When I was a kid Dick Tracy was the lead comic in the Chicago Tribune, the Tribune was the voice of conservative Republican politics. And the Tracy comic reflected the law and order viewpoint of the Tribune which endorsed Dick Nixon and Barry Goldwater. The editorial content of the paper permeated everything including the comics . Dick Tracy always got his man and his very silhouette struck fear in the criminals he pursued in serial fashion. On Sundays Tracy was the featured comic the first one at the top of the comics section in those lurid colors freshly printed the night before and nothing came close to the intensity of the crime stories that were told in those pages. Chester Gould the cartoonist was an avid conservative , a hunter and a friend to all reactionaries everywhere. Tracy started years before I came upon it, Chicago was quite a crime story itself everybody seemed to be involved in some illegal activity. The headlines in the tabloid Chicago Sun-Times were intense always murders especially gangland type slayings or whatever lurid photos would attract the most readers. Everyday the Sun-Times would give you the impression that horrible crimes were taking place all around you (not unlike The Daily-News tabloid in New York City). My Dad ate these stories up everyday it gave you a very curious and anxious perception of your home town. And Dick Tracy was the graphic version of those headlines, it was also this sense of crime being the big issue the big story. And the police could barely keep up with the mayhem. Tracy of course was always one step ahead of the crooks but it could take him weeks and weeks to catch Pruneface or the Mole or any of the vermin he was after, Tracy was very deductive in process like Sherlock Holmes but in a modern post war America. I would copy his angular face with a pencil or trace a whole comic to experience the style, a style that changed very slowly over many years. Later when I used the image I always tried to make it my version of Tracy especially the color. The politics I put to one side, the law and order thing the horse that Nixon rode in on was always on my mind. Being a straight arrow was always something on your mind , Chicago was so full of cops! Indeed in the 1960's it seemed you couldn't do anything without the sense that cops were around the corner. In Dick Tracy the detectives were the smart cops and the regular uniformed cops were never the story they were more decorative. Tracy figured stuff out not the policemen. They worked for Tracy he was the main dude, he was the story. And he was a straight arrow even his nose was straight and his hat was always cocked on his head at a rakish angle so you knew it was him a signature yellow fedora. For me working with his image always makes me remember growing up in Chicago. I knew the artist worked in a studio in the Tribune Tower on Michigan Ave, on the Chicago River. Indeed as a youngster my idea of a real artist was Chester Gould. The sort of artist who make paintings seemed from another century. Who wants to paint flowers when you can tell stories about criminals like Flat Top and The Brow? I was lucky enough to be born into the golden age of comics and my sense of what was contemporary art was these Sunday Comic Sections of which 4 Chicago newspapers each ran sections on week ends. And it was most likely why I went into the arts why I drew pictures why I found such pleasure in color and characature. Later my fascination with the detective story I think led me in a philosophical direction intellectually. Because life is a bit like a mystery story and the artist has different ways to investigate the narratives. Indeed I came to feel that the artist was a detective of sorts, the curiosity of the artist about the world in all it's layed complexities makes itself more clear in the hands of a visual artist. A picture can tell you a lot, my studies of art history were my study of history minus all the language. Reading Raymond Chandler or seeing films based on his detective novels made Philip Marlowe his detective one of my favorite philosophers. Marlowe's view was the baseline for a sort of view of the world as I found it. Detection for the artist is like a form of insight, looking at pictures and making some sense of them, what they mean and how they were made. Tracy was so cool so brave yet so a creature of his era. Knowing about one's origins is a useful means to know from whence came one's mature works. Art is increasingly more perplexing but somethings remain the same, the desire to know why and who .The idea that the past is alive when you investigate it as a world that begat our own world.
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