MILTON CANIFF:
AN ENTERTAINER SELLING NEWSPAPERS

Never one for boastful pride nor false modesty, Milton Caniff (1907-1988) would usually tell people that he saw himself as "an entertainer", first and foremost, whose role was "to force the customer to buy tomorrow's newspaper". The "customer" wasn't the kids, they didn't buy the paper; "I'm interested in pleasing their daddies". As Caniff explained to Will Eisner in a 1982 'shop talk', he and his contemporaries had few illusions that they were creating art or literature. They used to think of their daily strips and Sunday pages as "a communication form rather than an art form", a chance to shoot for "a provable mass audience" with the incentive of "being paid on a percentage basis, based on circulation". The more papers you sell in, the more you earn, and it was seriously hard work, but he saw it as more than just making a living, it was "satisfying...to have a platform" and "trying to say something" and at least it was never boring. "You do the best job, and you do it today. Let the future take care of itself."

Still, Caniff did have his eye on the future, and on the past. He understood the significance of his achievements in the newspaper comic strip field and throughout his life strove to raise its status and recognition, for example by helping to found both the National Cartoonists Society and the Newspaper Comics Advisory Council, by being a spokesperson and ambassador for the profession, and by setting a shining example of asking for, and getting, complete control and ownership of his creation Steve Canyon. He also acted to ensure that all his records and archives of the past, "from the nipple to now", would be looked after by entrusting them to his old university, Ohio State, home to America's dedicated Cartoon Research Library, which since 1979 houses The Milton Caniff Research Room. He was looking ahead to the future.

He also had the foresight to appoint an official biographer, the distinguished comics historian and writer Robert C. Harvey. While we eagerly await his 'definitive biography', Harvey has given us almost the next best thing by gathering eighteen of the best interviews he found during his five years of research and editing them into Milton Caniff: Conversations. Here is the man in his own words, forthright, funny and revealing, talking from 1937 to 1986, through almost his entire career on Terry & The Pirates (1934-1946) and Steve Canyon (1947-1988). Some of the 'conversations' take the conventional question and answer format, others are journalistic profiles sprinkled with quotes, while one is a short commentary by Caniff and the final entry is a moving tribute by his long-time art assistant, Richard Rockwell (and yes, he was Norman Rockwell's nephew). I felt spoilt for choice among all these great anecdotes and memories.

Here is Caniff as an up-and-coming, thirty-something Sigma Chi fraternity brother, driving out to Long Island in 1937 with other 'Sigs' Chester Cleveland and pals to interview another famous, slightly older 'Significant Sig', cartoonist Fontaine Fox of Toonerville Trolley fame. When they arrive half an hour too early, young Milt, himself squeezing time away from the constant deadlines of his Terry strip, is only too aware of how precious every minute could be for a daily cartoonist like Fox, for whom "every moment of the all too short day must be budgeted... Mr. Fox has no choice other than to budget, budget, budget his time all day long." Milt insists they adjourn to a tavern so they can arrive on time. Not surprisingly, from this his fellow 'Sigs' immediately nickname Milt 'Budge', or 'Budget'. In fact, Fox turns out to be perfectly unflustered, but this incident does tell us about Caniff's own feelings about the deadline pressures, feelings that never completely left him. In later chatty correspondence with Cleveland, we learn about his tastes, in cigarettes (Old Golds, his fatal addiction), books (often read to him by his wife while he is "toying with my paper dolls"), plays (Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is singled out) and movie stars ("Pearl White and Helen Holmes are really my all-time loves....Real Emotion."). Harvey also notes how Caniff cannily cultivated his fraternity brethren, who numbered several newspaper editors who were likely buyers of a strip by a fraternity brother. Brothers help brothers.

In 1944, as Terry approached its tenth anniversary, Caniff was profiled by The New Yorker no less, a sign of definitely having arrived. By then, the Caniffs were renting 'a large modernistic house' in several acres, designed by the painter Henry Poor with playwrights Maxwell Anderson, John Houseman and Kurt Weill for neighbours. But, as John Bainbridge recounts, Caniff "is too busy to have much chance to enjoy his possessions." Bainbridge reports that, even putting in fifteen hours a day and using assistants on Terry, Caniff, a stickler for detail and research, has managed to meet the syndicate deadlines, which demand dailies four weeks in advance of publication and Sunday pages nine weeks ahead, only "twice in the nine years the contract has run". Actually, as another writer, Austin Stevens, later calculates, Caniff was averaging four drawings every Monday to Saturday, another eleven for the Sunday page, 35 per week, that's 1,820 per year. The profile also includes a fascinating account of Chicago Tribune and New York News publisher Captain Joseph Patterson's specifications for the Terry strip, and his comment on how Caniff had successfully evolved it over the years from a comic strip into a "romantic and dramatic continued serial".

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Bainbridge also records the historic reading into the Congressional Record of Flip Corkin's speech to Terry in the Sunday page monologue when Terry wins his wings in the Air Forces in October 1943. It can be no coincidence that earlier that year Caniff had failed his physical, twice, due to his phlebitis and was classified 4-F. Bainbridge mentions this, but I wanted to know how Caniff felt about his bad leg keeping him out of the fighting. This is only disclosed in this book much later. In 1979, for example, he confesses to Austin Stevens in Yankee, "Not being in the service put me in an awkward position. I couldn't speak with the same authority as, say, Bill Mauldin. I couldn't form the same kinds of personal statements he was free to make. It could too easily be said, What does he know." When pressed in a 1982 feature Homefront Commando appropriately in Airman, Caniff admits that his patriotic strips had helped him cope with his "home-front neurosis". "There was a slight tinge of guilt, because being in the military was something I had always wanted to do... Fortunately, the strips have allowed me to have this close association with the military." He served his country through his comics. As well as sharing Terry's training and pilot experiences through the strip, almost living them vicariously, Caniff also did his duty by drawing without pay his Male Call starring Miss Lace, a weekly morale and libido booster for the troops published in the greatest number of individual publications of any comic strip.

Among further little-seen Forties coverage gleaned by Harvey is Marcia Winn's 1945 visit to the studio of this "blue-eyed, black-haired Irishman". I appreciated her observations of his working methods (on "three drawing boards", he "writes with his right hand and draws, paints, and prints with his left") and the decor ("on the mantel rest...a wicked curved blade used for cutting brush in the South Pacific"), as well as more on the real life people who had inspired characters in the strip. In the industry bible Editor & Publisher, Helen Staunton a year later marked Miss Lace's return to her ink bottle and after feverish speculation followed up with the unveiling of Caniff's new strip, Steve Canyon, just under two months before it was due to start on January 13th 1947. As early as this, she confirms that 162 daily papers and 96 Sunday papers had already booked the new strip. The story was so big, it made the front cover of Time and an article excerpted here, which hails him as "the best tantalizer in the profession" and "a frustrated actor" who "has borrowed many a trick of stagecraft...to keep his audience on the edge of their chairs". This remark made me think how Caniff's love of acting, as a boy in walk-ons in silent movies, as a youth on stage, his consideration of the theatre as a career, his enjoyment of plays, must have informed his performances through his "puppets" acting on the printed page.

Other highlights included here are Jay Maeder's 1972 interview where Caniff has his eye keenly trained on innovators like Johnny Hart and Garry Trudeau, two interviews with Steve Canyon letterer Shel Dorf, Arn Saba's conversation for The Comics Journal, and Eisner's spirited Shop Talk. I was intrigued to read what Caniff might have done with Terry & The Pirates, writing in a 1973 piece after George Wunder's continuation of the strip had been cancelled, when he felt able to talk about his ideas, such as: "a whooping confrontation between Big Stoop and the Dragon Lady"; "I planned to have Pat Ryan marry Burma"; and "a stateside story" in which "I was going to make a big thing of all these China Hands returning to the U.S. and showing how the picaresque hero from the Far Places does not always fare so well in the conventional surroundings back home". But this was just conjecture and there was a sadness about its ending, because, as he told Dorf, "...once it's dead, it's dead! You can't revive one of these things. That part I regret." No mention is made of the later attempted revival and updating that swiftly folded.

Harvey's choice for the final conversation is a particularly fruitful one from 1986 between Caniff and the strip and political cartoonist, Spirit scripter, screenwriter and children's book author Jules Feiffer, who talked for four and half hours about Caniff's oeuvre and numerous other classic strips and their creators. Feiffer then distilled it all down to a Caniff monologue interspersed with his reflections. Ever since his seminal 1965 work, The Great Comic Book Heroes (whose essays have just been republished in book form by Fantagraphics Books), Feiffer has been one of America's most entertaining and astute analysts of the comics, writing from a passionate relationship to the works. For instance, he has no time for characters like Terry growing up. "The whole idea of cartoon characters is, or should be, to represent us in place, a better place than the place we now occupy; certainly a funnier, a more entertaining place." I love Feiffer summations like "Alex Raymond drew models, Caniff drew women, Crane drew gals and Will Eisner drew dames." Such wit, economy and pin-sharp perception. As he writes autobiographically, "One knew-even the eleven year old suspected-that a man-say, a very young man-could spend the night and that Burma would please him beyond his wildest dreams and that the Dragon Lady would please herself."

It was another of the greatest adventure strip artists, Noel Sickles, who shared a studio with Caniff and encouraged a greater realism to Caniff's artistic approach. The revolutinary style grew out of expediency. They both needed a way to draw faster than the old meticulous outlines and solid blacks. Caniff explained, "[Sickles] started fooling around with the chiaroscuro technique... developing an image with just lights and darks. Well, it worked. He figured out how to translate the approach to our strips. We used brushes on the shadow side of our drawing, grouping our blacks and then coming in with pen and ink on the light side. It was fast and that's what we needed, but it was also very effective." Feiffer is full of praise too for Sickles, but makes the crucial distinction, "...of the two, Caniff was the artist. Caniff was able to take all the elements that Sickles introduced, add story to them, add character to them, add cinematography, and out of the blend create a genuine full-bodied vision."

At 270 pages, counting Harvey's pertinent introduction and handy chronology, this book pieces together a spoken self-portrait, a treasure trove of insights. My favourite line of all in the book, one that made me laugh out loud, comes from Rockwell Kent's 1989 coda 'Remembering Caniff', in which he bemoans the sorry fate of the story strips, shrunk to a row of talking heads. He brilliantly describes the challenge as "...like performing the opera in a subway car at rush hour"!

The 144 pages of Milton Caniff: American Stars & Strips make a perfect complement to Harvey's resource by presenting a wide-ranging selection of rare and significant imagery, Beccattini's concise career overview and his detailed 27-page checklist encompassing practically all of Caniff's cartoons and illustrations from the Twenties, all of his strips, comic books, books, fanzines, advertising, TV series and a selected bibliography. The Gallery section includes thirteen little-seen story illustrations circa 1929 and ten of the advertising comics by 'Paul Arthur' (Caniff's and Sickles' joint pseudonym) shown in color. Regarding Caniff's legacy, Beccattini comes to the same conclusion as Feiffer: "As far as storytelling is concerned, though, Sickles doesn't hold a candle to Caniff. Sickles never really loved the comics medium, whereas Caniff was the quintessential comic artist, able to create a perfect blend of adventure, romance, suspense and comedy through a masterful use of sequential art." As Beccatini points out Scorchy Smith ran in only a limited number of papers for less than three years, so that although "it was Noel Sickles who introduced a new style of drawing to comics, no one can deny that his graphic approach would not have been so influential if it had not been popularized by Milton Caniff." Both of these valuable studies confirm how much Caniff achieved and inspired, while selling tomorrow's newspaper.

The original version of this article appeared in 2002 in the pages of Comic Book Marketplace.