My guest for today’s Fun Friday Feature (patent pending) is writer and author Matthew K. Manning. Matthew has written hundreds of comics and prose books for a range of publishers, including DC, Marvel, IDW, Scholastic, Disney, and many more. Some standouts are the Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures, the hardcover The Batman Files, the 12-issue comic series Marvel Action: Avengers, and a recent stint on the Dick Tracy comic strip.
Matthew lives in Asheville, North Carolina — an area that could still use your support after the devastating Hurricane Helene.
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Edited excerpts from our conversation:
SER: Tell me how [about your interest] in Dick Tracy?
MATTHEW: I’ve been a Tracy fan since when the movie came out, that kind of converted me. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, Ohio, and back then there weren't very many graphic novels in any library, but Ohio was really limited, but they did have some Dick Tracy collections.
So I got to read the best of them from the get go. I remember collecting like the McDonald's game pieces when the movie came out and all that kind of stuff.
So, I’ve been a lifetime fan, and there was a lull in the quality of the strip for a while until Mike Curtis and Joe Staten took over and then it got good again.
It was probably like every time I’d see Joe at Comic-Cons or something, I’d [say], “Can I do a guest in on Tracy?”
And they’d started doing these things called Minute Mysteries, which is a name from the old Tracy comics, which were just like one page mysteries in the old comics. That was mostly like filler material back in the day. And it would be in between the actual reprints of the newspaper comic strip.
So they were doing Minute Mysteries in the actual daily comic strip. They’d have like a guest artist normally for about for two weeks and sometimes guest writers. And so ever since, I just kept asking Joe and then finally Joe retired.
Then Shelly took over after him, and she contacted me after I emailed her and said, “I’ve been trying to do this forever.” A year later, she responded, “Oh, yeah, sorry, your email got lost.”
We ended up doing a guest stint, and what was really odd was the artist that they paired me with, I knew from when I used to live in Brooklyn. His name’s Howie, and in recent years has been doing Dick Tracy.
We teamed up on it and did a two-week guest spot where we really wanted to make it … because Dick Tracy is not really a mystery strip. It's more of … the criminal did a crime, Dick Tracy discovered it, and then there was a big chase. That was always a real fun part where the criminal would just be tortured and fall into chimneys. And there was a beehive in there.
That was the weird, sick humor of Chester Gould, the original cartoonist.
[Dick Tracy doesn’t] really lend to a mystery, so we kind of cheated a little bit, but then we also introduced a new villain. We don’t reveal who the villain is yet. So we’re hoping we get asked back to continue, because we do know who it is.
SER: You mentioned 1990 [Dick Tracy movie] with Warren Beatty. I was a fan of that, as well. In those days, comic book movies were very hard to come by. I liked the [Tim Burton] Batman movie. It’s very much a Burton film. I was a big Burton fan. But Dick Tracy really so leaned into the [comic book imagery] in a fun way.
There’s also [Stephen] Sondheim and Madonna so as a musical theater fan, a comic book fan, and a Madonna fan, it had everything for me.
MATTHEW: I think it really holds up. I’ve watched it a couple times recently, even before the strip, because we wanted to capture a little bit of that and mix that with your classic Chester Gould kind of style. It’s so heavily stylized. It’s like Sin City before Sin City.
There’s even a scene where [Tracy’s] fighting Steve the Tramp, and you see the shed that they’re inside rocking, exaggerated back and forth, and it’s completely like what Frank Miller would have done in Sin City.
People got that joke [in Sin City] but I don’t think people got the joke of Dick Tracy or just didn't get what it was doing — not necessarily like it wasn't making fun of the material was embracing it.
SER: You’ve written a lot for Batman, a favorite character of both of ours. How would you describe, as a writer and a fan, the difference between the two, and what would you see as some of the commonalities.
MATTHEW: I think Batman is very much in the vein of Dick Tracy, and it’s funny you ask that because just last night I was reading a [Batman comic by mystery writer] Max Allan Collins, who wrote the Dick Tracy comic strip [after Chester Gould.] I happened to pick up an old Batman issue of his because I wanted to read something from when I was a kid, so it was a late or mid-’80s issue, and in the back of it, he talks about this very thing.
He actually claims that Bob Kane told him at one point that he was pretty much was just using Dick Tracy
SER: Yeah, some Dick Tracy, some Zorro. Max Allan Collins, for folks of my generation, who were reading Dick Tracy, he would have been writing it, I think.
He wrote the first Batman comic I purchased off the stands, Batman No. 410, which was the “first” new Robin, Jason Todd. Well, Jason Todd had been introduced earlier but they redid his origin when [DC} revamped all the comics in the mid-to-late ‘80s.
Max Allan Collins started his run sometime during that, and he wrote some key issues that I think he’s not necessarily associated with or remembered for. Certainly the new Jason Todd origin … where he’s a street kid who stole the Batmobile’s tires.
He didn’t stay on a series for long. Then came Jim Starlin. I think there’s often a sort of Mandela Effect where people assume that the whole new Jason Todd storyline is Jim Starlin, who wrote a very different, hard-edged 1980s Batman, whereas Max Allen Collins’s Batman still had moments where he would say “old chum” or something. He was kind of figuring it out, I guess, because it was a weird period, right? Who is Batman now after [Miller’s] Dark Knight?
MATTHEW: The issue that I was reading yesterday was Batman 402, which is the first Max Allan Collins issue. I think I actually had that same thing. I thought, “I want to read one of the Starlin issues!” But Starlin drew it, which is odd.
But yeah, Dick Tracy has a lighter tone because it has to be now, but when Dick Tracy started out, the Chester Gold stuff is so violent and so over the top for what you’d see on television.
There would be scenes where … a Nazi gets impaled on a flagpole and his body slowly falls down the flagpole. And the American flag is flying. It’s brutal, and now, just working on Dick Tracy, they even have a style guide stating, “Okay, Tracy can’t shoot at anybody unless they shoot at him first.” There’s these in-house rules that just would have made [Gould] so angry back then. There were actually some papers that moved the Chester Gould strip from the comics page to a different section because it was that violent and they didn’t want kids to see it.
So by the time Collins was writing Tracy, they’d already really softened it. Collins was kind of in that between [period regarding] how to write these darker characters.
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