Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon 1953


By Milton Caniff with Dick Rockwell (Checker Books)
ISBN: 978-1-93316-057-3

Steve Canyon began on 13th January 1947, after a canny campaign to boost public anticipation following creator Milton Caniff’s very conspicuous resignation from his previous and world-famous comic strip masterpiece Terry and the Pirates.

Caniff, a true master of suspense and expert in the dark art of forcing reader attention, didn’t show his new hero until four days into the first adventure – and then only in a ‘file photograph’. The primed-and-ready readership first met Stevenson Burton Canyon, bomber pilot, medal-winning war-hero, Air-Force flight instructor and, latterly, independent airline charter operator in the first Sunday colour page, on January 19th 1947.

Almost instantly Caniff was working at the top of his game, producing material exotically familiar and – as ever – bang on the money in terms of the public zeitgeist and taste.

Dropping his hero into the exotic climes he had made his own on Terry, Caniff modified that world based on real-world events, but this time the brooding, unspoken menace was Communism not Fascism. Banditry and duplicity, of course, never changed, no matter who was nominally running the show…

Caniff was simply being marketably contemporary, but he was savvy enough to realise that with the Cold War “hotting up”, Yankees were going to be seen as spies in many countries, so he made that an intrinsic part of the narrative. When Canyon officially re-enlisted, the strip became to all intents and purposes a contemporary War feature…

Over the decades the Steve Canyon strip honestly embraced the philosophy of America as the World’s policeman, becoming a bastion of US militarism and remaining true to its ideals even as the years rolled by and national tastes and readership changed…

Steve foiled plots and chased his true love Summer Olsen around the globe for thirty years: continually frustrated that fate and his many antagonists cruelly kept them unhappily apart until they finally wed in 1970. Canyon had remained a far-ranging agent of Air Force Military Intelligence, even though by this time the Vietnam War had made the Armed Forces an extremely hot potato…

This seventh volume covers the period May 15th 1953 to August 5th 1954 and shows how, as the Korean conflict stuttered to a weary impasse, Caniff smoothly changed tack but not gears reinstating characters, plots and situations he had shelved when the fighting began. Now, his charismatic cast were edging into another post-war world…

Steve Canyon stories seldom had a recognisable beginning or end and the narrative continually flowed and followed upon itself, but for convenience the publishers have broken the saga into generally discrete tales which begin here with ‘The Princess and the Doctor’ which ran from May 15th to September 12th 1953 and saw the veteran adventurer “requested” by his USAF superiors to ferry a doctor into the heart of Red China.

The tale started with a clever code message readers were invited to solve – with a $100 prize offered by the magnificent showman and publicist Caniff – before Steve and Chinese American medic Dr. Louis Shu sneak through Indian passes behind the Bamboo Curtain to save anti-communist rebel Princess Snowflower from a mystery malady that even her psychotically devoted American mentor and former shiftless Soldier-of-Fortune Dogie Hogan can’t handle (for full details of these incredible characters a thorough re-reading of Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon 1949 is advised and much recommended…).

The Princess and her fanatically loyal forces have been holding out against the Chi-Com for years from an impregnable mountain fastness but her weakened condition is causing her devoted warriors to doubt their cause and Steve is needed to shore up the resistance movement within the new totalitarian monolith…

However Canyon and Hogan are old rivals who have butted heads since the fall of Imperial China and the grizzled veteran sees no reason to welcome the flashy air force know-it-all. He’d have been better advised to keep the good-looking surgeon away from the lonely, impressionable young girl…

And of course, to cap matters the Chinese have a new wonder general who thinks he can finally break the years-long impasse of the infernal royalist modern Masada…

Packed with tension, blistering action, love, anger, betrayal, smouldering sex and withering comedy, this epic saga also features the welcome return of one of the strip’s most unique supporting characters before Steve leaves with his mission more or less accomplished, but with enough dangling plot threads to guarantee another tempestuous visit in the years to come…

The soap opera shufflings and Cold War shenanigans were briefly sidelined in ‘The Halls’ (13th September – December 30th) wherein Canyon, travelling incognito through the contentious region, is mistaken for a Russian spy by overzealous border guards and wrongfully imprisoned in a small non-aligned nation between India and the USSR. Happily even that postage-stamp state has a US Consulate.

Homer Hall, his capable, beautiful and blind wife Gil and their imaginative daughter Hollister never expected much trouble, but when Holly and her pal Lise from the French Embassy discover an American in the city dungeons the romance-starved girls contrive his escape, even as the city’s inevitable cabal of true communist agents engineer a riot to spring their “Soviet Comrade”.

With Mr. Hall trapped outside the capital and riot in the streets, the girls free Steve and he valiantly returns the favour by saving Mrs. Hall from death in her own blazing Consulate building…

With a measure of order restored and Steve cleared of spying charges, his major difficulty is letting down Holly who has conceived the notion that Steve loves and wants to marry her. Mrs. Hall too harbours feeling for the rugged he-man…

The situation is swiftly exacerbated when the Hall Women are evacuated by train to safety in Indiaand the Consul asks Steve to escort them, only to have all three valuable Americans kidnapped by bandits eager for ransom. However the village of thieves panic when they see that Gil Hall is blind, as such women are bad luck, but their attempts to kill her are foiled by their charismatic chieftain Cobra Johnny, a lover of all things American – especially guns and money…

The robber king’s hold on his men soon slips however when smallpox breaks out in the village. With the men clamouring for the head of the “no-see woman”, Gil begins treating the ailing mothers and children: after all the disease took her sight years ago and she has nothing left to lose…

As events escalate Steve and Holly manage to signal the Indian forces searching for them but not before Johnny discovers their ploy and decides to cut his losses…

After extricating himself from that menace the rescued aviator escapes mother and daughter’s unwanted attentions by faking a telegram from his long-lost love Summer Olsen and heads for points west but doesn’t get far. Called into the local Air Force office he is “invited” to help with a little contraband problem.

‘Heroin Smuggler’ ran from December 31st 1953 to April 30th 1954 and saw Lieutenant Colonel Canyon go undercover to catch a diabolical murderer and expose a clever scheme wherein an old acquaintance was somehow running Chinese drugs into the West, past every trap and safeguard the British and Americans could devise…

In a brilliant mystery thriller by the utterly on-form Caniff, Steve’s problem was not discovering how independent airline magnate Herself Muldoon had managed to become the East’s first and foremost drug trafficker, but how to stop his old foe when every agency in the area seemed to work for her. The horrific answer came when one of her ex-service-man pilots finally lost control of the monkey on his back…

The subsequent tale of tragedy was one of the earliest and still most harrowing depictions of the nature and consequences of narcotics addiction ever seen in comics, and the far-from-clean but coldly plausible resolution a moving reminder of the insidious power of the medium to inform and affect…

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 a more mature 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 & experience were needed more than passion to produce “the Tempest” or “King Lear”, but in the final tale in this marvellous monochrome collection the author blends classic drama with sophisticate modern romance by finally allowing another bittersweet, ultimately frustrating reunion of his own star-crossed lovers…

Widow and proud single parent Summer has been forced to take a high-powered, well-paying job with Steve’s industrialist nemesis Copper Calhoun, unaware that the sadistic millionairess was also obsessed – or perhaps infatuated – with Canyon; the one man she could not buy.

Now in ‘Triangle’ (May 1st – August 5th 1954) a long simmering plot boiled over as Canyon finally returned toAmerica and sought out Summer. Neither frustrated lover was aware that Calhoun had been using her vast resources to keep tabs on the pair and even intercept their communications; determined to keep them both separate and miserable…

As the Colonel hit USsoil, Copper despatched Summer and her son Oley on a long-overdue vacation to a fabulousFlorida resort.

Naturally with the pressure off, plenty of time and money on her hands, convivial company and the ardent attentions of dashing playboy Clarke Netherland, Summer’s head was turned – and that’s when the indomitable ingenious Steve burst in, having spent almost all his furlough tracking down his intended…

After battering his way through all of Calhoun’s many obfuscations the last thing the Colonel expected was to have to fight a wooing campaign, but as the tale evolved into a delicious take on the sparkling, glamorous sophisticated Philadelphia Story/High Society movie comedies of the time, no one was aware of the dark secret the enigmatic Mr. Netherland harboured nor just what his conscience would eventually force him to do…

…And as a bitter Steve again buried himself in another dangerous Air Force mission Summer, once more abandoned and bereft, at last discovered some brutal truths and had a final showdown with her boss the Copperhead…

Resulting in some of the most impressive and mature storytelling of his undeniably stellar career, Caniff seamlessly moved from hot combat to Cold War and from exotic locations to homespun soap opera at this time: his skilful passion-play perfectly showing a sublime ability to delineate character and mood.

The art here is some of the most subtly refined of his career and the brilliantly enacted storylines firmly put the series back on the original narrative tracks suspended by the Korean conflict …and there was even better still to follow…

Steve Canyon is comic storytelling at its best. Beautifully illustrated, mesmerising black and white sagas of war, espionage, romance, terror, justice and cynical reality: a masterpiece of graphic narrative every serious fan and story-lover should experience. …And that’s not to in any way disparage the astounding artistic contributions of Dick Rockwell who began assisting with the artwork in 1952, pencilling the scripts which Caniff authored and then inked.

As the Master’s health gradually failed over the years, Rockwell invisibly assumed more and more of the strip’s visual aspect. When Caniff passed away in 1988, Rockwell continued and concluded the final adventure ‘The Snow Princess’ before the series was finally retired with honour on Sunday, June 5th 1988.

Most cartoonists – or workers in any field of artistic endeavour – go to their graves never attaining the giddy heights of being universally associated with a signature piece of unequivocally supreme work. How incredible then when a guy achieves that perfect act of creation, not once but twice – and does so seven days a week for 64 years? Enticing, enthralling, action-packed and emotionally overwhelming, Steve Canyon is an unequivocal high-point of graphic narrative: a full-immersion thrill and a passport to the halcyon glory of another age.

Comics just don’t get better than this.
© Checker Book Publishing Group 2006, an authorized collection of works © Ester Parsons Caniff Estate 1953. All characters and distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks of the Ester Parsons Caniff Estate. All rights reserved.