Nightmare Fuel / Dick Tracy

Many of the deaths in Dick Tracy are horrifying, not to mention surprisingly gruesome for a newspaper comic. What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?

Nightmare Fuel for the comics

In General

• The general freakish nature of most of Tracy's Rogues Gallery.
• The Anyone Can Die nature of the comic lends itself to very grim situations. Suffice it to say NO ONE is safe in this comic. Some notable instances include:
  • Brilliant Smith, a regular recurring character, and the inventor of Tracy's iconic two-way wrist radio. He gets abruptly killed by Big Frost when he breaks into his apartment and kills him without a word. As a side note, Brilliant is 'blind, so despite the fact that he knew someone was there, he couldn't defend himself.
  • Stooge Viller is one of the few villains of the 1930s to make multiple appearances, to the point where a reader might consider him one of the few villains with Joker Immunity. Nope. He accidentally gets shot by his 9 year old daughter while trying to disarm her in the middle of pushing Tracy off of a ledge. He's arrested and dies in prison from gangrene, his last words to Tracy being to NEVER let his daughter know he died. One can only wonder what'd happen if she knew.
  • Big Boy, the first real Big Bad of the series, dies of a heart attack just as he's about to be arrested.
  • Moon Maid, Junior's wife is killed by a car bomb. To say this was unexpected of such a major character would be an insane understatement.
  • The Summer Sisters, a pair of naughty thieves who try to reform to get the Nazi agent "The Brow" arrested, get drowned in one of the most traumatic sequences in the entire series.
  • Flattop, one of the comic's most iconic villains, died when he was trapped inside a full-scale model of the Santa Maria, and drowned when the tide came in, his desperate struggle shown on panel the whole time. 30 years later, his daughter Angeltop died in the same ship, except she was burned alive when the ship caught fire.
  • Johnny Scorn was incinerated by his popcorn cart, which had its gasline sabotaged by The Pouch.
  • Jerome Trohs, better known as The Midget, was scalded to death with extremely hot shower water by his wife Mama as revenge for leaving her to the cops.
  • All of the above culminate in creating an extremely alarming atmosphere where month-old Bonnie Tracy is accidentally kidnapped and dumped by her kidnapper in an open car in the middle of the woods in extreme cold. Luckily she makes it, but jeez.
• The various death traps certainly qualify...
  • The boulder trap: Tracy is dropped into a hole near a construction site, and a boulder is dropped on top of him. To make things worse, the police force (Tracy's boss, partner, and various co-workers) show up, and are utterly unable to do anything as the boulder drops all the way down the hole (slowly).
  • The ice block trap: Caught and held hostage by Itchy Oliver and Kitty Eyes (B. B. Eyes' widow), Tracy is placed between two ice blocks, a refrigerator attached to a spike is placed on top of the two blocks, with the spike aimed at his heart. The intended result being that the spike would slowly descend into his heart as the ice melted. To compound the issue, the doors and windows were closed and the oven turned on and opened.

Specific examples

• The Blank's real face.
• In a 1940's storyline (Yanni Yogi), Tracy sends Tess in to see if a couple of fortune tellers are robbing their clients. She creates a diversion by pretending to be suicidal by pointing a gun at her head. You actually feel a bit sympathetic for the villain as he tries to calm her down. Then it's revealed that they robbed her anyway. Yikes.
  • Then it's revealed that the seeming wife/accomplice of Yanni had actually been under his mind control for 2 years, forced to help him commit crimes and god knows what else. Assuming she wasn't lying to save herself, of course. Oh, and she's probably still in jail for everything she was most likely forced to do.
  • Yanni's death. Turns out that mind-control gas is extremely flammable without constant refrigeration, so when Yanni accidentally spills alcohol on himself while drunk, he is immolated.
  • Just the concept of the gas. You lose all free will to the person who gassed you. Made somewhat worse by the fact that the inventor casually mentions he tried to sell it to Hitler at first.
• Tracy sends Officer O'Malley to figure out how B.B. Eyes's scheme works. B.B. Eyes sends O'Malley's corpse back.
• The Brow had a Cold-Blooded Torture device consisting of a small mechanical iron maiden that closed around the victim's leg. Eventually, the villain gets caught in it by the head. He has no choice but to tear his bleeding head out of it before it can close on him completely.
• The Brow hid from the good guys in a box filled with ice cold water. He had nothing but a hose for air, and a weight to keep him down. Freezing. Underwater. In the dark. For hours.
• The Flattop Jr. storyline is brutal, noted among comic scholars as an exceptional example of how far Gould could go in sadistic directions when punishing his villains. When Skinny, a girl he's been stringing along, reveals she entered his art in a local competition, thereby accidentally incriminating him, he loses it and throws her off the roof of the apartment to her death. Afterwards, Junior suffers a gradual nervous breakdown, as he starts to feel her invisible, ever-clinging arms wrapped around his neck◊, with her ghost's face in an unmoving rictus of a smile. By the time he encounters Lizz by accident, he's gone completely insane, raving and bug-eyed with snow-white hair◊. The conclusion, where Flattop dies and Skinny's ghost flies away at last◊, isn't the "happy" one intended so much as it is quite disturbing.
• Flattop's apparent cameo on 10-3-2003. If he's really still out there, he has more than enough reasons by now to come gunning for Tracy. Keep in mind that drowning is the least effective way of taking a Dick Tracy villain out permanently (see Mumbles, Flyface, and B-B Eyes).

Nightmare Fuel for the movies

The 1990 movie

• Many of the prosthetics are incredibly grotesque with some like Little Face and Pruneface being especially memorable. Steve the Tramp however, is quite hideous looking. The fact he's prone to beating Kid makes it worse.
• Lips Manlis' Cruel and Unusual Death where he's put into a crate, covered in cement, and then dumped into the lake to drown. The fact he's begging not to die that way, not to be spared, just NOT to die THAT WAY, only adds to the horror of the scene.
  • Even worse in the novelization - they fill the crate all the way, meaning that Lips drowned in wet cement. When describing it to Breathless, Tracy outright calls it a lousy way to go.
• The Blank qualifies as this. For most of the film, we don't know who they are, or what their endgame is. They appear dressed in a black overcoat and fedora, they speak in a high, creepy voice that's been filtered to sound outright ghoulish, and they don't have a face.
  • And as the movie goes on, no one is safe from them - Pruneface gets gunned down while trying to shoot Tracy, Tess gets abducted, Tracy gets framed for shooting the DA, and then Big Boy himself gets set up when the Blank stashes the kidnapped Tess in his nightclub!
    • In the novel, when kidnapping Tess, he strokes her face in a manner that suggests he's jealous of her for having features. It's incredibly creepy even though it's not necessarily sexual.

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