I really love learning stuff like this, because I've been immersing myself in comics along with comic culture and history over the last couple of years, and the depths of your knowledge about this stuff is impressive, and it makes your commentary all the more well-informed and interesting to hear. Your comment about how Gould "internalized police grievances" when he started working closely with the cops is beautifully phrased, and it reminds me of the problem I observed with so-called "embedded" journalists during the Iraq/Afghan wars. When a writer or artist, in an effort to get first-hand information for their work, "embeds" themselves with (or buddies-up to; tags along with; inserts themselves into the working environment of) their subjects, they often start to become part of those subjects' "In-Group" and consequently their partiality becomes heavily compromised...or really, obliterated. This leads to supposedly "impartial" war correspondents demonizing the conscripted 19-year-old enlisted soldiers on the other side of the concertina wire and lionizing the guys he's sharing meals with in a highly stressful situation....which fosters natural human bonding, of course. Maybe that happened with Gould? Did he go on ride-alongs with the police? Go out on patrol with them or walk the beat (back when that was still a thing)? I think you said elsewhere that he was always kind of leaning towards authoritarianism and going overboard with sympathy for abusive police behaviors, but it got worse as time progressed and he got older? Oh, and RE: the embedded-journalist/artist thing -- IIRC, the excellent Cameron Crowe movie "Almost Famous" addresses this problematic phenomenon in another journalistic milieu: rock n' roll journalism. The protagonist kid gets too close to his subjects and realizes he can't both be the FRIEND of his rock-group subjects and simultaneously report on them from a dispassionate, objective vantage point. It is a tough line to walk. Even so, the remark you cited in this video, the one made by the Dick Tracy Chief guy where he condones summary executions for alleged, SUPPOSED "criminals", that is inexcusable, no matter how warmly the boys in blue treated ol' Chester. I'll wrap this up in a minute, but that hard-line reactionary "screw DUE PROCESS -- just shoot 'wrongdoers' on sight! *BLAM, *BLAM, *BLAM*" attitude that you say is present in the later Dick Tracy strips, that stuff was bubbling up in the general zeitgeist of some quarters of America in that period anyhow (1950s and 1960s, I'm talkin'). And it fed into and led to the subsequent decades' popular cultural outputs like the "Death Wish" films, "Dirty Harry", scores of other films and TV shows like "TJ Hooker" -- the latter of which I revisited several years back and found it to be espousing exactly this kind of police violence as a SUPPOSED "solution" to the notional "tricky" defense lawyers" and a justice system that keeps on letting cops down by, like, respecting people's basic civil rights and honoring habeas corpus and not immediately shooting suspects to death and whatnot. Actually, there's a realllllly fascinating rabbit-hole that this issue leads to regarding the "Lead-Crime Hypothesis" and how it damaged the frontal lobes and other brainparts of nascent humanoids in the 20th-century and made them more...amenable to criminality, let's say. But obviously I've written too much already, so that will be a topic for another time. You probably know of it anyways. Great analysis and commentary on your part, tho, as usual!
Dang, I wrote this super long reply and then managed to delete it. I will write more later but I think you're 100% on the money with Gould and it was sad to see and his belief that cops were always right were not working in the tumoltuous 60s and 70s. I will write a much longer response later but I'm curious as to whether or not you ever read Judge Dredd.
I really love learning stuff like this, because I've been immersing myself in comics along with comic culture and history over the last couple of years, and the depths of your knowledge about this stuff is impressive, and it makes your commentary all the more well-informed and interesting to hear.
Your comment about how Gould "internalized police grievances" when he started working closely with the cops is beautifully phrased, and it reminds me of the problem I observed with so-called "embedded" journalists during the Iraq/Afghan wars. When a writer or artist, in an effort to get first-hand information for their work, "embeds" themselves with (or buddies-up to; tags along with; inserts themselves into the working environment of) their subjects, they often start to become part of those subjects' "In-Group" and consequently their partiality becomes heavily compromised...or really, obliterated.
This leads to supposedly "impartial" war correspondents demonizing the conscripted 19-year-old enlisted soldiers on the other side of the concertina wire and lionizing the guys he's sharing meals with in a highly stressful situation....which fosters natural human bonding, of course.
Maybe that happened with Gould? Did he go on ride-alongs with the police? Go out on patrol with them or walk the beat (back when that was still a thing)?
I think you said elsewhere that he was always kind of leaning towards authoritarianism and going overboard with sympathy for abusive police behaviors, but it got worse as time progressed and he got older?
Oh, and RE: the embedded-journalist/artist thing -- IIRC, the excellent Cameron Crowe movie "Almost Famous" addresses this problematic phenomenon in another journalistic milieu: rock n' roll journalism. The protagonist kid gets too close to his subjects and realizes he can't both be the FRIEND of his rock-group subjects and simultaneously report on them from a dispassionate, objective vantage point.
It is a tough line to walk. Even so, the remark you cited in this video, the one made by the Dick Tracy Chief guy where he condones summary executions for alleged, SUPPOSED "criminals", that is inexcusable, no matter how warmly the boys in blue treated ol' Chester.
I'll wrap this up in a minute, but that hard-line reactionary "screw DUE PROCESS -- just shoot 'wrongdoers' on sight! *BLAM, *BLAM, *BLAM*" attitude that you say is present in the later Dick Tracy strips, that stuff was bubbling up in the general zeitgeist of some quarters of America in that period anyhow (1950s and 1960s, I'm talkin'). And it fed into and led to the subsequent decades' popular cultural outputs like the "Death Wish" films, "Dirty Harry", scores of other films and TV shows like "TJ Hooker" -- the latter of which I revisited several years back and found it to be espousing exactly this kind of police violence as a SUPPOSED "solution" to the notional "tricky" defense lawyers" and a justice system that keeps on letting cops down by, like, respecting people's basic civil rights and honoring habeas corpus and not immediately shooting suspects to death and whatnot.
Actually, there's a realllllly fascinating rabbit-hole that this issue leads to regarding the "Lead-Crime Hypothesis" and how it damaged the frontal lobes and other brainparts of nascent humanoids in the 20th-century and made them more...amenable to criminality, let's say. But obviously I've written too much already, so that will be a topic for another time. You probably know of it anyways.
Great analysis and commentary on your part, tho, as usual!
Dang, I wrote this super long reply and then managed to delete it. I will write more later but I think you're 100% on the money with Gould and it was sad to see and his belief that cops were always right were not working in the tumoltuous 60s and 70s. I will write a much longer response later but I'm curious as to whether or not you ever read Judge Dredd.