Dick Tracy Forever #2: Dick Tracy and that Damned Watch, The Two Dicks

English Bob and Pirate Billy swap tales over near misses with Dick Tracy while setting their sights on busting loose and retrieving stashed loot. Loot they’d be free and enjoying if the City’s most honest cop weren’t equipped with his signature two-way wristwatch radio.

Tracy gets embroiled in a controversy involving Nazi’s, Pruneface, The Brow, and Broccoli Rabe. It looks like Tracy may not be that incorruptible after all and it’s up to private eye “Bricks” Walker to get to the bottom of it all.

Reading Michael Avon Oeming’s take on Dick Tracy ticks a lot of boxes and dives real deep into the universe of Chester Gould’s creation.

Everything important to the endearing legacy of the character is paraded without being outright exploited and, tonally, this is an all-encompassing jaunt through The City that has as much appeal to new readers as it does to the staunchest comic-strip-fanatic.

Oeming brings an element of the bizarre that arguably influenced such unique and entertaining properties as Ben Edlund’s The Tick and Michael Allred’s Madman. He doesn’t play it for laughs but theirs just as much joy to be had as there are detective novel action scenes.

Rather than overload the story with a litany of Tracy’s best rogues he holds fast and focuses on a small handful. This issue leans toward the more abstract Broccoli Rabe. A character that shouldn’t fit into the tropy gangsters with tommy-guns and straight moxie to spare. But Rabe fits seamlessly, acting as a segue into the stranger aspects of Dick Tracy that are soon to come. He also affords Oeming the writer to come up with some inspire dialogue and one-liners

The story is as action-packed and exciting as the dialogue is snappy.

The art hits some really great heights to make sure it does nothing to let the creativity of the writing down. Employing some fundamental graphic design tricks as well as a solid color job by Taki Soma and terrific lettering by Shawn Lee to really, to give this issue visual flair that’s every bit as captivating to the eye as the 1990 film adaptation.

Oeming’s visual style really does fit perfectly with the quirky designs of the villains and the square-jawed mans-man heroics of the hero.