The First Shoot-'Em-Down Strip. In a decade when gangster movies enjoyed unprecedented popularity, and when the bad guys, though they may in the end have died, at least did so in a blaze of glory, uttering unforgettable lines on their way out, Dick Tracy provided a cartoon counterbalance — and, in some sense, a counterpart — to the tide of blood washing over American screens. In 1931 Dick Tracy, just minutes after he announced his engagement, was traumatized by witnessing his fiancee's father gunned down in cold blood by gangsters and joined the police force as a plainclothes detective. From this beginning artist Chester Gould launched a strip in which his square-jawed hero pursued and shot scores of gangsters in the funny pages: the copsand- robbers format and the sheer level of violence was unprecedented in the world of comics. Tracy proved too powerful a...