Dick Tracy (comic strip)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


YMMVs in the comic strip:

  • Anvilicious: Chester Gould's stories got really bad for this during The Seventies, with Tracy frequently going on lengthy speeches about how the law should operate. Mike Kilian had a tendency to do this as well (most infamously with the movie piracy story), though to a much lesser extent than Gould.
    • Dick Locher's strips completely averted this, oddly enough, though presumably as a famed political cartoonist Locher had another outlet for that sort of thing.
  • Complete Monster: Quite a few of the villains.
  • Creator's Pet: Moon Maid
  • Dork Age: Arguably from the start of the "Space Era" in the 1960s until Max Allan Collins took over as writer, and definitely Dick Locher's era as writer.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: The Blank; though he only appeared in one story, he's largely one of the more memorable villains Tracy fought.
    • Toss in Flattop; originally a one-shot character, he proved to be so popular that not only did Gould keep bringing him back, but once he killed him off, introduced his family to continue his legacy.
    • And Mumbles. Popular enough to be brought back from the dead TWICE.
  • Pragmatic Villainy: The people running the Apparatus find out about Big Boy's million dollar open contract on Dick Tracy and storm in to tell him point blank that it isn't worth it.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The Blank's real face.
    • Also the general freakish nature of most of Tracy's rogue gallery.
    • The Brow had a Cold-Blooded Torture device consisting of a small mechanical iron maiden that closed around the victim's leg. Eventually the villain gets caught in it by the head. He has no choice but to tear his bleeding head out of it before it can close on him completely.
  • So Bad It's Good: The Moon Period stories can actually be a lot of fun if you enjoy the very pulpiest of pulp science fiction. They're utterly ridiculous and out of place, but they're fun for exactly those reasons. And Gould's artwork during this period is gorgeous, arguably the best he ever did; he very clearly enjoyed getting to draw stuff so radically different from the normal restrictions of the strip's genre.
  • Took a Level In Badass: Groovy Grove, Tracy's hippie sidekick, gradually became a much more serious and heroic character once Max Allan Collins took over the writing. It didn't prevent him from being killed, mind you, but he did at least get into a relationship with Lizz in the months prior to his death.

YMMVs in the Animated Adaptation:

  • Ethnic Scrappy: Joe-Jitsu and Go-Go Gomez in one of the animated series. Think about the worst way you could animate an Asian and a Mexican while still having them be good guys. That's about it.

YMMVs in the video games:

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