Dick Tracy is a newspaper comic strip created in 1931 by Chester Gould and distributed by the Chicago Tribune Syndicate. Dick Tracy is a hard hitting, fast shooting, and supremely intelligent police detective who matched wits with a variety of colorful villains. Gould wrote and drew the strip until 1977.

Gould introduced a raw violence to comic strips, reflecting the violence of 1930s Chicago. But Gould also did his best to keep up with the latest in crime fighting techniques and while Tracy often ends a case in a shootout, he uses forensic science, advanced gadgetry, and plain hard thinking to track the bad guy down. It has been suggested that this comic strip was the first example of the police procedural mystery story. Others noted that actual mystery plots were relatively rare in the stories since the comic strip format is a difficult one for that kind of plot. The real focus, they argue, is the chase with the criminal seen committing the crime and Dick Tracy figuring out the case and relentlessly pursuing the criminal who becomes increasingly desperate as the detective closes in.

The Gould villains are the strongest appeal of the story. Tracy’s world is decidedly black and white where the bad guys are sometimes so evil, their very flesh is deformed to announced their sins to the world. The evil sometimes is raw and coarse like the criminally insane Selbert Depool (that’s looped, spelled backwards, a typical Gould move) or the suave, yet arrogant Shoulders, who can’t help thinking that all women like him, or even bordering on genius like the Nazi spy Pruneface who is not only a machine design engineer but also dabbles with a chemical nerve gas. Tracy tackles all sorts of crime, too. Bicycle thieves, con men, pickpockets, gangsters, saboteurs, kidnappers, hit men, arsonists, junkies and, of course, twisted freaks hellbent on revenge. In an odd slip, one of his villains, Oodles, a jolly sort with a ballooning mop of black hair that hid his face, became too attractive. Gould had him hide out for a few weeks, lose over a hundred pounds, clip his hair and come out an unattractive, emaciated bum. However, by the most popular character was Flattop, a freelance hitman who had a large head that was as flat as an aircraft carrier's flight deck. He was hired by black marketeers to murder Tracy and he came within a hairsbreath of accomplishing that before deciding to blackmail his employers for more money before he did the deed. This proved to be a fatal mistake since it gave Tracy time to signal for help and he eventually defeated his assassin in a spectacular fight scene even as the police were storming the hideout. When Flattop was eventually killed, fans went into public mourning.