Big Little Books (BLB) have had a tremendous appeal to collectors since they first appeared featuring the likes of Mickey Mouse, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Little Orphan Annie, The Phantom, Donald Duck, and so many others. In the course of this column, we’ll take you through a selection of them and explore some of the many nuances to collecting BLBs.

Reacting to the growing sense of lawlessness and danger that pervaded 1930s Chicago, Chester Gould (1900-1985) created a comic strip detective who would fight back and put criminals in their place. The hawk-nosed and sharp-chinned “Dick Tracy” debuted in October 1931 with a story in which the father of Tracy’s girlfriend, Tess Trueheart, is killed, inspiring Tracy to join the Plainclothesmen Squad and dedicate his life to preserving justice.

Tracy instantly struck a chord with his unswerving devotion to the truth, not to mention his penchant for using some muscle to get the job done when necessary. Tracy gained a sidekick in adopted son Junior, and although Tracy’s early adventures were gritty and down-to-earth, he soon found himself facing an increasingly grotesque assortment of underworld types that would make the series a pop culture institution. Criminals like Pruneface, Flattop, Gravel Gertie, and B.O. Plenty matched wits with Tracy and his assistants Pat Patton and Sam Catchem, and very often the deformed ne’er-do-wells died at the end of their final confrontation with Tracy. Gould paradoxically treated his subject matter with no small amount of realism while populating the series with this endless variety of bizarre villains.

Fans also thrilled to Tracy’s use of futuristic technology, namely his famous two-way wrist TV communicator, first seen in 1964 and later upgraded to a computer in 1986. The strange balance of reality and fantasy made Dick Tracy a potent figure who soon found his way to comic books like Popular ComicsDick Tracy Meets Gruesome, pitting Boris Karloff against the detective; and television with a live-action series that debuted in 1950 and ran in syndication for years. 130 animated cartoon shorts were released in the 1960s, and Tracy also turned up as one rotating backup animated segment of 1971-73 Archie’s TV Funnies.

In addition to those appearances and a torrent of merchandise, Warren Beatty took on the yellow trench coat and fedora in a 1990 Disney feature film also starring Madonna and Al Pacino. Following Gould’s retirement in 1977, Max Allan Collins took over scripting the newspaper strip with art by Rick Fletcher, succeeded by the team of Michael Kilian and Dick Locher. Tracy sure was ahead of his time–today you can even buy a high-tech, web-capable wristwatch that looks just like Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio!

If you’d like to know more about Big Little Books, check out The Big Big Little Book Book – An Overstreet Photo-Journal, which is an amazing compendium of information and images about Big Little Books and other publications associated with the form. It’s full color, 272 pages, and it’s packed with the history of these little classics. And it’s only $19.95!