MIDNIGHT MADNESS

DC Comics is relaunching their line in September, starting over with 52 new #1 issues. It's a bid to attract new readers and invigorate older ones. To publicize this event, many retailers across the country were open at midnight for the release of Justice League #1.

My local comic store - Up Up and Away in Cheviot - kicked things off at 11:08PM last night with a 52 minute sale. It was better attended than I thought it would be, but then, maybe most of these folks didn't have their alarms set for 6AM. Oh well, what's a little lost sleep where funnybooks are involved?

Matt with Up Up and Away owner Kendall Swafford.

A pretty good crowd for midnight at a comic book store.

You can't sleep here...go home, Matt!

FOUR COLOR FANTASY

Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon: The Complete Series, Volume: One (Hermes Press)

Steve Canyon appeared annually from 1953 to 1959 as one-shots that were part of Dell Comics anthology series known as Four Color. Wouldn't it be great, I once wondered, if somebody collected these in one book? My thought was not alone in the ether. Hermes Press has just released a beautiful reprinting of these comics in hardcover.

John Ellis of the Milton Caniff Estate writes the introductory essay that gives a nice overview of Steve Canyon's history in the comic book field. The first Canyon comics were reformatted strips published by Harvey in the late 1940s. This lasted only six issues, not faring as well as 'Terry & the Pirates', which ran 11 years in the anthology title Popular Comics, as well as 28 issues of its own title.
The Four Color comics were not strip reprints, but original stories which introduced new characters. For six issues, Steve is aided by Tuck, a young sidekick similar to the strip's Reed Kimberly. In two of the three issues that center on the Civil Air Patrol, a young Civil Air Patrol officer named Janice becomes Tuck's love interest. The main gist of the stories typically involves Steve's role as an Air Force troubleshooter trying to protect U.S. interests from the Commies.
Each issue, save the last, has a painted cover. It's interesting to me that Four Color issues featuring humor strip characters (e.g., Beetle Bailey, Little King) have cartoon line art, but the ones with adventure strip heroes (Flash Gordon, Jungle Jim) have stunning painted covers. Each cover artist is different, but they continue to remain anonymous. They each reflect a scene from the story, except for issue #939, which happens to be the best of the bunch and was used as the stunning cover for this collection. The seventh issue has a photo cover, which was a tie-in to the "Steve Canyon" TV series. Ellis is 2/3 of the way through releasing crisp, remastered episodes of the complete series on DVD.
Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon comics are, for the most part, not by Caniff. The art chores were handled by William Overgard and Ray Bailey, two veteran strip artists of the "Caniff school" who could do a pretty good impersonation of the master. Overgard did the first issue and Bailey the other six. According to Ellis, Caniff did the inking of the Steve Canyon faces to provide continuity between the books and the strip (and likely to keep his own stamp/brand on the character). The stories are by the prolific Paul S. Newman, though Ellis suspects Caniff had a hand in the first. All are Caniffesque adventures stories, though admittedly they lack the snap of Caniff's dialogue.

All in all, a dream project made true by the folks at Hermes, who deliver a first rate, faithful reproduction of the comics. A great example of both restoration and preservation of comics no longer scattered and forgotten.

CANIFF AUCTIONS - RARITIES EDITION

DRAWING TABLET - You're not likely to find many 50 year old drawing tablets lying around unused. This "Newspaper Comic Strip Stars" Drawing Tablet was released in 1959 by HyTone, a trademark of the Western Tablet & Stationery Corporation. Western Tablet was headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, where Caniff grew up and did his first professional art. Sharing the cover with Steve Canyon is Li'l Abner, drawn by Caniff's longtime pal Al Capp. The other "stars" are Harry Haenigsen's somewhat forgotten "Penny" and Harry Hanan's "Louie", a pantomime strip so obscure that I'm surprised Dean Mullaney hasn't done a collection yet.

The inner cover had "how to" instructions for drawing the comic stars. How to go from an oval and square to a perfect 'Steve Canyon' face in two steps? I think we're missing something! This went unused and unbid at $19.95.

APRIL KANE PRINT
Unable to satisfy the demand for original drawings, Caniff had prints made of his best-known characters. He would then personalize them and often hand-colored them. They pop up on eBay quite frequently, but mostly of Steve Canyon, Burma, Terry, Dragon Lady and Flip Corkin. I've never seen the April Kane print before. The seller didn't know who know who she was, titling her "grouchy young lady." This made it onto somebody's wall for $203.50.






STEVE CANYON FLIGHT SUIT
I wrote last month about a rare child's Steve Canyon flight suit up for auction and going unsold. I no sooner mentioned that I'd never seen one before when this one comes up - the same product, only brand new and still in the box! It may be one of a kind, but it didn't move on the minimum price of $565.

WOMEN IN THE AIR FORCE RESERVE
Even before Terry Lee got in a cockpit, Milton Caniff was a booster for the US military. Here's one of the many (no doubt gratis) jobs he did for Uncle Sam. It's a recruitment sign for the Women's Air Force Reserve. It's not dated, but the art looks like '60s, maybe early '70s Caniff. A rarity, to be sure, but at $40 it found no recruits!

CANIFF NEWS - JULY 2011

The most anticipated book of 2011 - CANIFF: A Visual Biography - is almost here! It's still due for August 2nd. Read more about it here.

Hermes Press gives a one-two punch to wind up summer. Steve Canyon: The Complete Series v.1, reprinting Steve's adventures in Dell Four Color, will be released a week after CANIFF on August 9th. Male Call, the collection of Caniff's wartime Camp News Services strips, is now set for September 15th.

Hermes Press has also announced a deluxe reprint project for Frank Robbins' Johnny Hazard. As far as artists of the Caniff school go, Robbins was top of his class. Hazard, about an aviating man of action, ran over 30 years. There were two separate reprint series in the 1980s, but those are hard to come by, so this project is welcome news. Johnny Hazard, Volume One-The Newspaper Dailies: 1944-1946 is also due in September.

The National Aviation Hall of Fame held their induction ceremony on July 15th and 16th. The Milton Caniff Spirit of Flight Award, recognizing exceptional contributions to the advancement of flight, was given to the Blue Angels flight demonstration team. It is the 65th anniversary of the Blue Angels, a Navy squadron known for their choreographed aerobatics in F/A-18 Hornets.

The National Cartoonists Society held their annual Reuben Awards in May. The awards weekend, held in Boston, were the Society's 65th. The Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to R.O. Blechman, a cartoonist and animator known for his squiggly line. His latest books are 'Dear James', his wealth of experiences presented as letters to a young cartoonist, and 'Talking Lines', a collection of his cartoon narratives.
Photo above by David Folkman. See more of Folkman's photos from the event here,

Finally, a humorous look at R.C. Harvey's 2007 biography of Caniff that was presented at the Reubens. Creator Tom Gammill follows "the Donner Book Party" on their harrowing journey through the 900 page tome.

CANIFF PANELS

A new auction catalog by Heritage is up on their site for the comic & comic art auction they're holding in August. It contains a Caniff bounty of 17 original strips. Rather than post a few or them all, and to whet your appetite for the new CANIFF art book, I picked out some choice panels for reader enjoyment...

6/1/1939. A great thing about originals is seeing Caniff's strip titles in the upper right.

9/20/1938

7/6/1940

4/18/1946

2/9/1958

Something you don't see too often. Late-model Caniff from 4/25/1978.
7/27/47. Happy Easter stating a Caniff philosophy akin to the Pilot's Creed strip of four years previous.

ANDREW AT 5

Many of you know my son Andrew passed in 2006 after living for only 65 days. I wrote about him on this blog last year. He died five years ago this week. It's getting harder and harder to put into words, so I made a video. Sadly, I only have an hour of video. I wish I had a hundred.

GENE COLAN (1926-2011)

While preparing last week's article on the late Lew Sayre Schwartz I learned of the death of Gene Colan. Colan was a giant of comics art, and I regret that it took me so long to appreciate him. As a kid, I shied away from Colan's work. This was the early '80s, and I preferred the clean lines of a John Byrne or Mike Zeck. I didn't care for Colan's pencil work, which was too moody for my taste...shadowy, seemingly loose and muddy. And that wasn't just his contemporary work, which then was NIGHT FORCE for DC. Even in my quest to own every issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA, I hesitantly bought issues from his two year run. Whatever it was that made him a Marvel Comics mainstay in the '60s and '70s, I wasn't seeing it. It only took me about ten years to appreciate Jack Kirby, but 20 for Colan.
Colan, like most artists of his era, was a devotee of Milton Caniff. According to Tom Field's biography of Colan, his favorite strips were Caniff's TERRY & THE PIRATES and Colton Waugh's DICKIE DARE. 'Dickie' was the strip created by Caniff before 'Terry'. "I can even remember the smell of the newsprint," he told Field, "I'd put the paper right up to my face."¹ In addition to Field's book, Colan gave several career-spanning interviews over the past decade. What follows are his salient remarks about Caniff...

Terry & the Pirates, 5/11/1937

Gene Colan's art is known for its use of shadows, inspired by film noir and Caniff's chiaroscuro. "[Caniff's] work always inspired me. I would go for the Daily News every week, the weekend edition with the full color page of his work and I was just drawn to it like a fly to flypaper. I loved his stuff. Just loved it. And I guess that was my biggest influence. There were so many other great artists like Alex Raymond and Hal Foster, and they were really fine illustrators, but Milton Caniff had a very solid black and white look and since I loved to do things so heavily in black I was attracted to it."²

Terry & the Pirates, 2/17/1945

"He used heavy blacks in the folds of the clothes. His room interiors, his exteriors I just loved his work. I never met him. The closest I ever came I saw a picture of him in the news paper and I’d imagined him not anything at all like the way he was. I pictured him like Terry."³

Terry & the Pirates, 5/24/1945

The work of Caniff and other cartoonists was a foundation, but Colan gradually developed his own signature style. "I always loved [Caniff's] work," Colan told the Comics Journal, "[I]t was loaded with shadow work. But you get your own ideas as you go along. Somehow or other, [my own drawing] glided into something else, unconsciously. Like handwriting. You don’t know why you write your name in a particular way. But that's the way you write it. You don’t know what brought that about."⁴

Some very Caniff-esque Colan panels from 'My Greatest Adventure' #74 (12/1962)

"He did everything within a border," said Colan of Caniff, "a straight border. Everyone in those years did it that way too. I started out doing it that way. After a while, I noticed that you could get more action in it if you changed the shape of the panel or eliminated them all together."⁵

Caniff was a "wonderful artist," Colan said, "very original. Several people have imitated Caniff's style to a 'tee'. Lee Elias drew very much like Caniff. Biggest compliment that anyone could give you." ⁵

The old man on the cover of the same issue is decidedly Colan

¹Field, Tom; Colan, Gene; "Secrets in the shadows: the art & life of Gene Colan", 1995, TwoMorrows; This book is rare and out of print, but can be read via Google Books. Field's comprehensive obituary of Colan is found here.

²Stroud, Bryan; "The Silver Age Sage Interviews Gene Colan"; The complete interview here.

³ Previews; "Gene Colan: Comics 'Iron Man'"; The complete interview here.

⁴Rodman, Larry, "The Gene Colan Interview", The Comics Journal; The interview is here.

⁵Neal, Raymond, "Comic Legend Gene Colan", UGO Entertainment; the interview is found here