The Brush of Greatness: Milt Caniff

Here and there it's a little shaky or not as slick as the impression it makes.  In our era of Photoshop retouching to the point of overkill, such ink imperfections are rare but these reveal that this is the work of a man, not a god.  Yet most of the biggest names from the Silver Age of comic books treated Milt Caniff as a sort of deity.  With TERRY AND THE PIRATES and STEVE CANYON, Milt Caniff brought exotic adventure to the comics page.  There's nothing like it today.  The only thing left in the "Funnies" are gag a day strips, gag panels, puzzles and an occasional soap opera.

These pages that I've scanned are from the Famous Artists Cartoon Course.  My dad had wanted to be a cartoonist.  At USC he did a single panel cartoon for The Trojan but had to carve a linoleum block for printing!  That trained his brain but did nothing for his line quality. When he graduated it was the Depression when you took any job you could snag.  He did sample strip of a character at a race track but I don't think he drew more than one strip sample.  Anyway, I benefited from his library of "How To" books, many of them about cartooning.  The Famous Artist Course was the absolute best, giving be early training in art that I still use today.

Part of the course featured biographies of the "teachers," big name cartoonists of the forties and fifties.  That's where you'd get examples of their work.  My three favorites were probably Milt Caniff, Al Capp and Willard Mullin.  Mullin was a guy whose work I had never seen because he was a sports cartoonist, a category that had largely disappeared by the time I could read the comics for myself.  But Milton Caniff was the adventure guy:

 Here's a page of the varied cast of TERRY AND THE PIRATES.  The broad treatment of the character personalities are mirrored in the designs.  You could easily write a biography just from the look of any one of them.

 Comic strip creators were media stars back then.  Movies, TV shows and Broadway musicals were based on the work of Caniff and Capp.  Capp was on the cover of Time Magazine but today few comic fans have even heard of him.  

Okay, no dazzling insight from me just clues to set you googling for further info on the masters of the cartoon image.   Happy New Year.  -- Tad

 

Comments

[Leo Brodie]

Masters indeed. BTW, the almost the entire Famous Artist Cartoon course has been scanned by Chris on his Comicrazies blog:
http://comicrazys.com/category/famous-artists-cartoon-course/