egotistical that my blog has sections - all high and mighty eh? :P): Comic Artist Showcase, where I post examples of some of my favourite comic artists, and explain the qualities and attributes that I like about them. To start it off, this post is dedicated to newspaper strip artist Chester Gould, aka the creator of Dick Tracy:

I recently bought a volume containing over 500 Dick Tracy strips, so I thought I'd focus a bit of time on the crisp, stylish art that characterises Gould.

Although Dick Tracy is one of the most beloved comic characters in the medium, there are many young un's out there who, sadly like Popeye, have no idea who the character is, seemingly lost in that void that many strip characters from the 20s and 30s are stuck in. Indeed the storytelling format that the comic uses, a daily strip where each part of the story is revealed with each strip is almost a dead art form in a world where attention spans can be measured in nanoseconds. If you have the patience, however, you'll be enthralled by the tales and escapades of super-intelligent master detective Dick Tracy, who together with his faithful sidekicks Junior and Pat fights crime, solves perplexing mysteries and does battle with a colorful rogues gallery of villains.

What I love about Gould's art is the emphasis on form over little details. All of his characters are well-defined, often using a thick and thin approach on his lines like on the pictures mentioned above and making proper use of black and white in his compositions. With a lot of other black and white comics it often feels as if there's an absence of color, whereas in Dick Tracy all the blacks and whites are carefully composed and organised, contrasting one another to create a striking image:

Although some comic fans today might belittle this sort of art for being "too cartoony", "not realistic enough" or "not enough detail", what needs to be kept in mind is that Gould was telling a whole story in parts day by day, and there were often chase and action sequences throughout each strip. Therefore, the story had to keep moving and keep the reader's attention, so this "quaint" style works better as far as storytelling goes, as having the reader stopping to admire all the "little details" would slow the story down. I've always believed that storytelling comes first in comics, animation and film, and clearly Chester Gould thought so too.

Another thing that I love is that each character in the comic has a unique appearance, almost representing the characters personality, (literally) warts and all:

It's very easy for any artist (even the good ones) to make their characters resemble each other (unintentionally) as if they're clones of one another, especially when it comes to background characters. Here, every character was interesting, unique and fascinating to look at, and clearly defined their characteristics for all to see.

Dick Tracy himself, for example is characterised by a strong build, and an infamous square chin that inspired a hundred heroes and superheroes after him, implying a strong, determined and confident man who would always win out and solve the crime at the end of the day:

This fantastically blocky chin was the inspiration for Bruce Wayne in Batman The Animated Series, which creator Bruce Timm himself admitted to:

But there is no finer example of this than Tracy's classic gallery of rogues. Instead of having your stock standard bunch of gangsters in pork pie hats and pinstripe suits, you had a colorful range of villains with with the most deformed, distorted and downright wacky facial features ever seen in a comic. As if they represented the deformities and horrors that lay within themselves:

Flattop - the Joker/Luthor/Moriarty to Dick Tracy's Batman/Superman/Holmes

The Brow

Pruneface (Duh!)

Hmmm, a rogues gallery that's physically deformed with colorful gimmicks, representing the psychopath inside. Where have I heard that before:

Anyway, this is getting a bit long, so I'll wind up by saying that Chester Gould's work on Dick Tracy has helped me considerably with my own comic strip, The Adventures of White Wolf, in telling one part of a story month by month, keeping the action and the narrative compelling enough for the reader to follow each month, as well as making sure that the art and characters are clear and defined to make sure that the story has the same qualities. As I stated before, the idea of a newspaper strip with serial-esque story-telling seems dead in the water. Fortunately, however, I've only reached the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Dick Tracy, and I look forward to his many more adventures in the fight against crime, and hopefully for my own creations too.