Planning, a trade journal for city planners, wanted a Dick Tracy-like character for a sidebar comic strip on real estate scams. Actually they wanted Dick Tracy but in the interests of not getting sued I went with something similar but not exact.

Rather than parody Tracy as he was at that time, I opted to go back to the source– creator Chester Gould’s work from the 1940s. That was when the character became an icon, and as a cartoonist, it was just much more fun to riff off of Gould than Dick Locher, who was illustrating it at the time.

Footnote: I recently rediscovered Dick Tracy...the comic strip is still running and can be found on gocomics.com. Sadly, it's not very good these days. A darn shame that is.