The Press: Crime & Punishment

Through the years a parade of repellent characters have spat, scratched and scowled through the panels of Cartoonist Chester Gould's comic strip, Dick Tracy. There was Pruneface, a dead ringer for an exhumed cadaver; the Mole, a homicidal man-sized rodent who lived in a burrow; Itchy, who never stopped scratching; Measles, whose complexion resembled an aerial view of the Badlands; and, of course, that bottomless well of chaw juice, B. O. Plenty. Latest entry is Flyface, whose face is always surrounded by flies—and who has a mother and a nephew similarly convoyed. Last week this unsavory trio, causing many an editor...