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 to wince, got to be too much for the Atlanta Constitution, one of Tracy's 507 U.S. and Canadian papers.

With a grimace, Constitution Managing Editor William H. Fields announced that Dick Tracy was being dropped from the paper permanently. "Flyface and his mother were bad enough," said Fields, "but the nephew with all those flies! It's enough to make anybody sick." Told of Tracy's exit from the Constitution, Cartoonist Gould, possibly borrowing inspiration from another of his current characters--Fifth, a hood who invokes the Fifth Amendment even in casual conversation--said nothing at all.

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