CNN has a sweet little article on Milt Caniff, one of the greatest comic creators to ever live, even if he is ignored or forgotten by the majority of comic book fandom because he was a newspaper guy who never made a name for himself on any Marvel or DC superheroes. I’ve mentioned before on KFR that Caniff’s “Steve Canyon” had a significant impact on my young mind through reprint books my father gave me, so it’s really cool to see that he’s being recognized with a career retrospective at his alma mater, Ohio State University.

In 1934, the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate commissioned Caniff to create a cartoon based on news reports of a band of Chinese pirates led by a woman. “Terry and the Pirates” debuted 73 years ago on October 22, 1934. Caniff stopped drawing it in 1946, but it was taken over by another artist and ran until 1973. The strip told the adventures of boy adventurer Terry Lee, his adult mentor Pat Ryan and their nemesis the Dragon Lady.

Caniff brought a cinematic technique to his strips, with close-ups, panoramas and angled views of characters out of the corner of panels. He used the “chiaroscuro” artistic style to create black-and-white contrasting images.

He insisted on accuracy in his drawings, subscribing to dozens of magazines to aid his research and amassing a collection of guns, knives and swords to get the details right on weapons. He relied on “spies” in the armed services to keep him up to date on military lingo and procedures and welcomed readers who caught mistakes in his strips.

Themes of war and violence ran through the cartoon. Men were strong, women were sultry and sexual relations were implied. He created a lesbian character, Sanjak, decades before cartoons like “Doonesbury” and “For Better or for Worse” addressed homosexuality.

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