Turn on your two-way wrist radio and flip on your fedora: Dick Tracy turns 75 this week.

On Oct. 4, 1931, after 10 years of pitching comic strips to the Chicago Tribune and its Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, Chester Gould finally struck gold – a tough-as-nails, scrupulously honest cop named Dick Tracy, who was a combination of Sherlock Holmes and the real-life Eliot Ness.

Gould was a news junkie and, living in Chicago in the 1920s and ’30s, grew frustrated with seeing mobsters run the town. Since most of the real-life Windy City cops didn’t seem interested in catching the crooks, Gould decided to create his own superdetective to show them how it could be done.

He wanted to call his creation Plainclothes Tracy, but his publisher opted for “Dick,” a common nickname for a detective at the time. Since then, the strip has appeared in hundreds of newspapers around the world. Tracy has conquered every entertainment medium: comic books, films, radio shows, a series of Republic movie serials, two television shows and more than 140 cartoons.

He’s best known to modern fans from the 1990 movie starring Warren Beatty in the title role. It was released five years after the death of Gould. The flick, a partial success at best, featured Madonna as Breathless Mahoney and a host of Hollywood actors hamming it up as Tracy villains: Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, James Caan and Mandy Patinkin among others.

IDW Publishing, a small comic company, is honoring the Tracy strip by collecting all 75 years’ worth in hardbound books and releasing them in chronological order at the rate of two or three a year. The first volume, covering the period from October 1931 to May 1933, comes out Oct. 25, and will contain 500 strips ($29.99). As a bonus, it will include the rarely seen five sample strips that Gould used to persuade the Chicago Tribune syndicate to buy his strip.

Few remember Tracy’s origin, which is very Batmanlike in retrospect. Young Tracy went to propose to Tess Trueheart, when criminals broke in and shot and killed her father. Tracy vowed to become a police officer and devote his life to bringing criminals to justice.

And that’s what he did for the next 75 years.

Tracy’s foes were as ugly as they were memorable. Gould once said that he wanted his villains to look evil, so no one could mistake what was in their hearts. Usually their names were sufficient description. There was a unibrowed Flattop; Pouch, a former circus fat man who lost hundreds of pounds but kept the floppy skin; Puckerpuss; Pruneface; Doc Hump; and the faceless Blank.

“Flattop is everybody’s favorite, I suppose,” Max Allen Collins, who wrote the strip from 1977 to 1992, said in a published interview. “But my two favorites are the Brow, that wonderful Nazi spy, and his best female villain, Crewey Lou. Of my villains, I like Snake Eyes the best. Ironically that was the last villain I created for the strip.”

Tracy always had cutting-edge equipment that would make the cast of “CSI” envious. His tools were decades ahead of what police used in real life, but his methods eventually would become commonplace. Tracy used fingerprints, cell phones, caller ID, phone-call tracing, voice-recognition technology, lasers, wrist communicators and closed-circuit television police lineups to protect witnesses.

Gary Sassaman, a Dick Tracy fan from San Diego, is enamored with Gould’s artwork but also fascinated by the almost historic quality of the work.

“When this was created, real-life gangsters like Al Capone were in the news,” he said in a telephone interview. “Tracy’s adventures resonated with the people of the time because it was torn from the headlines. During World War II, people were looking for something to distract them from the war, and Gould gave them stories even weirder than the daily events.”

While Tracy wore his trademark yellow hat and trench coat through much of his career, writers periodically would try to goose the character by giving him a crew cut in the early 1960s; long hair and a moustache in the late 1970s; and a motorcycle to ride in 1973, with fond memories of “Easy Rider.”

But Tracy is not a slave to fashion. He’s an icon and soon all attempts to make him anything but a two-fisted tough cop were abandoned.

Dick Locher, an editorial cartoonist at the Chicago Tribune, is the current writer/artist of the strip, which appears in about 100 newspapers daily. He was one of Gould’s former assistants and drew the strip beginning in 1983. He took over writing the strip as well about a year ago.

“There are no other crime comic strips out there,” Locher said. “To me, the characters are the three-ring circus, and Tracy is the pole holding the whole thing up.”

In keeping with the tradition of timely villains, Locher’s latest is Al Kinda, a bumbling terrorist.

“It’s important to bring it into modern times,” he said. “Back in the old days, we had Capone. Today, Tracy would face white-collar criminals and drug dealers.”

Locher said one thing he has learned over the years is to not mess with comic strips.

“People are very passionate about their comic strips, messing with one is like using someone’s toothbrush,” he said. “I have a letter framed in my office from a fan that says, ‘If you cancel Dick Tracy, I’ll kill you.’ That’s a fan.”

For further information, visit the Chester Gould-Dick Tracy Museum in Woodstock, Ill., at www.chestergould.org. For more Dick Tracy info, including a lengthy history and timeline, go to www.comicspage.com/dicktracy/