HR Boards
March 28, 2024, 01:46:30 PM*

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom  premieres in theaters now!
Advanced search  
Pages: [1]   Go Down
Print
Author Topic: New artist/writer takes over Dick Tracy comic  (Read 2585 times)
Gay Titan
HR Celestial
******
Posts: 2401



« on: March 22, 2011, 10:25:59 PM »

By Gerry Smith/ Chicago Tribune

He has been thrown out of helicopters and off skyscrapers, buried inside drainpipes and underneath highways, dumped in hot wax and sealed in coffins. But Dick Tracy never surrendered. His artist wouldn’t allow it.

“Never show him slumping, never show him blue, never show him depressed and never show him defeated,” said Dick Locher, who spent 32 years drawing the world’s most famous gumshoe. “He’s in charge. People expect that.”

This month, someone else will take charge of Tracy. Locher, 81, of Naperville, Ill., will turn over the strip to a new artist and writer. He will leave behind a character who is more than just a square-jawed action hero vanquishing villains on the funny pages.

Dick Tracy is a living, breathing person, Locher said. He is a husband and father. And to Locher, he is a close friend.

“He’s a great human being who happens to have a great crime sense,” Locher said.

Locher was 28 when he began assisting Chester Gould, who created the Dick Tracy character in 1931 and continued writing and drawing until his retirement in 1977. Locher left after four years in 1961, then returned in 1983, the same year that he won a Pulitzer Prize as an editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune. In 2005, Locher became the strip’s artist and author.

Just as Gould based characters on residents of his hometown of Woodstock, Locher used real Naperville residents for inspiration. Naperville’s mayor, George Pradel, and police chief, David Dial, have both appeared in the strip, although not under their actual names.

One of Locher’s recent “Dick Tracy” characters — David Dierdorf D’Buckworth, a wealthy man who pretends to be homeless — is based on Scott Huber, a homeless man who lives on the streets of Naperville.

Last year, a 9-foot bronze statue of Dick Tracy was installed on the city’s Riverwalk to honor Locher. Three years after the closing of the Chester Gould-Dick Tracy museum in Woodstock, Naperville is also considering opening a Dick Tracy gallery featuring panels by Locher and Gould.

The comic strip is more challenging now than it was for Gould, Locher said. Although Gould used five rows of panels for his Sunday strip, Locher must tell the story in only three. And while Gould’s readers had few other entertainment options, the digital revolution has left Locher’s readers with many.

The strip appeared in more than 650 newspapers by the 1960s.

Tribune Media Services, which along with the Chicago Tribune, is part of Tribune Co., declined to say how many papers run “Dick Tracy” today, although the Tribune reported in 2008 it was about 50.
Logged
Pages: [1]   Go Up
Print
Jump to:  

 B l a c k - R a i n V.2 by C r i p ~ Powered by SMF 1.1.21 | SMF © 2015, Simple Machines MySQL | PHP | XHTML | CSS