MYTHCOMICS: ["A BRILLIANT CAREER"] DICK TRACY (1945-46)

 

In the 1960s, a familiar support-character in the DICK TRACY strip was Diet Smith, whose wealth and resources shepherded Tracy and his police department into Chester Gould's thoroughly bizarre vision of the Space Age-- a period that many TRACY fans might prefer to forget. But in the late 1940s, the year Smith was introduced, the millionaire magnate was best known for bestowing on Tracy his best-known technological gizmo: the 2-way wrist radio.

Now even in 1945 Gould could have easily made Smith both a captain of industry and a genius inventor, like the later Tony Stark, so that any device he gave to Tracy was his own creation. Or Gould might have modeled Smith after Harold Gray's Daddy Warbucks, whose plants could turn out war-weapons with no reference to the R&D process. Instead, though, the arc I've titled A BRILLIANT CAREER focuses upon the true creator of the wrist-radio, the blind genius named Brilliant, whose short and tumultuous career owed much to Diet Smith, though one of the two never knows their true connection.              

As it happens, the storyline for Smith also re-introduced a character whom Gould seemed to have consigned to a grisly death in October 1945: language-mangling comical hillbilly B.O. Plenty. Gould brought Plenty back into the strip and put him to work on Diet Smith's estate, and though the wild-bearded farmer doesn't play a big dramatic role in CAREER, he would go to become much more of a regular fixture in the 1950s than his employer.

In any case, Smith, whose nickname clearly refers to the mild food he eats, due to ulcers brought on by his hard-driving work-schedule, contacts Tracy. Smith's long-time business partner, whom Smith regarded as a brother (though the dead man never gets a proper name), has perished in an isolated room, strangled to death by an unknown assailant. However, Plenty stumbles across a clue: an experimental wristwatch-radio apparently dropped by the murderer. Smith relates that the dead partner was in charge of the division working on the secret project. Tracy interviews the radio division's research team, and the employee "Miss Irma" claims, perhaps imprudently, to have invented the watch. Tracy suggests her involvement in the crime, prompting this exchange:

SMITH: "Why, Irma's devoted to our company. She's been legally compensated for all discoveries while in our employ. She's quite happy."

TRACY: "Are you SURE she's happy?"

This is the closest that Gould-- who was himself a toiler in the fields owned by a great syndicate-- comes to admitting that such a laborer might feel himself (or herself) short-changed. And Tracy's instincts are correct in that Irma did feel short-changed, which presumably led her to murder Smith's partner for vague reasons. Apparently Irma believed she could remain Smith's employee and brazen things out, but when Tracy implicates her, she gets her husband Herman to spring her free using another of her inventions, "the atom light."

Except Irma and Herman are far bigger thieves than even a robber-baron like Smith. Irma's teenaged son Brilliant-- whom she accidentally blinded in a sort of reverse-Oedipal motif-- created both the atom light and the wrist-radio. (Though Brilliant has no idea that his mother's using one of his inventions for crime, it's somewhat appropriate that even a saintly kid like Brilliant might want to deprive others of sight. if only on a subconscious level.) Irma and Herman, now on the run, then get the not-so-brilliant idea to mass-produce the atom light for sale to foreign powers. Brilliant informs his adoptive father that they can only make more devices with a supply of lithium. Herman, knowing that Smith's factory has such a supply, uses the atom light to try ripping off the shipment. However, Smith's guards kill Herman.

Irma, never a master planner, then goes off the deep end. She infiltrates Smith's estate, and in a scene perhaps more indebted to Agamemnon than to Oedipus, she shoots Smith in his bath and then kills herself.

   

The Oedipal pattern does come forth, though, for even after Brilliant has been told how his parents used him, he like his mother decides that Smith is responsible for all his sufferings. At the hospital where Smith is recovering from his wounds, Brilliant invades what he thinks is the industrialist's room and attempts to kill his parents' murderer. However, hardboiled Tracy has read Brilliant like a book, and he plays a game of "blind man's bluff," allowing Brilliant to fire into an empty bed. Once Brilliant has purged his demons, he expresses contrition. He accepts Smith's offer to be the chief of research at Smith's facility. In private, the industrialist says that he wants Brilliant to become "my boy," though in this story we don't see the formation of filial bonds. But readers almost surely accepted that Smith could only be an improvement over Irma and her husband with the sound-alike name.

Gould could have left things that way for the run of the strip. For roughly the next two years, Smith and Brilliant presented other inventions to the city police, though none became as iconic as the wrist-radio. However, in 1948 Brilliant incorporated his "atom light" into "a television burglar alarm," and this was deemed such a threat to organized crime that a racketeer, Big Frost, tried to kill Diet Smith and did murder Brilliant.    

And it's at the point where Tracy ramps up the search for Brilliant's killer that Diet Smith drops the Oedipal bomb. Brilliant was his natural son by Irma, to whom Smith was married for a time. Thus the Oedipal slaying of the true father in defense of the false one was averted, though Smith's secretiveness may have cost him some points with readers. Yet even after Brilliant became the epitome of the loyal son, it seems Gould wanted the dramatic payoff, but without any complications to the strip's status quo. So Brilliant becomes one of the TRACY strip's many casualties, and in future I suspect nothing more is said about the creative personnel behind Diet Smith Industries.