One of the giants of the American newspaper comic strip, Milton Caniff created the classic adventure strip Terry and the Pirates, which he wrote and illustrated from 1934 through 1946, and then created Steve Canyon, which he continued until his death in 1988. Marking the centennial of Caniff’s birth, Fantagraphics Books has just published Meanwhile...: A Biography of Milton Caniff by Robert C. Harvey, the longtime comic strip historian and scholar.
Harvey began working on the book during Caniff’s lifetime and interviewed him extensively. Not only did Caniff read through chapter seven, covering the Terry years, before his death, but he even suggested the title Meanwhile, a standard caption in the continuity strips of which Caniff was a master.
Readers will be awed at Harvey’s voluminous research, not only into Caniff’s life but into the times and places in which he lived. On the other hand, readers with relatively casual interest in Caniff and his strips may be put off by the sheer size of the book. Harvey tells us (twice) in the book that it was originally 40% longer until a friend of his subjected it to severe copy editing. Even so, the book is now 952 pages long. Caniff doesn’t start drawing Terry until page 200. Those initial 200 pages, covering Caniff’s childhood, college years and early career, may particularly try a reader’s patience.
Readers who already have a strong interest in Caniff’s work and the comic strips of the 1930s and 1940s should find Harvey’s biography more engrossing once Terry begins. Still, virtually every page could benefit from being whittled down further. (For example, do we really need to read so many fan letters written to Caniff?) This is a book for hardcore aficionados of classic comic strips, who will be rewarded if they are willing to invest the time it will take to make their way through this literally weighty tome. It is hard to imagine that a general audience would want to embark on this journey.
As demonstrated in his past books and articles, one of Harvey’s great strengths is his skill at analyzing comics storytelling. In Meanwhile Harvey insightfully explains what made Caniff’s work, as both writer and artist, so revolutionary. Harvey traces how Caniff and his friend Noel Sickles developed their chiaroscuro style of inking, which imparted a strong dramatic atmosphere to their comic strip work. Caniff brought a multidimensional approach to characterization that was brand new to American comic strips, and Harvey is especially good at exploring the psyches of Caniff’s femme fatales, like the Dragon Lady. Harvey superbly analyzes the initial week of Steve Canyon strips, illuminating Caniff’s mastery of building suspense, although he is much less persuasive in his praise of Canyon story lines of later decades.
Perhaps that is because the book contains comparatively few examples of Canyon strips from those years. In contrast, there are plentiful examples of classic Terry strips and sequences that justify Harvey’s high praise, as well as amusing selections from Caniff’s wartime strip Male Call; his first important strip, Dickie Dare; promotional artwork; and even cartoons that Caniff did as a boy.
Despite the biography’s vast length, Caniff remains a remote figure. Harvey, who became Caniff’s friend, portrays him as kind and generous, staunchly patriotic and a dedicated workaholic. But did Caniff have no flaws or self-doubts? Caniff brought tragic depths to the comics page through the death of Raven Sherman in Terry, sending readers nationwide into mourning. From what emotional depths in his psyche did Caniff draw such a powerful and sensitive sequence? Through his female characters, Caniff brought a new sensuality to the comics pages. What do characters like Burma say about Caniff’s own attitudes toward women and sexuality? In his book, Harvey tells us (again, twice) that he has chosen not to speculate about Caniff’s psychology. But surely it is a biographer’s duty to explore and explicate his subject’s personality. David Michaelis’s new biography, Schulz and Peanuts, not only provides a penetrating portrait of Charles M. Schulz’s personality, warts and all, but also reveals how Schulz’s comics are a key to interpreting his mind. Harvey worked on his book for more than two decades, yet Michaelis’s book shows that length of research and writing time doesn’t equal depth.
Through the background of Meanwhile runs Harvey’s fascinating portrait of America’s contradictory attitudes toward comics through much of the 20th century. Those readers who think that only now, in the 21st century, are comics recognized as an art form will be astonished to read that the Metropolitan Museum of Art held an exhibition called “American Cartooning” in 1951, including comic strips and comic books. Comics’ legendary nemesis, Dr. Frederic Wertham, makes a chilling appearance in the book, arguing that the entire comics medium be outlawed. Harvey depicts Caniff and Pogo creator Walt Kelly testifying before a Senate subcommittee in 1954 to try to fend off the threat of censorship.
Caniff raised the adventure strip to new heights of graphic and narrative sophistication with Terry, a tremendous popular success. During the early 1940s, Caniff and Terry captured the mood of America at war; they became national icons, and Caniff made the cover of Time in 1947, the year that he launched Steve Canyon. Yet in the 1960s Caniff’s support of the Vietnam War left him on the other side of the gaping generational divide, losing him much of his potential audience, and newspaper editors, greedy for space, shrank the size of comic strips, severely hampering beautifully illustrated strips like Caniff’s. He lived long enough to witness the virtual extinction of the adventure newspaper strip, the genre that had made him famous.
Though Caniff is no longer a household name, his work lives on through IDW’s new series of reprints of Terry and Checker’sCanyon reprints. They should bring Caniff a new generation of admirers, who will constitute a proper audience for Harvey’s copious biography.
