Big Boy Caprice

"Big Boy"
Al Pacino as "Big Boy" Caprice in the 1990 film adaptation
Publication information
Publisher	Tribune Media Services
First appearance	October 11, 1931
Created by	Chester Gould

"Big Boy" is a fictional character in the comic strip Dick Tracy, created by Chester Gould.

Big Boy made his first published (though apparently not chronological) appearance in Dick Tracy's second Sunday strip (October 11, 1931). In that self-contained story, Tracy, already a member of the police department's detective bureau, leads a raid on Big Boy's nightclub in order to arrest the mobster, and is able to thwart Big Boy's escape.

On October 12, 1931, the daily strip began its run. Big Boy was the main villain in the first published daily serial of the strip. His minions rob and murder Emil Trueheart right in front of his family and Tracy, then kidnap Tess Trueheart, Tracy's girlfriend. In response, Tracy joins the Detective Bureau and becomes the thorn in the gangster's side. The events in this daily story apparently predate the events depicted in the Sunday strip of the previous day. The Sunday strips and daily strips continued to run separately for the first few months of the feature.

Big Boy was featured in several different daily continuities and Sunday stories during the early years of the strip, becoming Gould's most frequently recurring villain, and during those early years was a sort of "gray eminence" behind virtually all the criminal activity Tracy was constantly thwarting, even in stories in which he wasn't the featured villain.

The character eventually faded away until the 1970s, when Max Allan Collins revived him for one last story. By this time, Big Boy's power had faded considerably from an autocratic boss to merely one of the members of the nationwide criminal cartel referred to, in the strip, as The Apparatus. Furthermore, his health declined seriously, to the point that he was terminally ill.

Determined to have his revenge on Tracy for ruining his power base, Big Boy creates an open contract, an offer of one million dollars to anyone who kills Tracy. As a result, Tracy is repeatedly attacked by amateurs. As Tracy and his partners, Sam Catchem and Lizz, take precautions and investigate, a professional criminal bomber, "Little" Littel, makes his own attempt with a car bomb. Moon Maid, Tracy's daughter-in-law and the wife of Tracy's adopted son, Junior, is killed by the bomb.