Milton Caniff, Part 3

While I’ve noted Robert C. Harvey’s 952-page tribute to cartoonist Milton Caniff is far too hefty for casual reading — trying holding it upright while lying in bed at night — I don’t want to suggest it’s not worthy.

Meanwhile … is exhaustive, and that’s part of its virtue, too. Points in the text are aptly supported with examples from Caniff’s work, as well as from contemporaries and pals Al Capp, Noel “Bud” Sickles and others. And it boasts a good number of photos, including even a couple shots of the walls of the Palm, the 1930s speakeasy where New York City-based cartoonists hung out and drank, when not scribbling their work on the vertical surfaces.

Yes, Harvey and Fantagraphics could have broken this into two volumes or, gee, maybe left out a few details. (While waxing about Caniff’s first arrival in Manhattan to work for Associated Press, Harvey names all the theaters Caniff could have spied while standing at 42nd Street and Broadway … and the names of what shows were playing there and who was starring in them.)

But if you want to know just about everything about how the oft-called Rembrandt of the Comics rose and rose even more in his chosen profession — from early days in Ohio to chatting with U.S. presidents — this is the golden source. Nary a negative word is said about its subject, but I can’t imagine finding a more thorough and entertaining trove of information.

Read my earlier posts on this book here and here.

Milton Caniff, Part 2

In a post way back in April, on In the Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists, I noted Chris Ware’s comment about how comics could have evolved using single-scene tableaus, rather than imitating motion picture camera techniques.

“This is the course comics should’ve taken before they got sidetracked and transformed by the language of cinema in the 1930s,” Ware said, speaking appreciatively of the work of Japanese cartoonist Suiho Tagawa.

If anyone is to blame — if blame is the right word — for comics’ path of movie-like perspectives, that would be Milton Caniff. His Terry and the Pirates — as with his pal Noel Sickles’s Scorchy Smith — for the first time employed close-ups, overhead angles and other dramatic viewpoints not seen before in the newspaper strips of the 1930s.

In Meanwhile …: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Robert C. Harvey tells how Caniff developed this camera-lens eye. As a child in California, where he spent part of youth when not in Ohio, he hung around the fledgling movie industry, out in the dusty California desert. Often he was picked as an extra in the seat-of-their-pants productions.

That's what first gave him a taste for the cinematic.

You can read my first post on this book here.

Lineage

I’m reminded of that Albert Einstein quote that I think is often misapplied: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Ad agencies tout it as a corporate motto for being clever. But while it’s true imagination can be the spark that generates great ideas, without knowledge you’re just playing with soggy matches.

In sequential art, we can see a direct line of informed artists building upon the work of their predecessors, to which they blend in their own imagination. See what I mean: Hugo Pratt (Corto Maltese is his internationally known protagonist) acknowledged his debt to comic-strip predecessors Noel Sickles (Scorchy Smith) and Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon). As Jaime Hernandez moved from very detailed illustrations to more impressionistic work in Love & Rockets, his heavy inks began to resemble Pratt’s — which of course in turn evoked the chiaroscuro of Caniff. And when Jessica Abel (La Perdida) visited Kalamazoo, Michigan, last week, she cited Hernandez as an early inspiration for her work.

So we can draw a link from Sickles and Caniff (starting in the 1930s) through Pratt (1970s to 1990s) to Hernandez (1980s up to today) to Abel (2000 and still going), to name just a few practitioners.

Another would be Frank Miller. (Now there’s a man who loves chiaroscuro — look at Sin City.) In his introduction to The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Miller writes that the notion to make his version of Robin a girl came from Love & Rockets.

And as readers of that dark, grim series also will recall, political and military tension mounts between the United States and the Soviet Union over the island of Corto Maltese ….

It Started With Scorchy

When Hugo Pratt set about to design the logo for his mythic adventure hero Corto Maltese, he consciously imitated Milton Caniff’s famous Terry and the Pirates lettering — dynamic and fun, bold and spunky.

Except that Caniff didn’t draw that famous logo. It was created by his longtime friend, drinking buddy and fellow cartoonist, Noel Sickles. If you want to really know about sequential art, you need to look at Sickles.

As pointed out in Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles, when Sickles inherited the adventure strip of airplane ace Scorchy in 1933, he tried to copy the dodgy art work of his predecessor. But, it seems, he just couldn’t do it for long. Sickles was too good. The transformation was like Dorothy opening that door after her house crash-landed in Oz.

This is a giant book, which is good as it contains every Scorchy Smith strip Sickles wrote and drew, three years worth, plus a few before he took it over and a few after he left to pursue magazine illustration (and there are plenty of samples of that, too, along with his biography). Sickles’s comic strip illustrations are, in a word, splendid. His colorful heroes bristle and his femme fatales slink as well as anyone’s — including his pal Caniff’s.

Even better, the detail Sickles managed to squeeze into those tiny daily panels — of air battles and of trains run amok, of cowboy ranches and jungle villages, sun-baked seaports and snow-covered hideouts, of open fields and the coming dusk — are enough to cause any cartoonist tears of envy. As Sickles himself boasted, he could draw anything.

And, by golly, he really could.

(You can read more about the work of Sickles and Caniff, together and separately, in Ron Goulart’s 1975 book, The Adventurous Decade: Comic Strips in the Thirties. I hope to devote a post to that book soon.)