consumes a can of beans which turns out to be the can he was searching for. As is sometimes common in cartoon strips, Fosdick "dies" but (thanks to Lester Gooch) Fosdick comes back to life to inflict more chaos and mayhem on innocent citizens. No one is spared Capp's merciless satire in "The Case of the Poisoned Beans"—from the venality of the justice system to the crookedness of a complicit media (which refuses to air public safety warnings for fear of offending its sponsor, Old Faithful Beans); from the corruption of big business to the fickleness and stupidity of a complacent public. The diabolical plot, which concerns urban terrorism and product tampering, presaged the 1982 Tylenol case by more than 30 years. "Capp makes Fosdick's police brutality acceptable, even funny, because Fosdick acts out of misguided goodness. He is, like Abner, an innocent," wrote Max Allan Collins in 1990. He's also a victim of the system himself. According to Capp, "Fosdick is underpaid only in terms of money. His superiors and his community are lavish with things worth more than money, such as hollow praise and chances to risk his life." Capp dedicated a book of reprinted Fosdick continuities to "all underpaid cops, because there are no other kind." Chester Gould's reaction Newspaper editors began clamoring for Fosdick to star in his own strip, something Capp briefly considered. Chester Gould, the creator of Dick Tracy, reportedly did not find Capp's parody particularly funny. This is not surprising, since Fearless Fosdick lampoons every aspect of Dick Tracy, all grossly exaggerated for comic effect, from Fosdick's impossibly square-jawed profile to his propensity for creating mayhem beyond all reason. The style of the Fosdick sequences closely mimics Tracy—including the urban setting, the outrageously grotesque villains, the galloping mortality rate, the thick square panels, the crosshatched shadows, and even the lettering style. Gould was also probably less than enamored of his own unflattering portrayal in the character of Fosdick's "creator," the diminutive and occasionally mentally deranged cartoonist Lester Gooch. (Even Gooch's bogus "autograph" in the panels of Fearless Fosdick is a parody of Gould's own famously flamboyant signature.) Gooch toiled for the abusive and corrupt "Squeezeblood Syndicate," a dig at Capp's own real-life syndicate, United Features, which owned Li'l Abner until Capp successfully wrested back ownership in 1948. Ironically, the post-Gould Dick Tracy's favorite cartoon character was Fearless Fosdick. Whatever Capp really thought of