Dick Tracy

Dick Tracy is a popular character in American pop culture. The character of Dick Tracy is a hard hitting, fast shooting, and supremely intelligent police detective who has matched wits with a variety of often grotesquely ugly villains. Dick Tracy was created by cartoonist Chester Gould in 1931 for a newspaper comic strip also entitled Dick Tracy. The strip was distributed by the Chicago Tribune Syndicate. Gould wrote and drew the strip until 1977.

Trivia

• In Al Capp's Li'l Abner, there is a comic-in-the-comic detective called Fearless Fosdick that is clearly modeled after Dick Tracy.
• Many of the comic characters were based on local citizens of Woodstock, Illinois where Chester Gould wrote the majority of the strip. However, Gould modeled many characters after close associates like his publisher, Joseph Patterson, as Big Frost and even himself, as Pear-Shape.