Chester Gould (November 20, 1900 – May 11, 1985) was the creator of the Dick Tracy comic strip, which he wrote and drew from 1931 to 1977. Gould was known for his colorful, often monstrous, villains. November 20 is the 324th day of the year (325th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1900 (MCM) is a common year starting on Monday. ... May 11 is the 131st day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (132nd in leap years). ... This article is about the year. ... Dick Tracy USPS stamp Dick Tracy is a popular character in American pop culture. ... This article is about the comic strip, the sequential art form as published in newspapers and on the Internet. ... 1931 (MCMXXXI) is a common year starting on Thursday. ... For the album by Ash, see 1977 (album). ... A typical cartoon villain. ...

Chester Gould was born and raised in Pawnee, Oklahoma. In 1919, his family moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma where he attended Oklahoma A & M (now Oklahoma State University) until 1921. That year, he moved to Chicago, Illinois where he transferred to Northwestern University, and graduated in 1923. In 1931, Gould was hired as a cartoonist with the Chicago Tribune and introduced the Dick Tracy cartoon. He drew the comic strip for the next for 46 years from his home in Woodstock, Illinois. His work on the strip won him the Reuben Award for 1959 and 1977. Pawnee is a city located in Pawnee County, Oklahoma. ... 1919 (MCMXIX) was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... Stillwater is a city located in Payne County, Oklahoma. ... Oklahoma State University Logo The Oklahoma State University System comprises of five educational instututes across Oklahoma. ... 1921 (MCMXXI) was a common year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar). ... Chicago, known as the Second City and the Windy City, is the third-largest city in population in the United States, following New York City and Los Angeles. ... Northwestern University is a private, coeducational, non-sectarian university, located in Evanston, Illinois and Chicago, Illinois. ... 1931 (MCMXXXI) is a common year starting on Thursday. ... The Chicago Tribune, formerly self-styled as the Worlds Greatest Newspaper, remains one of the principal daily newspapers of the midwestern United States. ... Woodstock is a city located in McHenry County, Illinois. ... The Reuben Awards, named for Rube Goldberg, are presented each year by the National Cartoonists Society to the person chosen as Cartoonist of the Year. ...

Gould's stories were rarely extensively preplanned as he preferred to improvise his stories as he drew them. While fans praised this style as creating exciting stories, it sometimes created awkward plot developments that were difficult to resolve. A notorious case was when Gould had Tracy trapped in an inescapable deathtrap in a caisson. Gould first depicted Tracy addressing Gould personally and having the cartoonist magically extract him. It was a move that his publisher, Joseph Patterson, personally vetoed and ordered a redraw of the sequence. A deathtrap is a literary and dramatic plot device in which a villain, who has captured the hero or another sympathetic character, attempts to use an elaborate and usually sadistic method of murdering him/her. ... Joseph Medill Patterson (January 6, 1879 - May 26, 1946) was an American journalist and publisher and the older brother of fellow publisher Cissy Patterson. ...

Late in the period of Gould's control of it, the Tracy strip was widely criticized as too right-wing in character, and as excessively worshipful of the police. This commentary argued that Gould was using the strip to push his own right-wing agenda such as attacking the rights of the accused at the expense of storytelling. Additionally, the late 1950s saw a changing newspaper readership that was perhaps less tolerant of Gould's grotesque style. When he introduced a crooked lawyer named "Flyface" and his relatives, all of whom were surrounded by swarming flies at all times, it created a negative reader reaction strong enough for papers to drop the strip in large numbers. There was then a dramatic change in the strip's paradigm to feature science fiction plot elements, with regular visits to the moon. This led to an increasingly fantastic procession of enemies and stories that largely abandoned the strip's format of urban crime drama; the Apollo 11 moon landing prompted Gould to abandon this phase. Finally, Dick Tracy was beset by the overall trend in newspaper comics away from strips with continuing story lines and toward those whose stories are largely resolved within one series of panels. In politics, right-wing, the political right, or simply The Right, are terms that refer to the segment of the political spectrum typically associated with any of several strains of conservatism, classical liberalism, the religious right, authoritarian nationalism; or often simply the opposite of left-wing politics. ... Headline text The rights of the accused is a class of rights in that apply to a person in the time period between when they are formally accused of a crime and when they are either convicted or acquitted. ... A lawyer is a person licensed by the state to advise clients in legal matters and represent them in courts of law and in other forms of dispute resolution. ... Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... The Apollo 11 mission was the first manned lunar landing. ...

Gould, his characters and improbable plots were satirized in the Fearless Fosdick sequences (supposedly drawn by "Lester Gooch") appearing within Al Capp's comic strip Li'l Abner; a notable villain was Bomb Face, a gangster whose head was a bomb. Fearless Fosdick was a policeman who was the hero of the Lil Abner character in Al Capps Lil Abner comic strip which appeared from 1934 to 1977. ... Al Capp (September 28, 1909 – November 5, 1979) was a Jewish American cartoonist best known for the satiric comic strip, Lil Abner. ... Lil Abner was a comic strip in United States newspapers, featuring a fictional clan of hillbillies in the town of Dogpatch. ...

External links

Commemorative Mural in Pawnee The Chester Gould - Dick Tracy Museum NCS Awards