DICK TRACY #1, by Mad Cave Studios on 4/24/24, begins a hardboiled crime case when star detective Dick Tracy is after gangsters who gunned down a prominent city politician.
The Details
- Written by: Alex Segura, Michael Moreci
- Art by: Geraldo Borges
- Colors by: Mark Englert
- Letters by: Jim Campbell
- Cover art by: Geraldo Borges (cover A)
- Comic Rating: Teen
- Cover price: $4.99
- Release date: April 24, 2024
Is DICK TRACY #1 Good?
The issue begins with a prologue. We have a prominent politician by the name of Emil Truehart meeting with a city reporter by the name of Langdon Marsh at a diner in the wee hours of the morning when nobody’s noticing that they’re having a conversation. From the bits and pieces of the talk, we get the impression that Truehart is about to expose individuals within the city government for being on the take for corruption or any number of different crimes. Suddenly, somebody breaks through the door with a tommy gun and a few other goons, peppering the place with bullets. By the time the chaos is over, Marsh and Truehart are both dead. The next morning, the police are taking stock of the damage and all the dead bodies that are laying in this diner. Suddenly, we get the big dramatic entrance moment: it is Dick Tracy who is on the case to figure out who killed all these people.
After a brief exchange with the police who are already on the scene, Dick Tracy takes a look at the dead bodies and recognizes that Truehart and Marsh were the true targets because they are the ones that were killed up close and with precision. Everybody else appears to be collateral damage. Suddenly, there’s a ruckus outside, and it is Tess Truehart, who is Emil Truehart’s daughter and also an ace reporter, an investigative reporter, and sort of a Lois Lane archetype. She’s determined to find out who killed her father.
A little bit later, we catch up with Dick Tracy and his chief as they’re meeting in the chief’s home for an early morning breakfast to talk about what Dick Tracy’s found so far. The chief is warning Dick not to push too hard, that he’s got police officers scouring the city going door to door looking for information. Dick Tracy says nope, not on my watch. I can’t sit back while something this evil is happening in my city. Here we get a good idea of the relationship between the chief and Dick Tracy and also get good insight into Dick Tracy’s personality, about how he’s obsessively driven to see justice done and to stop crime.
Then we cut to a scene where we catch up with Tess Truehart as she’s trying to search her father’s office. She’s resigned herself to the fact that her father was into something corrupt or malicious, and she’s looking for any kind of diaries or any kind of logs or any kind of information that she is convinced her father would have left. She does find a book that has meeting information, and in that meeting information, she finds the name Mumbles, which is a long-time, if you know the original comic strip, one of the gangsters that is a type of a secret informant. Then she’s interrupted by two goons who appear to be looking for information as she is. She tries to pretend she’s a secretary, but they aren’t buying it. She manages to stab one of them with a letter opener and makes for the door and dashes out into the street to find Dick Tracy and seek help. Tess eventually finds Dick Tracy and tells him what she’s found. Dick is aware of Mumbles, and the two of them drive out to an old abandoned part of the town where they break into an old office building. They find Mumbles and take him into custody. When they get close to the police station, suddenly a car drives up and somebody steps out with a Tommy gun looking to gun Mumbles down before he can say anything, and it is also long-time Dick Tracy villain Flattop. There’s a shootout, but Dick manages to get everybody into his car and drive away while shooting out a fire hydrant to spray down Flattop and prevent him from following.
That night we catch up with Flattop meeting with some of his goons down by the docks where he’s talking to a mysterious figure who’s in the shadows but only smoking a cigar, that’s the only reason you know he’s there. And we find out that this man is determined to enact some kind of plan that will give him power over the city, and he needs Flattop and his guys to do it. We end with a cliffhanger that there’s some mysterious figure who’s in town that’s looking to throw a monkey wrench in the entire city’s political system.
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What did we like about DICK TRACY #1?
If you put aside the comic strip cartoonish origins of Dick Tracy, this is a pretty proper hardboiled crime detective type story set in 1947. The character work is grounded, gritty, and serious. Nothing here is played for laughs, nothing here is played for jokes. Here the tone is darker, more grounded, more dramatic, and more serious. For the type of story that Segura and Moreci are telling, it plays off really well.
What didn’t we like about DICK TRACY #1?
The only thing that stands out is a minor nitpick that makes less sense the more you think about it. Dick Tracy takes Tess along on everything that he’s doing, which he knows is incredibly dangerous. Yes, she’s a nosy reporter and a spitfire, and not somebody you want to mess with. But at the same time, he doesn’t have to take her along on when he’s got his gun drawn trying to take down gangsters and get into shootouts. Yes, it’s consistent with the source material, but if they’re going to do a little bit of an updated version, finding some way to keep Tess occupied without her tagging along on dangerous detective work seems it would have been a better choice.
How’s the Art?
Borges’s art relies on shadows, dark lines, thick lines, silhouettes, and all the staples that you would expect from a detective noir story. If we’re looking for a little bit of a nitpick on the art, the line work could be a little cleaner and pronounced. When you have strange characters like Mumbles and Flattop, who are not named as so because that’s their nickname but they have physical attributes that make that nickname possible, you don’t get the clarity that Mumbles’s mouth is off to the side, talking out of the side of his mouth. Flattop, in some scenes, looks like he has his hair parted down the middle. It’s not as pronounced as it could be except in some of the silhouettes. Cleaner lines would have helped, but overall, the art does look good.
Final Thoughts
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DICK TRACY #1 has a great murder mystery at its heart, strong detective noir crime vibes, which is what appears the creators were going for. You get all the classic elements of the original source material for Dick Tracy, and the ending is pretty strong. You want to know what’s going to happen next, and you’re invested in Dick Tracy as a character.
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