Print

[crashryan]

The cover artist is tantalizingly familiar, but I can't place him. The "twitchy" lines in faces and hands seem to be the key. A decent Caniff homage, though, particularly the background.

Link to the book: 0101 - Terry and the Pirates

[jimmm kelly]

The GCD credits the cover art to Milton Caniff. I realize that there were some ghosts who worked with Caniff on his strips, but the GCD usually makes an effort to get these things right--or if there's a question about the art they will note that. Unless you mean the cover colours--no idea who did those.

I was looking on Wikipedia for information about Caniff--in particular I wanted to know what kind of awards or recognition he received in life or posthumously. I know that he got a truckload of cartoonist awards--and deservedly so--but I would have thought his contribution to American culture would be recognized beyond just the comics community. Did he get no Medal of Freedom or Medal of Honor?

You Americans should get on that. The guy gave a lot to your country and ought to be hailed as a great patriot and a great storyteller.

[crashryan]

Jimmm--I am pretty sure the GCD cover credit is in error. Most of these Dell adventure-strip reprints used covers drawn by house artists rather than (like Harvey did later on) using panel blow-ups or promo art. It's a nice drawing but those faces aren't Caniff faces.

This brings up a problem with the GCD. I'm hesitant to mention it because irate readers might accuse me of putting down the entire project. Quite the contrary. The GCD is an exceptional resource, the result of hard work by countless dedicated people. BUT.....art identification mixes research with large amounts of downright guesswork. The majority of art identifications are educated guesses by people with an eye for stylistic similarities. Some guesses turn out to be wrong, but unfortunately once an identification is posted in the GCD it tends to become gospel as sites like CB+ reference it.

In my own tiny area of semi-expertise, I've seen the GCD attribute to George Evans work by artists as diverse as Norman Nodel and Ed Robbins. In some cases it seems the attribution was made more because Evans was known to have worked on a series rather than by a close examination of the art itself.

Over the years the discovery of hard evidence, like Paul S. Newman's ledgers and the pile of Standard originals on which the artists' names were noted, has provided pockets of certainty. Hopefully more such material will surface. Even so, reversing mis-identifications may prove difficult now that the Internet has distributed them so widely.

[crashryan]

Sorry to bend your ear further, Jimmm, but I wanted to respond to your note about awards to Milton Caniff outside the cartoon world. If there had been a Presidential Medal of Freedom during WWII I wouldn't have been surprised to see Caniff receive one. However the current MOF was established by President Kennedy in 1963. By that time Caniff was a far less influential public figure. "Steve Canyon" was still doing fine, but the strip never tapped into the American vein like the wartime "Terry" did. Then came the Vietnam War. I don't believe Caniff's public reputation ever recovered from the factionalism of the late 60s and early 70s. "Canyon" was already a spokesman for the Air Force. During the protest era he took a staunchly hawkish stand, with storylines suggesting campus protestors were traitors and Communist dupes. "Canyon" survived, but by the time the shouting was over newspapers as a whole and adventure strips in particular had started their downward slide to irrelevance.

I remember one last burst of public attention. I think it was sometime in the late seventies or early eighties. Caniff depicted the villain flogging a nude woman. There was a brief flurry of outrage after which the strip dropped off the radar. Interesting to note the resonance with the incident reprinted here in which the Dragon Lady is tortured, though in this case she wears an open-front shirt.