Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon: 1952 (Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon Series) epub

Milton Caniff was a genius. Have enjoyed the previous year's volumes, and this continues the Steve Canyon saga.

...how does he do it??

One thing I had noticed was a fair amount of rigor in the Steve Canyon stories, whereas I had seen some appallingly poor inconsistencies on other strips. For instance, in a Flash Gordon episode, Flash leaves a dangerous prisoner's cell unlocked so that he can escape and lead Flash to his lair. The operation is a success! The bad guy leads Flash to his lair, though only after slaughtering fifty innocent civilians, merely mentioned in passing.

In another strip "King of the Royal Mounted", the hero assures that the girl who committed the crime will turn herself in because of her conscience. Never mind that he doesn't know the girl, but he's right anyway... she turns herself in, her conscience was bothering her. However it transpires later that she was innocent all along! So why on earth was her conscience bothering her?? It's as if the authors make it up as they go along.

Such problems in continuity were fairly rare in Steve Canyon, but the Deep Woods episode is crawling with them (they're "explained away", but give me a break!!). I would walk out of a movie for far slighter transgressions of continuity than those in Deep Woods, but in fairness, it does reward our suspension of disbelief with a pretty good action sequence. I doubt, however, that I'd be reading any strip on a daily basis if it had much of a chance of being that bad. Still, we must show a little understanding to the creator, who must churn these things out on a daily basis.

The episode preceding Deep Woods is fine, but the one following it drags on and has a ridiculous device (you have a licence to light fireworks, therefore you can do it in a manner that sets a whole town in a panic??). It seems that after five years, Caniff is losing narrative steam. Four stars, but I'm tempted to give it three... at least there's quite the teaser at the end of the book and I have 1953 on order...

This review is shorter, at this stage, than most of my other Canyon reviews, so how about a little comparative analysis (I do a little of this in my review for Buz Sawyer.)

The greatest European adventure strip is, according to many including myself, Tintin. The basic narrative unit is the page or two-page spread, as opposed to the daily strip and Sunday page for Canyon. In Canyon, the author must cater to the risk that readers may miss some strips and consequently there are many redundant reminders of past action. Not so in Tintin. The strip tends to end with a teaser, which occupies one of the three or four panels; this need is reduced to one per page or two in Tintin. Tintin is in color, Canyon is in black and white six days a week, color on Sundays (though reproduced (very nicely) in B&W in the Checker series).

The main difference is in the art style and the narrative breadth of each series. Tintin is drawn in simple but very precise lines, with solid colors and no shading to suggest depth. The lines all have the same thickness. With this style, known as the clear line, the author Hergé greatly influenced European comic art and much work there is done in the clear line. This style eschews extraneous elements from the composition that might distract from the narrative. Yet, the panels are lush and extremely pleasing to look at. The narrative in Tintin is 62 pages long in every adventure and its sweep is majestic. From the frozen desolation of the Tibetan Himalayas to lunar landscapes to Amazon jungles, the Tintin stories stick with the reader from his first childhood readings for the rest of his life.

I don't believe it is possible for the daily strip to match these weekly pages, but Caniff managed excellently. His art, as I mention in earlier reviews, is beautiful and his stories very imaginative and well-paced. The 1950s, when both Canyon and Tintin were at their peak, are a good basis of comparison. The former is a fine historical document, if a little dated in appearance, the latter is still a vibrant part of the French-speaking culture, as well as a gift to many other languages.

While the 22 Tintin adventures have collectively sold over 200 million copies worldwide, it is always a risky business over here to issue even the best of strips. Granted, Tintin is considerably better than Steve Canyon, but the Canyon series certainly merits a loyal readership of its own.

Well, doing an adventure strip day in day out could not have been easy. Hergé himself had a nervous breakdown before he accomplished his masterpiece as part of his therapy: Tintin in Tibet (1960).