11/2/2022 0 Comments Laws the funny pagesHe’d formed a friendship with legendary comics artist Joe Staton, who, since he got his first professional job in 1971, has been so active in the business it’s easier to list the characters he hasn’t drawn, than those he has. Though an admirer of Dick Tracy, Mike’s first love is really Superman, and he owns one of the biggest collections of memorabilia devoted to the Man of Steel in the country. Later he would form his own company, Shandafa Comics. Mike Curtis, who had briefly been in law enforcement himself (he once served as a deputy in the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office), started in the business writing scripts for Harvey Comics about character like Casper the Friendly Ghost, Richie Rich, and Wendy the Good Little Witch. (When Chester Gould first conceived the strip, he called it Plainclothes Tracy). I was fortunate enough to get involved in with Tracy professionally, or at least semi-professionally, when two guys I knew through the Internet, both of them well-known comics professionals, decided to start a web page called Plainclothes as a tribute to the famed law enforcement icon. Aside from turning my into a mystery fan, and eventually a mystery writer, Tracy also clearly had an influence on my choice of day job (though, being Irish, and having a lot of law enforcement types in my family Tracy was, perhaps, not the only influence). LAWS THE FUNNY PAGES HOW TOI know one of my fondest memories is of my dad reading Dick Tracy to me years before I even knew how to read. Most mystery fans, at least in the US, will probably mention the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew when asked how they first got started, but, how many of them, even before they knew how to read, thrilled to the four-color adventures of the most famous of all fictional cops. Every time we think of how cool Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Alan Ladd, Jack Webb, or Dick Powell look in that particular ensemble, we’re admiring a look that Tracy’s creator, Chester Gould, invented, or at least connected to crime fiction, as indelibly as Sidney Paget connected the deerstalker cap and the Inverness cape in the pages of The Strand Magazine.Īnd imagine about how many people must have been introduced to crime fiction through Tracy. Comics are a visual medium, after all, and that being the case, it’s clear that our whole idea of what a hard-boiled sleuth is supposed to look like comes to us direct from Tracy. LAWS THE FUNNY PAGES TVLeave aside that, like Holmes, he’s a multi-media star, successful in movies, novels, TV and radio, stage productions, and just about any other story-telling medium you can imagine. Leave aside the obvious fact that, with the exception of Sherlock Holmes himself, Tracy’s the most famous detective in any fictional medium. It might seem odd to be discussing a comic strip character on a blog devoted to the mystery genre, until one considers that Dick Tracy’s as important a figure to crime fiction as he is to the comics medium. So, I thought it might be interesting if he shared with us a bit about his own background, as well as his relationship with the square-jawed Detective Tracy and his crime-busting comic strip. Jim, as mentioned earlier, is both a police sergeant and technical advisor, but he is also a writer of crime fiction himself. May his name be sung in the mead halls of Valhalla forevermore. It was he that submitted my name and bio to the editors, and it was on his recommendation that I was accepted. On my honor (which is now unquestionable), Jim and I have never met, and he only knew of me through my writing. Jim Doherty, the person most responsible for my induction into the Hall of Fame. Though you probably couldn’t tell, I intended my little victory dance to serve as an introduction to my new friend and colleague, Sgt. And it’s great fun to boot.īut that’s enough about me. Having spent a big part of my adulthood as both a cop and a writer, this inclusion rang all the bells and blew all the whistles for me. To say that I was blown away would be putting it mildly. Jim, as I learned, is the police technical advisor to the comic strip’s creative team. Half an hour later, I’m reading a very kind note from a police sergeant named Jim Doherty telling me of my inclusion in Dick Tracy’s Hall of Fame. It being a weekday, I was hard at work hammering out my next story when, during a brief lull in my creativity I checked all my social and communication media. When I got the news it was via a forwarded email from Janet Hutchings at Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Can you believe he also honored some dude named Wambaugh in a previous issue? What kind of name is that for a writer? Get a clue, Wambaugh. It appears that amongst Dick’s many skills and talents at detection, he has also honed an appreciation of fine crime writing-mine… amongst others it seems. There, see me? I’m the thin dude in the Hall Of Fame box.
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