But it wouldn't be make-believe if you believed in me

[austin_dern]

In reading Dick Tracy: America's Most Famous Detective I found several interesting quotes, most of them from Chester Gould. One which intrigued me was Gould's discussion of a controversial era for Dick Tracy, and I pause here that james_nicoll may prepare to stash this one away for future deployment:

During the 1960's many people referred to some of my work with Dick Tracy as science-fiction when I introduced the magnetic space coupe, the air car, Moon Maid, and the people from the moon. That was not science-fiction. I am not a science-fiction writer. I was basing everything I did on what was being done by NASA, and they were making a lot of noise and doing nothing. So I researched the moon, its extreme heat and extreme cold, etc., and took things from there with my imagination.

Sure I had gangsters in space. I had this one guy in the story taken for a ride and just floated out into space. That's the way it will be. I'm convinced as soon as they've established valuable minerals that can be mined in space, there will be gangsterism in space.

I irritated NASA a great deal because I brought out things they will be doing in space one of these days.

But remember, especially with his moon people and the space-born child of Dick Tracy Jr and the Moon Maid, Chester Gould was not writing science fiction.

(The book contains that sequence where gangsters steal the Space Coupe to rub out a guy by dropping him off in space. I don't mean to tell organized crime their business but it seems like one could kill a guy in much less attention-drawing ways than stealing Dick Tracy's Space Coupe and lobbing the victim off into low earth orbit. The Moon Maid herself looks interesting enough but I'm tempted to see what the fan art community on DeviantArt makes of her, except they don't because nobody draws fan art of 50-year-old stuff that isn't Hanna-Barbera cartoons.)

Trivia: On learning, in 1910, that New York City police had smashed into a poolroom on Park Row, destroyed illegal gambling equipment, and arrested sixteen people without the appropriate warrant, William J Gaynor denounced the police's action as ``mob violence'' and advised the gamblers they would have been justified in resisting arrest ``to the last extremity''. Gaynor was at the time Mayor of New York City. Source: Satan's Circus: Murder, Vice, Police Corruption, And New York's Trial of the Century, Mike Dash.

Currently Reading: The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan.

Comments

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

::: The Moon Maid herself looks interesting enough but I'm tempted to see what the fan art community on DeviantArt makes of her, except they don't ...

This sounds like a challenge! (He says, cracking his knuckles.) Is the Moon Maid a robot? I could do a trio in Charlie's Angels pose, featuring Rosie from The Jetsons and ... that other robot maid ... from Richie Rich. Oh, wrong kind of maid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Maid_(comic)): more like Maid Marion. Not to be confused with ERB's Moon Maid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Maid). And the Buck Rogers newspaper strip didn't have any humanoids on our moon (hard-shelled ornithoids, yes), just on Mars and Jupiter.

Switch to Google Image Search and ... BOOM! Your premise is blown out of the lunar maria in a spray of regolith ejecta! There is indeed fan art, and it is indeed on DeviantArt (http://meezerkat.deviantart.com/art/Moon-Maid-75895373). And it's quite well done -- on its own merits, anyway; I don't follow Dick Tracy so I can't say if the style is compatible.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Good job searching! I swear to you I'd searched before writing this and not turned up anything besides a few nice bits of fan art of Tracy himself, or sometimes people's own characters cosplaying as Tracy. But that happens.

The style looks pretty compatible, as best I can tell. The examples of the Moon Maid I have on hand mostly focus on her head, so the rest of her body has to be extrapolated from Chester Gould's standard humanoid body model, which does not exist. (Personally I like the spirit, but I think her antennas could stand to be a little taller.)

Still, even if the lunar people do make a return to Dick Tracy there's not going to be people drawing the Moon Maid the way they draw, say, Dexter's Laboratory's Mom.