Warren Beatty is being sued over the rights to Dick Tracy, the square-jawed supercop who was created by cartoonist Chester Gould in 1931. Beatty, who bought the rights to the character in 1985, has had some kind of Tracy obsession for much of his career; he used to talk about his lust to don the detective's yellow hat and two-way wrist radio in interviews going back to the 1960s, when talk of a movie based on a comic strip automatically inspired talk about Pop Art and the kind of jolly, mass-market camp typified by the Adam West Batman TV show. When Beatty finally got around to making 1990's Dick Tracy, the film was released in the shadow of Tim Burton's Batman, and Beatty, said by some to be nervous that he was no longer a box office draw for young audiences, consented to a publicity campaign geared around Madonna's role as a singing femme fatale. (In addition to starring as Tracy, Beatty both directed and produced that movie.) In recent years, Beatty has been heard to kick around the idea of doing Dick Tracy II or maybe a TV special, and in 2006 he took Tribune Media Services, which syndicates the comic strip, to court to establish that he still has the rights to the strip. The latest developments stem from Tribune's charges that if Beatty wants to grind out a TV show for no reason except to extend his claim to the rights to the character. The rights may revert to Tribune if the court decides that Beatty has let ten years lapse without making any "productive use" of them.

Gould, who retired from the strip in 1977 (it would be kept alive by other hands) and who died in 1985, apparently not upon hearing that his creation had fallen into the hands of Warren Beatty, created a distinctively flinty world, characterized by what the comics critic R. Fiore called an "unforgiving Calvinism", in which the grimly moralistic Tracy did whatever it took to bring a semblance of order to an urban landscape populated by dupes, saps, and brutish monsters whose misshapen souls had turned their features into Halloween masks. Such characters as the hit man Flattop Jones and the Nazi agent Pruneface might have taken their cues from Richard III's opening soliloquy: "Cheated of feature by dissembling nature/ Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time/ Into this breathing world, scarce half made up/ And that so lamely and unfashionable/ That dogs bark at me, as I halt by them.../And therefore, — since I cannot prove a lover/ To entertain these fair well-spoken days/ I am determined to prove a villain/ And hate the idle pleasures of these days." (The Screengrab: your one-stop on-line shop for comics rants and Shakespeare quotes.)

So far, no screen adaptation of the strip has really tapped into the fevered, hard-boiled nightmare quality of Gould's best early work, which after a long stretch out of print has recently begun reappearing in a series of hardcover volumes from IDW Publishing, beginning in 2006. (Volume 7, with Flattop on the cover, arrives late next month.) Republic Pictures, and later RKO, produced a string of Dick Tracy movies in the 1930s, most of which starred the colorless Ralph Byrd; in the 1960s, UPA produced a series of five-minute cartoons with Everett Sloane providing the voice of Tracy. These are best remembered for the supporting cast, a veritable United Nations of offensive ethnic stereotypes that included such worthies as Go-Go Gomez and Joe Jitsu. (These characters were voiced by Mel Blanc. I'd like to believe that he was high on something at the time.) The question of who may get to take the next crack at getting it right has recently taken on new significance with the bankruptcy of TMS's parent company, the Tribune Company, which filed for Chapter 11 protection late last year, while struggling under a debt load of some $13 billion. Having exclusive rights to Tracy again would be a major asset for a company that can't afford to be picky about where its next meal is coming from.