Editing Dick Tracy (section)

===The 1950s===
[[File:Spike Dyke Dick Tracy.jpg|right|thumb|370px|In 1949, [[Spike Jones]] was caricatured in the ''Dick Tracy'' dailies as Spike Dyke]]

Gould introduced topical story lines about television, [[juvenile delinquency]], [[Police corruption|graft]], [[organized crime]], and other developments in American life during the 1950s; elements of [[soap opera]] depicted Dick, Tess, and Junior (along with the Tracys' baby daughter Bonnie Braids) at home as a family. Depictions of family life alternated with the story's crime drama, as in the kidnapping of Bonnie Braids by fugitive Crewy Lou, or Junior's girlfriend Model being accidentally killed by her brother.

Gould incurred some controversy when he had Tracy live in an unaccountably ostentatious manner on a police officer's salary, and he responded with a story wherein Tracy was accused of corruption and had to explain the origin of his possessions in detail. In his book-length examination of the strip, ''Dick Tracy – The Official Biography'', Jay Maeder suggested that Gould's critics were unsatisfied by his explanation. Nevertheless, the controversy eventually faded, and the cartoonist reduced exposure to Tracy's home life.

Tracy's cases generally incriminated independent operators rather than organized crime—with a few exceptions, such as [[Alphonse "Big Boy" Caprice|Big Boy]], a fictionalized version of [[Al Capone]] and the strip's first villain. Tracy contended with a series of big-time mobsters in the 1950s, such as the King, George "Mr. Crime" Alpha, Odds Zonn, and Willie "The Fifth" Millyun, after events like the [[Kefauver Hearings]]. As Tess faded into the background, Tracy took, as his assistant, the rookie policewoman Lizz Worthington, a photographer who becomes a highly capable police officer, which was a rare female character type for its time.

From 1956 to 1964, the ''Dick Tracy'' Sunday page was accompanied by a [[Topper (comic strip)|topper]] humor strip called ''The Gravies'' and drawn by Gould and his assistants.

The 1950s are often considered the strip's artistic and commercial prime, which is thought to come to an end with the 1959 story with the villains The Fifth and his colleague, Flyface. In that story, The Fifth was Gould's criticism of the constitutional [[right to silence]] with the gangster invoking that right for any question, which his cohort and legal representation, Flyface, was a caricature of lawyers as a repellent man constantly swarmed by flies as was most of his family as well. In that story, Gould's creative weaknesses began to become more obvious with his vitriolic overlong condemnation of the [[rights of the accused]] and any new restraint on police practices no matter how justified, while his grotesque style for his villain characters began to alienate contemporary readers enough to prompt newspapers to drop the strip.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Maeder |first1=Jay |title=Dick Tracy : the Official Biography |date=1990 |publisher=Plume |pages=183–5 }}</ref>