Gould, Chester

Chester Gould, (born Nov. 20, 1900, Pawnee, Okla., U.S.—died May 11, 1985, Woodstock, Ill.), American cartoonist who created “Dick Tracy,” the detective-action comic strip that became the first popular cops-and-robbers series.

Gould studied cartooning through a correspondence school, briefly drew sports cartoons in Oklahoma, then worked for the Chicago Daily News. “Dick Tracy” was first distributed in 1931 by the Chicago Tribune–New York News Syndicate, Inc.; its underlying code of “crime doesn’t pay” and its support of tough and often violent law enforcement were widely appealing. Drawn with hard outlines and bright colours and accurate in the details of crime and criminal investigation, the comic strip features Dick Tracy, a clean-cut, plainclothes detective with a hard, jutting jawline, whose methods, reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes’s, made him the nemesis of a gallery of grotesquely caricatured criminals. Gould retired from the strip in 1977.