Dick Tracy Forever #1: ‘The Cost Of Living’, ‘Crash Manhattan’, & ‘Unfinished Business’

A tripleheader that sees Tracy balance duty with the demands of his lady love, discover some new tools in the fight against crime and try to take big shots like Flattop, The Brow, and corrupt impresario Rackman.

The best way to have your readership enjoy a Dick Tracy comic is to do nothing in the way of modernizing its surface.

Creators from the Allreds to variant cover artist Kyle Baker clearly have a fond affinity for the classic newsprint strip good guy and a series bearing his name needs to let that reverence really fly.

That’s what Oeming does with his opener. It’s too easy to call it a simple love letter or an homage. Oeming as a creator brings his action-packed and inventive layouts to Tracy’s 1930s gangster-ridden city and injects it with more meat in the story than the basic and formulaic tales of old.

But everything else is untouched and showered with adoration.

The cityscape, steel girders, shadowy alleys, and art-deco architecture are all rendered in visual praise. The body language is stereotypical cops-n-robbers stuff. The black and white segments that wrap themselves in the glory of radio jump off the page as much as anything that’s colored does.

Speaking of color Taki Soma (The United States vs. Murder, Inc.) is excellent in embellishing Oeming’s visuals with a visually stunning palette of colors that sticks to the four colored roots but pushes the boundaries of how effective that can be used.

It gives the book it’s permanent night time feel, making the shadows that much more nourish, sinister, and cinematic. The efforts of this book on the artistic side really do washover the reader in waves of cool nostalgia regardless of whether you know Tracy as a hardcore fan or from his ‘90s big screen adventure.

The inclusion of a crossword and word find, stitching them into the fabric of the stories and playing up the serialized framework of the issue really fit.

This isn’t just a straightforward comic. It can be enjoyed by all ages, is superbly designed and carries serious weight in the story and action department.