Big Boy and Mr Big
“If you
will allow the conceit, I see myself sometimes as one of those great Egyptian
fresco painters who devoted their lives to producing masterpieces in the tombs
of kings, knowing that no living eye would ever see them.” Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die, 1954
Mr Big sat in front of the English secret
agent James Bond. He was a monstrous man
who had devoted his life to creating the greatest criminal enterprise that
would remain forever unknown to ordinary people who worked in factories and
offices. Mr Big’s head, twice the size
of a normal man’s, reminded Bond of a football.
His taut grey-black skin could have been worn by a corpse that had spent
a week in the East River of New York.
The thing Bond found most frightening was the absolute power and genius
intelligence radiating from eyes that danced with evil…
Buanopart Ignace Gallia, aka Mr Big, was far
from being the first freakish fiend to grace pop culture. Most Americans who devoured the James Bond
adventures in the late 1950s and early 1960s had at least a passing familiarity
with the detective Dick Tracy who had a penchant for encountering bad men and
women who belonged in a carnival sideshow…
 |
| Mr Big (Yaphet Koto) prepares to execute James Bond (Roger Moore) and Solitaire (Jane Seymour), the seer who has betrayed him for the love of the secret agent, as one of Big's henchmen looks on. |
Chester Gould, whose Dick Tracy strip debuted in 1931 with a villain named Big Boy,
understood we humans allow ourselves to be publicly fascinated by grotesqueries
in a way that overshadows our power to embrace beauty except in the most
private places of our hearts. Big Boy
was one the few hoodlums Gould permitted to escape swift justice, surviving
encounter after encounter with Tracy for over forty years until one of his
henchmen makes the fatal mistake of murdering the detective’s daughter-in-law…
[The character of Tracy’s daughter-in-law,
incidentally, first entered the comic strip as a result of its creator’s
fascination with futuristic technology.
Gould had already incorporated the notion of a wristwatch allowing for
two-way televised communication between Tracy and police headquarters when he
decided to have to have one of his minor characters invent a “magnetic space
coupe” that journeys to the Moon. There,
the daughter of the Moon’s Supreme Governor stows away and travels back to
Earth where she and Tracy’s adopted son fall in love and soon become the proud
parents of little Honeymoon Tracy, much to the chagrin of the Supreme Governor
who would have preferred his daughter marry a lad who sported giraffe horns on
his head, a trait that made it relatively simple to distinguish lunar folk from
ordinary humans.
 |
| The Moon Governor and his Daughter, Moon Maid, celebrate her nuptials to Dick Tracy's son |
Gould’s Moon Maid is not to be confused with
Nah-ee-lah, the heroine of Edgar Rice Burrough’s The Moon Maid trilogy, a thinly veiled attack on Russia’s
Communists and their totalitarian mindset set in outer space. Like Honeymoon Tracy’s mother, Nah-ee-lah is also
the daughter of a lunar ruler. She captures
the heart of Julian, another earthling who has traveled into space and who
describes her as being “as perfectly formed a human female as I had even seen”
with raven-black hair and creamy-white skin.
As with many of ERB’s heroines, this Moon Maid turns out to be a strong,
tough-willed, highly intelligent and quick-witted princess who also,
fortunately for the young men who devoured Burroughs stories, passionately believes
beautiful women should never be overly encumbered by garments.]
 |
| Cover art for the 1926 A C McClurg edition of Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel is credited to J Allen St John, whose long career as an illustrator included time as an instructor at the Chicago Institute of Art and the American Academy of Art |
Big Boy dies of a heart attack in the midst
of a fit of rage as Dick Tracy closes in on him. His fate was far more merciful than the one
Ian Fleming bestowed on the nemesis of James Bond-- to be slowly ripped apart
by ravenous barracuda. It is a horrible
fate. Even the secret agent he failed to
kill briefly hopes Mr Big’s disease-ridden heart will fail him and deliver him
the savagery of the fishes’ teeth. But
it does not…
Occasionally, other villains defeated by
Tracy met ends far more gruesome than Big Boy’s. Flattop Jones, loosely patterned on the
real-life Depression era bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd, drowns after being
trapped underwater at a harbor under a replica of the Columbus ship, Santa
Maria. The ocean surface and life are
but inches away from the killer’s eyes as he struggles to free himself. A Nazi spy, The Brow, escapes prison only to
die impaled on a flagpole reserved for the Stars and Stripes of the Land of the
Free and the Home of the Brave. But for
the most part, Dick Tracy’s foes spend their last days in prison as they await
a date with Old Sparky in the execution chamber. Tracy was an old-fashioned cop who tried to
bring the bad guys in alive-- it was a jury’s job to decide the just rewards of
a criminal, not a task for adrenaline-fueled men with badges and guns…
 |
| Al Capone as Big Boy schemes with Madonna as Breathless Mahoney on the best ways to do in a pesky detective in Warren Beatty's film adaptation of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy comic strip |
Big Boy and Mr Big belong to the world of
human oddities, a landscape greatly favored by both Robert Ripley of Believe It or Not fame and entrepreneurs
whose carnivals and “freak shows” lined their pockets with entrance fees paid
by gawking rubes eager to see human deformities…
Ripley’s interest in unusual people remains
far more palatable to modern sensibilities than the distasteful public displays
of physically abnormal persons which enthralled viewers in Europe and the
United States from the 16th to early 20th centuries. Born in 1890, Ripley was a cartoonist with
youthful dreams of becoming a baseball player.
He was fascinated by the incredible diversity of the world around him,
the strangeness of exotic cultures…
It was an interest that embraced the macabre
without pandering too greatly to ghoulish tastes. Ripley was as intrigued by tallest woman in
the world as he was by the voltage generated by electric eels. Culinary delights of Lapps and men who
covered the backs of postage stamps with Biblical quotations both had a home in
his syndicated Believe It Or Not comic
strip, an outgrowth of a sports-oriented cartoon feature which Ripley first
began drawing in 1918…
 |
| D C Comics reprinted the Flattop saga in 1975. The cover art celebrated a number of the strip's favorite villains. |
After Champs
and Chumps became Believe It or Not
in the autumn of 1919, Ripley’s fame soared.
The strip had over eighty million readers during the darkest days of the
Great Depression and World War Two. Not
one to be content with recognition only by newspaper readers, Robert Ripley
recognized the growing importance of radio, movies, television, and public
exhibitions in building and sustaining an audience in what was even then a
rapidly changing world…
Whether it was prescience as to the role
technology would play in creating audiences in the future or merely the drive
of a showman to put on the biggest and bestest spectacle possible, there is no
doubt Ripley’s strategy worked. He did have a bit of P T Barnum in his blood--
over two million visitors to “Ripley’s Odditorium” at the 1933 Chicago World’s
Fair were occasionally distracted by people hired to “faint” at shocking sights
their eyes encountered…
Unlike Barnum and his mermaids of dubious
authenticity, Ripley had a passion for truth and knew he could lose an audience
overnight that had taken him years to build if fraud or factual inaccuracy were
proven. He hired researchers to check
and double check his data-- one of them, Norbert Pearlroth, spent ten hours a
day, six days a week, in New York City’s public library, attempting to disprove
items destined to appear in Ripley’s comic strip…
 |
| Robert Ripley joins five lovely companions for a lake excursion |
[One November 1929 Ripley panel would
eventually spur Congressional action when the cartoonist revealed, despite
popular belief, “The Star Spangled Banner” had never been officially designated
as the National Anthem of the United States of America. In 1931, this legislative oversight would be
corrected with President Hoover’s approval.]
It is to be expected that a chap like Robert
Ripley would carefully cultivate eccentricities to make himself even more
distinctive to the general public. He
had the money to do so-- in addition to the $100,000 salary paid him by William
Randolph Hearst for the rights to his strip, the cartoonist’s other ventures
took in another $400,000 or so yearly during a time when people hit hard by the
Great Depression needed cheap thrills to get them through the day…
He lived a life designed to appeal to the
fantasies of his readers-- traveling the world on Mr Hearst’s dime, surrounding
himself with beautiful girlfriends, attending parties with the likes of the
Marx Brothers and Harry Houdini as guests, broadcasting radio shows from snake
pits and ships in the middle of the ocean, posing for photographs in his
trademark pith helmet and holding the shrunken head of an unfortunate enemy of
South American tribesmen…
 |
| Robert Ripley in a series of publicity photographs |
Quests for the odd and unusual did not place
Mr Ripley on a search for deeper and darker truths about the nature of the
universe…
Such roads were the ones traveled by Charles
Hoy Fort who combined Robert Ripley’s enthusiasm for the bizarre with Norbert
Pearlroth’s passion for sitting in the New York Public Library and doggedly
searching out facts that “Dogmatic Science” preferred to ignore. These were the truths the academic
establishment had relegated to the real of the damned…
Fort had no real explanation for the events
he found chronicled in old newspapers and forgotten books but he had a passion
for forcing scientists to confront phenomena such as red rains, fish falling
from the sky, mariners’ reports of wheels of light just below the ocean’s
waves, anomalous shapes traversing the heavens, flashes of illumination from
the moon’s surface…
 |
| Artist's conception of tests of a Nazi flying saucer-- perhaps the very craft used to ferry Hitler to a sectet base in Antarctica if one conspiracy theory is to be believed |
Despite this, he did offer suggestions as to
what might be going on behind the scenes of our placid world. Perhaps there are worlds and dimensions
parallel to our own, perhaps alien beings abduct us for their scientific
curiosity or amusement, perhaps objects might be teleported instantaneously
from one location to another…
[Generally unsuccessful as a fiction writer,
Fort explored some of his notions in novels.
One suggested a Martian civilization controlled events on Earth. Another hinted at an equally sinister human
civilization based at the South Pole.
This latter notion is favored by a number of modern conspiracy theorists,
some of whom assert the Nazis created a secret base in Antarctica, with Hitler
escaping to a safe-- if not frozen-- haven in one of the flying saucers the
Third Reich secretly built during the closing days of the second world war.]
Charles Fort published his first collection
of data, The Book of the Damned, in
1919, the year that Robert Ripley changed the name of his fact-based cartoon to
Believe It or Not. Unlike the erstwhile baseball player, Fort
failed to capture an extremely large following among the general public but he
did attract a number of the more minds of his day…
Prominent intellectuals who immediately
rallied to Fort’s call to not ignore the “damned”, those anomalous events that
couldn’t be pigeon-holed into the notion of a mechanistic and orderly universe,
included Theodore Dreiser, Ben Hecht, Alexander Woollcott, H L Mencken, Booth
Tarkington, Tiffany Thayer, John Cowper Powys.
Fort himself refused to accept leadership of a Fortean Society created
in his honor, neither willing to be bothered by the time such duties entailed
nor desiring to be cast in the role of authority figure for anyone other than
himself…
 |
| Charles Fort and wife Anna |
Today, Charles Fort is generally regarded as
a harmless crank, occasionally mentioned by the scientists he mocked as a mere
collector of data that could surely be explained if Fort had bothered to dig a
little deeper into the circumstances surrounding red snows on the Antarctic ice
or people whose charred remains hint at spontaneous human combustion. He is seen by The Establishment as a bit akin
to Robert Ripley-- a chap who loved interesting facts but had no real desire to
explain anything, a little boy who brings a nine-legged spider to class to
shock the teacher…
Perhaps he was less of a crank and more of a
man who wished to create masterpieces of data that would remain uncatalogued by
today’s ordinary minds, awaiting intellects of the future that would see
patterns that he himself never saw. In
this, he would be akin to those great Egyptian fresco painters admired by Mr
Big, toiling away to honor kings whose living eyes would never see them…
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CREDITS
Note:
All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia,
without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Jane
Seymour and Yaphet Koto still from Live and Let Die (Director: Guy Hamilton,
1973) photograph of Charles and Anna Fort from http://www.forteantimes.com/features/commentary/
395/who_was_charles_fort.html; Robert Ripley photographs from “The
Unbelievable Mr Ripley” by Neal Thompson
(linked below); Dick Tracy by Chester Gould cartoons from Chicago Tribune New
York News Syndicate and D C Comics; Al Pacino and Madonna still from Dick
Tracy (Director: Warren Beatty, 1990);
Nazi flying saucer from http://www.henrymakow.com/nikola_tesla2.html Research for topics covered in this essay
consists primarily of information from readily available sources such as
Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica except as noted: Mr Big quotation
taken from Live and Let Die by Ian
Fleming, 1954; additional Robert Ripley biographical data from “The
Unbelievable Mr Ripley” by Neal Thompson,
extract published in Vanity Fair (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/05/robert-ripley-believe-it-or-not)
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