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BOOK REVIEW! THE COMPLETE DICK TRACY VOLUME 23 BY CHESTER GOULD (IDW 2017)

I thought that this strip would have been petering out into late-sixties "War on Crime" jingoism and duller-than-you storylines by now...after all, that's what the "experts" have been saying had happened to DICK TRACY once Chester Gould got on his moon trip and science fiction angle. But gosh if DICK TRACY just doesn't still seem to be cooking on all hotplates just like it had been a good twenty-to-thirty years earlier. The freaky villains, the scientific gadgets, the senseless violence...it's all here and let me tell you it must have looked just as good to the standard spread out onna parlor floor kiddoid suburban slob of 1967 as it did to the same species back during those World War II days when TRACY was even more popular than you ever will b, and I should know because I in fact was that suburban slob aficionado!

There are some great scenes to behold in this vol., like the one where Mr. Bribery and his cyster Ugly Christine (who really ain't ugly and is kinda sexy with that long black hair) kill a pair of renegade scientists by shooting one in the left eye and penetrating the other right through the skull with Christine's high heel! Then of course there's the panel which reveals just how "Haf-N-Haf" got the way he did (you think that Gould would have been aware of the extremely similar "Two-Face" character in BATMAN...maybe he was getting back at Bob Kane et. al. for swiping ideas from DICK TRACY lo these many years!) showing him lying unconscious while semi-submerged in a pool of acid! Grisly yet oh-so-appropriate for a strip such as this which never did shy away from the distasteful. Even weirder is the thread where Kora Steele, the now blind old lady who knew Haf as a child, is hiding the mummified remains of her husband in his bedroom and her bloodhound, after years of faithfully guarding the bedroom door, enters with the cops and licks the wrinkled and grinning face of his former master! YECH with a capital "Y" if you ask me, but somehow I find something that makes DICK TRACY all the more hard-hitting and (dare-I-say) REAL LIFE????? I mean, you should have seen some of the things my dog used to lick!

If the concerned mothers of Ameriga types were so up in arms about the violence in children's entertainment (not realizing that their hubbies were probably just as gung ho on this form of funzies as the kidz!) I'd like to see just what they'd think of these particular happenings that could easily be found in the pages of Anypaper USA! Funny how things have changed...I mean I can't think of anything more downhome wholesome than TRACY with all its violence and gore while the same kinda moms of the past have transformed into a new variation on the old "Reform League" types, only they're out there pushing such vague ideals as "equality of outcome" and "identity politics" rather than shuddering at the thought that Batman and Robin might be engaging in the love that won't shut up anymore. But they're still the same shrieking harpies they were back when D.W. Griffith was poking fun at 'em, and they're still about as welcome around here as a knife juggler would be in a nudist colony!

Can't complain a bit about anything (even Gould's frequent and weirdo proclamations about magnetism vs. rocketry!), and the upcoming volume looks even temptier what with the addition of these two young (and married) lookalike criminals, both former employees of Diet Smith Enterprises who were hired by a now-free Mr. Bribery (he having broke outta the hoosegow) to help him get hold of the hundred thou he accidentally left stranded in orbit. After retrieving the moolah in a large mesh trap strapped to the front of a space coupe they actually drop Bribery's drunken carcass back at the prison where the guy escaped---and he goes right through the roof! (These sorta endings always make me feel happy inside!) What's surprising about this particular arc is that the married badskis look conspicuously 2018 what with their flashy hairstyles, bizarroid earrings and both sporting stylish pointy beards. And considering how close alike they look they mighta even been twins...talk about adding a a daring incest angle to an otherwise every day kiddo comic strip! Wow, who woulda thought that Gould woulda predicted the who ambi/unisexual transgender sibling love hipster movement a good fifty years back??? Yes, his "The Nation That Controls Magnetism Controls The World!" canard turned out to be a big flop but when it came to the weirdos like we have now boy could Gould call 'em!