Word: caniff
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TIME cover stories have been concerned with the comic-strip world twice before; in 1947, we presented Milton Caniff, who was then about to launch Steve Canyon, and in 1950 we ventured into Dogpatch with Al Capp. Since those days, the comics have gone through a slump as well as a renaissance. For some time now, the editors have been considering the comics' new style. More and more the strips are offering political satire, psychology, and comments of varying subtlety on the rages and outrages of everyday life...
...gets so nervous he ties his peanut-butter sandwich in knots. When he wins a bowling trophy-a rare triumph-his name turns out to be spelled wrong. "How can we lose when we're so sincere?" he cries after losing his umpteenth baseball game. "Charlie," says Milt Caniff, creator of the adventure strip Steve Canyon, "is everybody's Walter Mitty...
Thwarted Love. In the 1930s, the once funny comics grew ever more solemn. Dick Tracy introduced blood and bullets that had long been taboo, plus an assortment of grotesquely drawn but weirdly fascinating hoods: Prune Face, Fly Face, No Face. In Terry and the Pirates, Milton Caniff soon replaced the pirates with the Japanese-Terry was the first comic strip to go to war. Later Caniff gave up the youthful Terry for the more mature Steve Canyon, a seat-of-the-pants pilot who fights the battles of the Air Force so effectively that Caniff was once denounced...
...million-a-year business are a dozen powerful syndicates and some 240 smaller ones-many of which handle only a single strip. The syndicates sign up the artist, sell his strip to the newspapers, and then try to convince the papers to keep running it in what Milt Caniff calls a "murderous business...
...cartoonist can be hired to carry on the work. On top of that, the syndicates exercise a censorship that is breathtaking. When Dale Messick included a Negro girl among a group of teenagers in Brenda Starr, the syndicate rubbed her out for fear of offending Southern readers. When Milt Caniff used the Air Force slang word abort (to cancel) in Steve Canyon, the syndicate figured it came too close to abortion and changed it. In their own defense, the syndicates claim that newspaper editors are extremely touchy about reader reaction and demand immaculate strips. But as one indignant cartoonist puts...