4 February: Dick Tracy

On this date in 1935 The Adventures of Dick Tracy came to radio for the first time. 10 things you might not know about Dick Tracy:

1. Dick Tracy first saw the light of day in a Newspaper comic strip created by Chester Gould and based on U.S. federal agent Eliot Ness. Tracy was depicted wearing a fedora, a dark suit, a white shirt, and a necktie.
2. He was originally going to be called "Plainclothes Tracy", but when Gould pitched the idea to Joseph Medill Patterson of the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate, Patterson suggested changing the hero's name to Dick Tracy.
3. Some facts about Tracy's creator: Chester Gould was the son of a minister and the grandson of some of Oklahoma's early settlers. He was a Christian. He took courses in forensics and investigative procedures, but wasn't a "planner" preferring to make the stories up as he went along.
4. Dick Tracy became a cop to avenge the murder of Emil Trueheart, the father of his love interest, Tess. Even before that, he had captured his first villain, Pinkie the Stabber, in 1931. He served as a lieutenant (senior grade) in US Navy Intelligence during World War II.
5. We may have Dick Tracy to thank for inventions such as mobile phones, smart watches and CCTV. The Dick Tracy strip included a character called Diet Smith, a milk-drinking industrialist and his blind son, Brilliant, who supplied advanced equipment to Tracy and the police department. Among the futuristic (at the time) gadgets he invented were the two-way wrist Radio, two-way wrist TV, and the two-way wrist computer. Martin Cooper, who invented the mobile phone, is said to have been inspired by these devices.
6. Dick and Tess had an adopted son, Junior, and a daughter called Bonnie Braids. Some of the stories were a soap opera style depiction of their family life. Some of the crime storylines involved members of the family. Bonnie Braids was kidnapped on one occasion by fugitive Crewy Lou, and Junior's girlfriend Model was accidentally killed by her brother.
7. Dick Tracy comics moved with the times. In the 1950s there were stories about television, juvenile delinquency and organised crime; in the 1970s Tracy grew his hair longer and acquired a hippie sidekick called Groovy Grove.
8. In the 1960s, Dick Tracy joined the space age. Diet Smith supplied him with the Space Coupe, a spacecraft with a magnetic propulsion system. He went to the Moon in 1964 and met a race of humanoid people living in "Moon Valley". They had large eyes, giraffe-like antennae, and laser powers. One of them was called Moon Maid. She married Junior Tracy and they had a daughter, with antennae, called Honey Moon Tracy. However, once Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969 and found no signs of life there, this storyline waned in popularity.
9. The villains were usually ugly and disfigured in some way with names which described the way they looked: Pruneface, Flyface, the Mole, Wormy, the Blank, Laffy, and Rhodent.
10. In April 1937, a poll of adult comic strip readers in Fortune voted Dick Tracy their third favourite comic strip after Little Orphan Annie and Popeye. However, in 1968, the day after Senator Robert F. Kennedy was killed, a panel in the strip read "Violence is golden, when it's used to put down evil." Although the strips were prepared months in advance and it was merely a coincidence, it attracted a lot of criticism and several newspapers dropped the strip as a result.

Character birthday

Queen Helena of Galorvia: Queen Consort of King Christopher III and mother of Jade and Gloria. She was killed in an uprising alongside her husband, having arranged for her daughters to be smuggled to safety in England. Appears in From A Jack to A King.

From A Jack To A King

A royal palace is burning. The King and Queen are dead. The only hopes for an ancient dynasty flee to England for their lives.

A boy runs from his mother and the people he believes want to mutilate him, and vanishes, seemingly forever.

Gary Winchcombe, the experimental "super-cop" pursues a notorious gang of bank robbers, and starts to discover that his friends and neighbours have secrets he never could have imagined.

Tod Reynard wants to turn his life around. When he meets and falls in love with the beautiful Jade, he knows she might just be the one to help him change his life for the better. He cannot possibly know just how much.

When Jade's twin sister Gloria is kidnapped, old rivalries must be put aside and new associations formed in order to save Gloria's life and restore the rightful order of things.

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