Review: Dick Tracy: The Collins Casefiles Volumes 1, 2, and 3

Dick Tracy really is the man. I don't mean was the man, I mean he is the man. I realize that might not be a name that many of you have heard in a long time, some of you have never heard his name at all.

Dick Tracy is a famous crimefighter who was a superhero before there were superheroes. Created by Chester Gould in 1931, this era of the nation's history saw a rise of real organized crime such as Capone and other mobsters. Gould's famed title character really won the heart of Depression era audiences, as Tracy would take on mobsters whose evil seemed to always be matched by their ugliness. Villains such as Pruneface, Flattop, Mumbles were members of the Tracy rouges gallery, and Tracy's devotion to the law always took them down.

Chester Gould died in 1985, but he relinquished the strip to Max Allan Collins. Collins is one of greatest graphic novel writers, and wrote The Road to Perdition, which was later adapted into a movie starring Tom Hanks and Jude Law.

Checker Book Publishing has recently compiled Max's work with the yellow hat detective in Dick Tracy: The Collins Casefiles Volumes 1-3. They are a collection of daily strips that appeared in the late seventies, early eighties. For some reason, the color Sundays don't seem to appear. I have to admit that some of Tracy's cases seem laughable. After all, Tracy's villains are really more allegorical figure types than they are people with motivations.

One of the most laughable is Z.Z. Rowe, otherwise known as "The Computer Killer". Apparently, Mr. Rowe's computer records kept getting screwed up with another Z. Rowe, so he took it out on the computers at certain businesses in a hare-brained attempt at revenge.