Gould, Chester

(born Nov. 20, 1900, Pawnee, Okla., U.S.—died May 11, 1985, Woodstock, Ill.) U.S. cartoonist. He studied cartooning through a correspondence school. His “Dick Tracy” action comic strip, first distributed in 1931 by the Chicago Tribune–New York News Syndicate, became the first popular cops-and-robbers series. Drawn with hard outlines and accurate in the details of crime and criminal investigation, the widely syndicated strip featured a clean-cut detective with a jutting jaw, whose methods made him the nemesis of a gallery of grotesquely caricatured criminals. Gould retired from the strip in 1977.

Find more information on Gould, Chester. Upgrade to Britannica Online for more on Gould, Chester.