Milton Caniff By Jeet Heer The Comics Journal #249 (December 2002-This version is considerably longer than the published one). This may be hard to believe in the age of hermit-like alternative artists, but there was a time when cartooning was a glamorous profession which attracted hearty extroverts. Because they earned huge salaries and created stories that millions followed faithfully, comic strip artists were habitually showered with media attention. The most famous of these cartoonists, Al Capp being a prime example, often showed up in gossip columns as swank figures hobnobbing with movie stars, best-selling novelists and powerful politicians. Of all the celebrity cartoonists of the 20th century, none was more genial or likeable than Milton Caniff, best-remembered as the creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. During his long life from 1907 to 1988, Caniff seems to have befriended just about everyone of note: he knew not just fellow in-mates of the funny pages like Walt Kelly and Hal Foster, but also musicians like Kurt Weill, filmmakers like Orson Welles, politicians like Clare Boothe Luce and Barry Goldwater, military leaders like Curtis LeMay and Dwight Eisenhower. Two acts of kindness show the range of Caniff's social network as well as his famous generosity. In the late 1970s Al Capp faced a bleak old age, filled with bitterness over the unsatisfying end of his cartooning career and the suicide of his daughter. Caniff kept in close touch with Capp during the dark period, trying to cheer up his despondent old friend. Around the same time, Robert Crumb found himself facing a huge, almost insurmountable, tax bill. Although he shared none of Crumb's political or social views, Caniff donated money to help out the underground cartoonist. Aside from creating two popular and influential comic strips, Caniff clearly lived a full and interesting life. By bringing together a choice selection of articles and interviews, R.C. Harvey's new book Milton Caniff Conversations gives us a strong sense of the cartoonist's presence, both as a media figure and as a person. The broad outline of Caniff's career are well-known and amply-rehearsed in articles reprinted from the New Yorker, Time magazine, and The Comics Journal. However, the sheer accumulation of biographical facts gathered together allow us to see new patterns in Caniff's life. Born the son of a printer in Hillsboro, Ohio, Caniff had a life-long habit of joining clubs, sometimes even forming fresh organizations of his own. He was a Boy Scout in his youth and a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity as a college Student at Ohio State University. He retained closed ties to both the Scouts and the fraternity all his life, and often promoted them in his work. (Both Pat Ryan, the leading man of Terry and the Pirates, and Steve Canyon were members of Sigma Chi). Given his gregarious nature, it isn't surprising that Caniff dreamed of being an actor as a young man. It was only the Great Depression and the dearth of theatrical jobs that led Caniff to take up cartooning as a career of second choice. Despite being a default career, he quickly rose to prominence, starting his first national daily strip Dickie Dare in 1933. The following year he was hired by Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News Syndicate to create Terry and the Pirates. Caniff's early art on Dickie Dare and Terry was filled with brisk line-work and strachy cross-hatching, barely distinguishable from other adventure strips like Dan Dunn or the early Dick Tracy. Within a year of working on Terry, however, Caniff's art started moving in a direction that secured his fame. Under the tutelage of his friend and studio mate Noel Sickles, Caniff developed his famous chiaroscuro technique, using thick black brush strokes to create an atmospheric style that could be consistently maintained even on a tight dead-line. The distinctive style that Sickles and Caniff invented wasn't simply a matter of penmanship. Both men were devotees of theatre and film, so they aimed for a total visual make-over of comic strip storytelling based on incorporating the dramatic techniques of the stage and cinema. With its exotic locale and sleek femme fatales (most memorably The Dragon Lady), Terry was perhaps the best Hollywood adventure movie ever put to paper. Some have even argued that Caniff outstripped the movies he so avidly borrowed from. "By 1939 Milton Caniff's panels were so subtly planned that they looked like a story board for a movie to be produced ten years in the future," Austen Stevens noted in an article that appeared in Yankee magazine in 1979. "His use of extreme 'camera angles,' dramatic contrasts, the push and pull of pictorial sequence, was paralleled only once in that period, and then in the very advanced movie Citizen Kane, which may or may not be a coincidence. Along with fan mail from John Steinbeck, the Duke of Windsor, and Hap Arnold, Milton Caniff actually did have correspondence with Orson Welles in those days..." As he gained renown for his work on Terry, Caniff continued to widen his social network. As a genuine patriot, he wanted to serve his country during the war. He was twice called up and twice rejected for military service because he suffered from phlebitis. Like Bob Hope, Caniff had to be content with entertaining the troops, which he did by giving "chalk talks" at military hospitals and drawing Male Call, a slightly naughty strip that followed the adventures of a curvaceous brunette who enjoys flirting with soldiers. The close ties that Caniff developed with the military during these years would have a fateful consequence on his work. In addition to his commendable war work, Caniff's clubby nature found an outlet in the National Cartoonists Society (NCS), which he helped found in 1946. Caniff continued to be a prime mover in the NCS until his death and would in turn be repeatedly honored by the society, winning every major award the organization can confer. Although Terry earned Caniff a lucrative salary and much praise, he didn't enjoy being a well-paid serf of a newspaper syndicate that owned the rights to everything he created. In a risky but lucrative move, he quit Terry at the height of its fame and started Steve Canyon. Premiering in 1947, the new strip came complete with a contract that gave Caniff ownership of his work and greater creative freedom. Unfortunately, Caniff never put the freedom he had achieved to good use. With its blandly virtuous hero and blustery communist bad guys, Steve Canyon was little more than a clunky retread of Terry. As Caniff admits in an interview with an Air Force magazine, he felt "home-front neurosis" because he never had the chance to serve his country directly in wartime. Perhaps in compensation, Caniff filled his strip with Cold War propaganda. While this proved popular in the 1950s, by the time the Viet Nam war was underway, both Caniff and Steve Canyon seemed embarrassingly retrograde. Milton Caniff Conversations is a fitting tribute which highlights the cartoonists personal decency as well as his artistic limitations. Throughout these interviews, Caniff prides himself on his realism and research. Yet his commitment to verisimilitude was confined to surface details. Although he drew the uniforms of soldiers accurately, his plots were filled with melodramatic improbabilities and simplistic characterization. His life-long attempt to keep up with hip lingo often made his dialogue painful to read. Although he always worked hard to keep his strips entertaining and fresh, Caniff never put himself into the strip the way that George Herriman or Charles Schulz did. Caniff had a lively and interesting mind, but it rarely peeps through in his work. Time and again in these interviews, he describes himself as a simple newspaperman whose job is to get customers to buy tomorrow's paper. Seeing himself as a commercial artists, Caniff never developed the sense of autonomy that art seems to need. The reason it was so easy for him to put political propaganda into Steve Canyon was that he viewed the strip as tool, rather than as something of value in itself. Whatever the limitations of Caniff as an artist, no one can deny his importance in the history of comics. Which is why Milton Caniff Conversatons is such a welcome volume. Editor Harvey has done an impeccable job in selecting the interviews (taken from publications as diverse as Time magazine and the Rocket's Blast Comic Collector) and supplying appropriate annotation. The book comes with an informative introduction, a detailed chronology, many well-selected illustrations, and a thorough index. Compared to the cut-and-paste shoddiness of comparable books, Harvey displays commendable professionalism. All this labour issues from Harvey's high regard for Caniff, both as a man and as an artist. Perhaps as a suitable follow-up, University of Mississippi Press should consider publishing Harvey's long-anticipated full-length biography of Caniff.