Word: caniff
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Innocents & a Broad. Cartoonist Caniff's contribution to the industry was to throw in some curves and give it glamor. Long before he came along the "comics" had generally ceased to be funny. They had learned a thing or two about narrative from Sidney Smith's chinless Gumps and Frank King's morality play about the Wallets of Gasoline Alley. But mostly their idea of action was to have a character jump out of his shoes. Into Terry and the wartime Male Call (for the G.I. press) Caniff poured fast-breaking dialogue, credible adventure - and one touch...
There may be professors of journalism who have never heard of Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, but every U.S. newspaper publisher has. Many a publisher spends more effort shaping up his comic page than he does in seeing that Palestine or North China is properly covered. Highbrows had once dismissed the comics as the poor man's literature; now to read at least one of them (usually Terry) was proof of being a regular fellow. (After all, hadn't Dickens begun Pickwick Papers as a text for a cartoon series?) Only the New York Times...
Undergrads, Upper Classes. In the readership polls Caniff seldom beats out Ham Fisher's hammy Joe Palooka or Chic Young's just-folksy Blondie. But his comparatively small (31 million) audience is, comparatively speaking, a class audience. It includes collegians (from Harvard to Siwash) and their professors, the Duke of Windsor, Margaret Truman, John Steinbeck†- and, significantly, hundreds of newspaper executives. Two years ago, when a score of syndicate salesmen began to spread the word of a new, as yet unnamed and undrawn comic by Caniff, they had nothing to sell but Caniff's name...
...last months of his '305, Milton Arthur Caniff is a handsomely hefty (195 lbs.), blue-eyed, relaxed man with an indoor look and a sociable nature. He is almost never seen in the Stork Club or at El Morocco, although many a G.I. or plain reader might naturally assume that Terry's generally sophisticated dialogue was clutched from some such glamor-scented...
Actually, it comes out of Caniff's head. Among cartoonists-fellow members of what he calls "the pariah profession"-he is well liked, but seldom seen. He lives and works (12 to 18 hours a day) on the outer suburban ring of New York City, in a town with the confusing name of New City, N.Y. (pop. 992). Neighbors in the New City intellectual colony include Playwright Maxwell Anderson, Artist Henry Varnum Poor and Author J. P. McEvoy...