Fire, Ice and Horrific Deaths

Last week, we looked at the first act of Dick Tracy vs. Shaky, which ran Tracy's daily newspaper strip over the winter of 1944/45.  That first act was action-packed, with the events that took a number of weeks to show us probably only covering a single day. It ends with model Snowflake Falls escaping from Shaky after jamming the crooks hand in a door frame. Shaky, though, has escaped along with his last two henchmen.

Artist/writer Chester Gould was really good at pacing and knew that his readers would need a breather after several weeks of chases and shootouts. So the story proceeds at a more casual pace for its second act, while Gould sets up the next phase in the story's plot. This also allowed him to bring back one of his most successful and endearing comic relief characters--the ham actor Vitamin Flintheart.

In the volume of The Complete Dick Tracy that reprints this story arc, Max Allan Collins has some insightful remarks about Vitamin, who was originally a direct parody of real-life actor John Barrymore:

Vitamin is a particularly well-realized comic character, with universal appeal and resonance... [He] grew in both appeal and warmth, and came to represent all "ham" actors, not just the tragic Barrymore.

Vitamin auditions Snowflake and gives her the co-starring role in his new play. The play is a hit. Also, Vitamin and Snowflake fall in love. Here we see that though Tracy might be a brilliant cop, he's less than skilled at giving personal advice. Warning Snowflake about the danger of a May/December romance, he just gets everyone mad at him. Stick to your skill set, Tracy. Tracking down villains doesn't qualify you to play Dear Abby.

In the meantime, Shaky is looking to get revenge on Snowflake. When he and his friends meet Vitamin, who is tying one on after being "betrayed" by Tracy, he sees an opportunity to get his hands on the girl once again.

Shaky convinces Vitamin to elope with Snowflake and offers to throw a party for them. It's not much of a party, though, as Vitamin is knocked out, then robbed of both his fur coat and his lady.

This opens the final act of the story arc, with the pace of the tale speeding up once again as we race to what can only be described as a brutal finale.

Shaky tosses Snowflake into the river. Fortunately, she lands on a barge and is later rescued just before freezing to death. Gould was not shy about killing off likeable supporting characters and, in fact, had just done so a few months earlier in an earlier story arc. So newspaper readers that winter must have been on the edge of their seats, wondering if Snowflake was going to survive. In Dick Tracy, there were no guarentees. This is one of the reason the strip was such a great one.

In the meantime, Shaky and his two men are sleeping in a cheap hotel, using a portable heater to keep warm. When Vitamen's stolen coat falls onto the heater, the hotel is soon engulfed in flames.

The ensuing sequence is brilliant, with Gould's expressionistic artwork dripping with a sense of terror, panic and danger. The henchmen both come to horrible ends (one burns, the other jumps off the roof in a panic). Shaky brutally kills a fireman and tries to make a break for it. He steals a car, but the ensuing chase leads him to a dead end at the waterfront.

Shaky sends the car off a pier, hoping to make it look like he died in the crash, then hides in a nearby hole. The next week's worth of strips has Tracy and his men trying to recover the car and confirm Shaky's death, while the crook gradually realizes that ice is sealing him up in the hole. By the time he decides to shout for help, no one can hear him. And the air supply in that hole is limited...

Shaky was a violent sociopath, but Gould presents his death with such stark brutality, that you can't help but feel a little sorry for him despite realizing his fate is well-deserved. To quote Max Allan Collins one more time:

Life is harsh in Gould's world. Death, too. There are thrills, there are laughs, there is compassion, but there are mostly consequence, and sometimes just plain cruel fate.

As I mentioned last week, a paperback reprint of this storyline (along with another paperback reprinting the Pruneface story) was my earliest experience with classic adventure comic strips. Because of Chester Gould's brilliance as artist and storyteller, I was also later drawn to Milt Caniff, Hal Foster, Alex Raymond and Roy Crane. I wish I had had a chance to meet Chester Gould. I would have liked to have thanked him for enriching my life.

Next week, we'll stay in World War II (though via a story from 1975) as we look at the formation of the Marvel superhero group The Invaders.