Vintage 1975 Bicentennial Dick Tracy Patriotic Stickers 🕵️ Chester Gould Liberty Bell Flag Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate Set of 2

Who Created Dick Tracy, America's Toughest Cop? 🕵️ A Vintage 1975 Dick Tracy Patriotic Sticker Pair, Chester Gould, Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate

Size: 3 1/4" x 2"

You get the pair. On the first, Dick Tracy in his fedora stands beside the Liberty Bell in a red shield with Proclaim Your Liberty and DICK TRACY in red; on the second, his famous square-jawed profile sits beside a waving American flag with 'Tis the Star Spangled Banner and DICK TRACY in blue. Both carry the printed signature CHESTER GOULD and © CHICAGO-TRIBUNE NEW YORK NEWS SYNDICATE, on cream stock with the split backing paper still on. Neither has ever been stuck to anything.

🔔 Proclaim your liberty

Both lines come straight out of American history. The Liberty Bell in Philadelphia is cast with Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land, a line from Leviticus - and its famous crack, the story goes, widened sometime in the 1840s, and instead of melting it down and recasting it, Philadelphia simply retired the bell, crack and all, which is why a cracked bell came to mean more to Americans than a perfect one ever could - and 'Tis the Star-Spangled Banner is Francis Scott Key's own line from the poem he wrote after watching the British bombard Fort McHenry in September 1814. Put them in Dick Tracy's mouth for the 200th birthday and you've got a sticker that says law, order and Old Glory all at once.

🇺🇸 Two hundred years

These came out for the Bicentennial, the run-up to July 4, 1976, when every company, comic strip and cereal box in the country found a way to wrap itself in red, white and blue. Nothing printed on them gives a year - the dealers who carry this same pair call it 1975 or 1976 - and the Tracy art matches the strip as Gould was still drawing it.

It was a big party. The American Freedom Train, a steam-pulled museum on rails, toured the country in 1975 and 1976 with the nation's treasures aboard, towns repainted their fire hydrants as Minutemen, and on July 4, 1976 the tall ships of Operation Sail filled New York Harbor. Little stickers like these were part of that same flag-waving spirit, the kind of thing a kid stuck on a lunch box or a bike fender that summer.

🕵️ Chester Gould's detective

Chester Gould drew Dick Tracy for the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate, the comics arm of the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News. Gould first pitched him as Plainclothes Tracy; Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, the syndicate's boss - remembered in newspaper lore as the editor who saw something in a struggling cartoonist's pitch - changed it to Dick Tracy, and the strip debuted on October 4, 1931, in the middle of the Chicago gangster years. Old-timers in comics fandom like to point out that by 1937 it was the third most popular strip in America, behind only Little Orphan Annie and Popeye - not bad for gritty crime instead of gags. It was a hard, violent strip for its day, full of grotesque villains like Flattop, Pruneface and the Brow, and it gave the country the two-way wrist radio in 1946, long before anybody wore a phone on their wrist. Gould kept drawing it until he retired in 1977, so these Bicentennial stickers come from the very end of his more than forty-five years at the board. Along the way Tracy had his own radio show, Republic movie serials in the late 1930s and, much later, the 1990 Warren Beatty movie; after Gould retired, Max Allan Collins took over the writing. But this is Gould's Tracy, the original, with the hawk nose and the jaw you could break a brick on.

🗽 About these

Every one I have is the same unused pair. Frame them side by side, put them in a comics collection or a Fourth of July display, or give them to the friend who still has a Crimestoppers badge. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Gould's Bicentennial Tracy stickers again, and once these last pairs are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.