Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon 1951


By Milton Caniff (Checker Book Publishing Group)
ISBN: 978-1-933160-10-8

Most cartoonists – most artists in any field of creative endeavour – go to their graves never attaining those giddy heights wherein they are universally associated with a signature piece of unequivocally supreme work. How incredible then when somebody achieves that sublime act of creation, not once but twice – and does so seven days a week for 64 years?

After reluctantly leaving his incredibly successful, groundbreaking Terry and the Pirates newspaper strip in the hands of others, Milton Caniff created another iconic hero in de-mobbed World War II pilot Steve Canyon. The main reason for the move was rights and creative control, but it’s also easy to see another reason. Terry, set in a fabled Orient, even with the contemporary realism the author so captivatingly imparted, is a young man’s strip and limited by locale.

The worldly, war-weary, Canyon was a mature adventurer who could be sent literally anywhere and would appeal to the older, wiser readers of Red-Menaced, Atom-Age America, now a fully active player on the world stage. Canyon also reflects an older creator who has seen so much more of human nature and frailty than even the mysterious Orient could provide. A young Shakespeare could write “Romeo and Juliet” but maturity and experience were needed as much as passion and genius to produce “the Tempest” or “King Lear”.

Steve Canyon began on 13th January 1947, after an extended build-up of public anticipation following the very conspicuous resignation from Terry. Caniff, the master of suspense and adept at manipulating reader attention, didn’t let his new hero actually appear until four days later – and then only in a ‘file photograph’. The rabid readership first met Stevenson Burton Canyon, bomber pilot, medal-winning war-hero, Air-Force flight instructor and latterly, independent charter airline operator in the first Sunday colour page, on 19th January 1947.

Almost instantly Caniff was working at the top of his game, producing material both exotic and familiar, and once again dead on the money in terms of the public zeitgeist and taste…

Volume five of Milton Caniff’s second graphic magnum opus sees the WWII veteran increasingly mired in a catastrophic battle against World Socialism as the Korean War rumbled on whilst his “will-she, won’t-she” romance with the elusive Summer Olson continued to plague him in fraught and frantic episodes of the daily strip and Sunday page which first appeared between January 28th 1951 to April 6th 1952.

Conveniently contained for your convenience in four fabulous graphic sagas, the Cold War classics commence with ‘Operation Foo Ling’ (January 28th – April 14th), immediately following on from the previous chronicle with the fully reactivated Air Force Major dispatched into Nationalist China to drop the eponymous Chinese magician behind the Bamboo Curtain and fly out the prisoner Ling is tasked with rescuing. Providing medical support, glamour and romantic tension is old flame Deen Wilderness (see Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon: 1948) but is she a thorn in Steve’s side or a rose for new cast-member and dashing flyboy Breck Nazaire?

The mission goes badly from the start: even though Foo Ling carries out his part the commando raid deep into mainland China results in a spectacular firefight during which Breck is left behind and Deen is subsequently charged with deserting her post…

‘The Duchess of Denver’ (April 15th – August 5th), finds Steve in Hong Kong to rendezvous with Ling but quickly embroiled in a criminal scheme perpetrated by a gangster’s moll who suddenly finds herself in over her head. Smugglers, white slavers, spies and gallant White Knights combine in moody noir magnificence in the most exotic hell-holes of the Orient, but as always Caniff wrote – and drew – his women strong and capable enough to cope by themselves if they had to…

The shattering conclusion left Canyon battered, bruised and adrift alone in a lifeboat, so ‘Operation: Eel Island’ (August 6th – November 14th), opens with the recuperating Major on soft clerical duties in a “spit-and-polish” camp once used by the Japanese during WWII, unaware that he’s undergoing psychiatric evaluation.

Moreover, the island-base hides a dangerous secret, and martinet Colonel Index has his hands full with his sultry, wayward wife Delta amidst all those lonely military men. If he ever found out that she and Steve used to date back in the USA…

When intrigue is expedited by a fifth column of spies Colonel Index and Canyon find themselves on a collision course with disaster and dishonour…

This entrancing tome of comic-strip majesty concludes with ‘Crisis on the Campus’ (November 15th 1951 – April 6th 1952) as, posted back to America to lecture R.O.T.C. (that’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) candidates – actually to scrutinize a college professor’s latest invention – Steve is finally, joyously reunited with the long-missing Summer Olson, only to find that the shady halls of Academe are as fraught with tension and peril as the distant East and that in such troubled times there really were Reds under a lot of  Beds…

Most tragically, within moments of a marital “Happy Ever After” Steve and Summer were once again dragged apart by circumstance…

With Mao Tse-tung’s (we know him now as Mao Zedong) Chinese Republic flexing its victorious muscles and  stoking the fires of the Korean War, Caniff increasingly wove news scraps, items of research gained from military friends and advisors and sheer inspired speculation into his unfolding saga. Ever the patriot, his opinions and pro-“Free World” stance might now flavour these strips with a somewhat parochial or jingoistic tang, but as with all fiction viewed through the lens of time passed, context is everything.

Unlike his controversial stance on Vietnam two decades later, this was not an issue which divided America. However the public and officials of the USA treated Communists and “Pinkos” within their own borders, the Red Menace presented by Russia and China was real, immediate, and actively working against Western Interests. The real talking point here is not the extent of a creator’s perceived paranoia, (check out any Atlas/Marvel war title of the period if you want to see totally unrestrained “patriotic fervour”) but rather the restraint which Caniff always showed within his strip compared to what was happening in the world outside it.

Compelling, compulsive, exotic, action-packed and emotionally charged Steve Canyon is a masterpiece of graphic narrative: a full-immersion thrill and a passport to the best parts of another age. Comics just don’t get better than this.

© Checker Book Publishing Group 2005, an authorized collection of works © Ester Parsons Caniff Estate 1951, 1952. All characters and distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks of the Ester Parsons Caniff Estate. All rights reserved.