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Show f. 4 The Salt Lake Tribune, Sunday, October --W- ITH 4, 1981 max COLUnS MA MY MORS TO COAIgf Over the past 50 years Dick Tracy has matched wits with some minds of the best criminal from the comic strips. j Tracy will continue to fight crime for many years to come. No. 1 Crimestoppers Going Strong After 50 Years in Comic Strip By Harry F. Rosenthal Associated Press Writer Dick WASHINGTON Tracy, who matched violence with violence as he mopped up the likes of B.B. Eyes, Flattop, Mumbles and the Brow, observes 50 years on newspaper comic pages still black of Sunday hair, steely of eye and square of jaw. (The comic strip is carried daily and Sunday in The Salt Lake Tribune.) The strip was the first to depart from the funnies approach, delighting in showing death in graphic detail: bullets passing through heads, a pool of blood, a body trapped under ice. Dick Tracys brought complaints back in 1931 and in 1981. Last May, the Harrisburg, Pa., Pat immorality s dropped Dick Tracy and another strip saying, These strips are not marginal, violence is the sole reason for their existence, terrorism is grist for their mill. Robbery Witness Tracy first appeared on Sunday, Oct. 4, 1931, in the old Detroit Mirror as a witness to a robbery who is called to view a police lineup. He notices a woman in a cell, has a hunch and throws a punch, and from the masculine way she ducks unmasks a male crook in womens clothing. riot-New- Eight days later he proposes to Tess Trueheart, watches helplessly as Big Boys thugs kidnap Tess and gun down her father during a holdup. Then this colloquy between the police chief and Tracy : Howd you like to join the plain clothes squad? Youve taken the words right out of my mouth. Thus the superdetective was created, to sally forth in print, in Saturday matinee movie serials and on the radio as the tough dick who could gun down a gangster and deliver this sermon to his tender audience: Paid the Price Johnny Mintworth paid the price for living a loose, careless life. He made his first mistake when he kept company with a girl who was a once killed 42 people while trying to arrest a balloon vendor. Tracy was bom in the days of depression, prohibition and gangsters, the brainchild of Chester Gould. In The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy, published last year by Chelsea House, Gould is quoted as saying, I decided that if the police couldnt catch the gangsters, Id create a fellow who would. There followed a Dick Tracy was even parodied in another comic strip, Lil Abner, as Fearless Fosdick, a detective so inept that he K f, once. retired in 1977 and the strip is now done by writer Max Collins Gould who was born 17 years name was Frank Redrum (murder spelled after the first strip and artist' Rick Fletcher, who had worked with Gould for 16 years. Gould also created en- scalded to death in a shower; the Mole, a miser who lived underground; B.B. Eyes, a World War II bootlegger; Flattop, a killer for hire; Gravel Gertie, the crone with the silken gray hair; B.O. Plenty, whose name needs no explaining; the tough street urchin he took on as Junior Tracy; Diet Smith, the tycoon; memorable set of bad The Blank, a guys: faceless man whose backwards); Jerome perfume thief. He Trohs, a midget who is thought she was cute. Pruneface, Angeltop and Torcher. Villains Stand Gut Their hames often spelled their worst traits backwards and nearly always matched their appearance. I wanted to stand out definitely so that there would be no mistake who the villain was, Gould said dearing characters: !iV 1 Associated Press Laserphoto Chester Gould displays some of his Dick Tracy comic strip originals in his studio. Dick Tracy introduced scientific marvels years ahead of their time, the most famous of them the two-wa- y wrist radio; later a two-wa- y wrist TV. Tracy and Tess had no whirlwind courtship. They married on Christmas Day in 1949. Daugh- ter Bonnie Braids was bom two years later and son Joseph Flintheart Vitamin Smith, the John Barrymore-lik- e actor who always was popping pills the nice kind. Tracy years after that. Nice Old Man 24 The half century doesnt seem to have aged Tess either. In the current episode, one involving a guy with narcolepsy named Dozer, a curvaceous Tess com- ments that the Mole turned out to be a nice old man. Dont let this get out, says Dick with unaccustomed charm. 1 always did kind of like the Mole. In his left hand is the original drawing strip published in 1931, of the popular Monkeys Return to Lab Seventeen allegedly ROCKVILLE, Md. (UPI) mistreated research monkeys were returned Saturday to the suburban Washington, D.C., laboratory that police took them from in a raid three weeks ago. Montgomery County Circuit Judge David L. Cahoon late Friday ordered the monkeys temporary return to the institute for behavioral research in Silver Springs on condition they be monitored by a veterinarian and a county police officer. The monkeys, used in experiments on the central nervous system, were seized Sept. 11 by county police on a tip from a student volunteer that the animals were being mistreated. court-appoint- |