Meanwhile...: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon
In the 1930s and 1940s, the newspaper comic strip was one of the nation's most popular storytelling media, and Caniff's exotic high-adventure Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon were among the most widely read strips. The popularity of the China-based Terry skyrocketed in the early forties, when its cast entered World War II, but it was Caniff's bold abandonment of the successful strip in 1946 to launch Canyon, which continued until the artist's death, in 1988, that landed him on the cover of Time. Today aficionados consider his achievement unmatched, and his innovative combination of atmospherically chiaroscuro illustration and cinematic continuity still hugely influences contemporary cartoonists. Comics scholar Harvey, who worked on this biography for nearly 25 years, had the benefit of extensively interviewing Caniff, and the wealth of firsthand information he obtained and conveys helps explain why it weighs in at just short of 1,000 pages, which may strike some as excessive but, given Caniff's towering stature in the comics field, seems only appropriate, perhaps even necessary. Flagg, Gordon