I’ve been saying this for a couple of volumes now, but if you’ve never read Dick Tracy before and are looking for a sample of Chester Gould’s best work on the strip, this is the volume to read! Gould really hit his stride throughout the entire decade of the 1940s, and volume nine reprints stories from 1944-1945. Volume eight ended with Flattop taken into custody, but that wasn’t the end of the story. Next is the prison break in which he goes on the lam with Vitamin Flintheart an unwilling hostage. Yes, it would have been nice to have the entire Flattop sequence in a single volume, but given its length, that wasn’t likely to happen.
The previous volume ends at a good break point, however, and there’s no faulting the parade of villains and other characters included in volume nine. After Flattop is defeated for good and all, in quick succession follows The Brow, Shaky, Snowflake Falls, Breathless Mahoney, Measles and ends with the beginning of the Itchy Oliver story. Also introduced in this volume are Gravel Gertie and B.O. Plenty, both of whom started out on the wrong side of the law but later reformed, met, married, and became the parents of Sparkle Plenty.
This volume really brings back memories! Not of my childhood in the ‘40s, obviously, but of my childhood in the ‘70s when I first read the Flattop stories in a DC treasury edition for the whopping price of a buck! I had the Shaky story in paperback, and the Brow story was collected in a hardcover, but with dailies only, so I didn’t get to read of his gruesome end until years later. Over the years I managed to collect reprints of all the stories presented in this volume, but it sure is nice being able to read them in a single edition between two hard covers!
The only thing that would make these collections any better is if they were to reprint the Sundays in color!
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The Shaky story was interesting since it went on long after Shaky died, introducing several characters trying to get his money.