Gould, Chester

Gould, Chester

(born Nov. 20, 1900, Pawnee, Okla., U.S.—died May 11, 1985, Woodstock, Ill.) U.S. cartoonist. He studied cartooning through a correspondence school. His “Dick Tracy” action comic strip, first distributed in 1931 by the Chicago Tribune–New York News Syndicate, became the first popular cops-and-robbers series. Drawn with hard outlines and accurate in the details of crime and criminal investigation, the widely syndicated strip featured a clean-cut detective with a jutting jaw, whose methods made him the nemesis of a gallery of grotesquely caricatured criminals. Gould retired from the strip in 1977.

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Gould, Chester (1900–85) cartoonist; born in Pawnee, Okla. He created the newspaper comic strip, Fillum Fables, in 1924 for Hearst's Chicago American, and in 1931 he created for syndication a strip featuring a square-jawed police detective named Dick Tracy. The strip encouraged citizen involvement in crime prevention and a strong adherence to the law. In 1990 the strip was adapted to a full-length film starring Warren Beatty as Tracy.