Word: comic-strip
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...editors of Lord Beaverbrook's London Daily Express, the six-month trial run of Steve Canyon had been quite a trial. Steve had been a problem to the 3,870,000 readers of the Express, too. Milton Caniff's comic-strip airline operator was a likable enough chap, but how was one to understand him without a pony? Even to inveterate followers of the U.S. cinema, such terms as "leg it," "front boy," "Hood" and "gee" were hard to translate. Express editors, who have had to doctor much of the Canyon dialogue for British readers, were nonplussed...
Because of such problems, the Express also decided that Canyon and his jive talking crew had to go; Steve & Co. vanished from the Express without so much as a waggle of their wings. Steve's passing gave a clue to the differences between U.S. and British comic-strip tastes. Blondie is a fixture, in the Daily Graphic. Said an editor: "It never gets beyond the trifling happenings that go on in everyone's life all over the world." Donald Duck, Mandrake the Magician and King of the Royal Mounted have been accepted because they are easily understood...
Million-Dollar Baby. Gimbels reported that Baby Sparkle Plenty, a doll version of one of Chester Gould's comic-strip improbables, was smashing all sales records. Sales reached 15,100 (at $6 per head) in the first ten days, were expected to exceed $1,000,000 in retail value by Christmas. "Simply phenomenal," said the doll's proud parent, the Ideal Novelty & Toy Co., Inc. "It appears that sales of this one doll in the five remaining months of the year will exceed the output of the entire doll industry for any year in the past two decades...
...Manhattan, a group of comic-strip addicts formed the American Society for the Advancement of the Piebald Eyeball, solemnly pledged themselves always to pencil dots in the center of Little Orphan Annie's eyes before turning to the sports page...
...nearing 70, Author Sinclair can still reel off his special Lanny-brand of history and hokum at comic-strip clip. "All I have to do is turn the spigot," he once explained, "and the water flows." And, though critics and historians may not like him, Lanny has a public. In Europe-and in Russia (where Sinclair is considered a major U.S. literary figure, along with William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell) the Lanny Budd volumes are becoming almost as well known as Author Sinclair's The Jungle or The Brass Check. Several of the Lanny series have already been published...