There are some pretty decent storylines here, beginning with the conclusion of the Flattop Jr. story, where Flattop Jr. is haunted by the ghost of a young woman he had killed -- or is he tormented by a guilty conscience? There are some truly chilling sequences, as when a young girl is sneaking into a darkened walk-in freezer and feeling about for her favorite ice-cream bars, unaware of the frozen corpse of her father a few feet away. But there are segments that range from lame to truly offensive. The former is represented by a movement that Gould attempted to start within his strip toward crew cuts and dressing sharp among younger people. The latter is represented by one of Gould's most offensive stories, in which B.O. Plenty's 88-year-old father Morin Plenty shows up with a doting child-bride of perhaps 19. When she dies tragically, he apparently moves on toward grooming her twin sister as a replacement. The Dick Tracy stories have become a guilty pleasure for me, but I've always felt that Gould's elevated reputation among comic historians has been undeserved. ( )