14 Facts About Chester Gould

Chester Gould was born to Gilbert R Gould, the son of a minister, and Alice Maud.

The original comic was based on a New York detective Chester Gould was interested in.

Chester Gould drew the comic strip for the next 46 years from his home in Woodstock, Illinois.

Chester Gould was later proud of having introduced the two-way wrist radio for Tracy in 1946, and in 1947, the closed-circuit television, both of which were later invented, though in somewhat different forms.

Chester Gould's stories were rarely pre-planned, since he preferred to improvise stories as he drew them.

In one notorious case, Chester Gould had Tracy in an inescapable deathtrap with a caisson.

When Chester Gould depicted Tracy addressing Chester Gould personally and having the cartoonist magically extract him, publisher Joseph Patterson vetoed the sequence and ordered it redrawn.

Chester Gould, his characters, and improbable plots were satirized in Al Capp's comic strip Li'l Abner with the Fearless Fosdick sequences ; a notable villain was Bomb Face, a gangster whose head was a bomb.

Chester Gould won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award in 1959 and 1977, and was awarded the Inkpot Award in 1978.

Dick Tracy: The Art of Chester Gould was an exhibition in Port Chester, New York, at the Museum of Cartoon Art from October 4 through November 30,1978.

Visitors to the Museum saw original comic strips, correspondence, photographs, and much memorabilia, including Chester Gould's drawing board and chair.

Chester Gould retired December 25,1977, and died May 11,1985, in Woodstock, Illinois, of congestive heart failure.

In 2005, Chester Gould was inducted into the Oklahoma Cartoonists Hall of Fame in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, by Michael Vance.

The first volume includes the five sample strips that Chester Gould used to sell his strip, followed by over 450 strips showing the series' beginning, along with a Chester Gould interview, never previously published, by Max Allan Collins.