I've already confessed my love of
old movies (which really should've been the first retro boy confession) and
old radio programs, so it should come as no great surprise when I confess that I also love old comic strips from the 1930s and 1940s. As with the radio programs, I don't care so much for the old comedy strips. It's mostly the old adventure and detective strips that draw my interest.
Terry and the Pirates and
Jungle Jim are two of the best adventure strips and
Dick Tracy is unequivocally the best detective strip of all time.
Tracy is also my favorite comic strip, period. The contemporary version of the strip is pretty dreadful and not worth reading, but the classic
Dick Tracy strips had it all -- action, mystery, romance, melodrama, suspense, high tech gadgetry, fiendish death traps, and larger than life characters. I got hooked on
Tracy when I was in high school. At that time, the contemporary strip was still pretty damn good.
When I went away to college my parents would save the comics sections from the newspaper for me so I could catch up on my
Dick Tracy reading when I came home. Then, after I joined the Navy, they would clip the strips from the paper and send me an envelope stuffed with them every month so I wouldn't have to go without my
Tracy fix. Now I love collecting and reading reprinted editions of the vintage
Terry and the Pirates,
Jungle Jim, and especially
Dick Tracy comic strips. As with most examples of popular culture from that time period, they have a tendency to be casually racist. It's astonishing how the mainstream America of that era had no qualms about employing slurs and stereotypes that make most modern audiences cringe.
I love the old comic strips despite their flaws, although being a white guy probably makes it a lot easier to overlook the racist elements they contain and just focus on the slam-bang stories. There's more than a little guilt associated with this guilty pleasure.
(
Taken with my Nikon D90)
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