Comic strip police detective Dick Tracy lost a valuable member of his crime-fighting team this week in Michael Kilian, who died at age 66.
The Tribune columnist, reporter and book author wrote “Dick Tracy” (under the byline “Mike Kilian”) with artist and collaborator Dick Locher for 12 years.
Kilian was only the third person to script the square-jawed detective’s adventures. Kilian and Locher updated the strip with modern technology and plots inspired by current events.
“He was very good at plot and, in my mind, a really good writer . . . and he’d give you a wallop, right between the eyes,” Locher said. “He had a great criminal mind.”
In October 1931, creator Chester “Chet” Gould first published the strip about an average man who embarked on a crime-fighting crusade after his sweetheart was kidnapped and her father was robbed and murdered. Tracy soon became an honorary member of the Chicago Police Department’s plainclothes squad, then later became a full-fledged police detective.
Gould retired from the strip in 1977, handing over the reins to artist Rick Fletcher, a former assistant, and crime writer Max Allan Collins (“Road to Perdition”). Locher, also a former assistant to Gould, took over the artistic duties in 1983, and Collins left the strip in 1993.
“They asked me who I wanted,” said Locher, winner of a 1983 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. “Mike was my first choice.”
Locher and Kilian met in 1972, when they served on the Tribune editorial board.
“When people at the syndicate surveyed the field, he rose to the top,” said John Twohey, vice president for editorial and operations at Tribune Media Services, which syndicates “Dick Tracy.” “He had established himself as a successful novelist before that. He had a series of crime novels and mysteries that sold very well.”
Kilian’s books include Civil War mysteries “Murder at Manassas,” “A Killing at Ball’s Bluff” and, recently, “Antietam Assassins.”
But Kilian’s addition to the Dick Tracy legacy was a sense of urgency, said Jean O’Connell, daughter of creator Gould.
“His storytelling was very interesting in that he didn’t go into a lot of detective work, but he kept up with the current events,” O’Connell said. “That’s what I noticed most of all. He was on top of the very current events.”
Recent story lines included digital piracy and rising gas prices. In 2002 the Tracy team worked with the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to work “pictures and descriptive information” of actual missing children into the strip.
Kilian and Locher added villains Dab Stract, Pixel and Cellphone to Tracy’s pantheon of crooks, and they updated Tracy’s James Bond-like arsenal of crime-fighting tools.
“Mike added innovations,” said Andy Feighery, publisher of The Dick Tracy Magazine, a fan publication for Tracy enthusiasts. “Two-way wrist radio got a real refreshing boost when they added new features.”
The wrist radio became a “wrist geenee” under Locher and Kilian — a multimedia gadget that could take photos, print out evidence and send mug shots to Tracy’s colleagues.
Locher says he and Kilian would talk Sundays to plot out the following week’s story arc.
“He would suggests visuals, and I would suggest dialogue,” Locher said of their working relationship. The pair generally worked 12 weeks in advance, so Kilian’s final strips will run until January, Locher said.
“The syndicate is determined to keep going with the feature, no question about that,” Twohey said. “We’ll have to start the search immediately [for a replacement]. There’ll be no interruption in story to subscribers. . . . But he won’t be easy to replace.”
“Dick Tracy” appears in 50 newspapers nationwide.
Locher describes his friend as having “something of a bulldog nature.”
“If he had a story that he liked, he’d stay with it tenaciously,” Locher says. “We lose a great plot master and a guy who was good at yanking people around and surprising them.”
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relder@tribune.com
