Customer Reviews

Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon: 1948 (Steve Canyon Series) (Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon Series)

5 star:		(1)
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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There are five, not four, adventures in this issue. The first of these begins in the 1947 edition and is about one month old when this issue begins.

I've been reading several series in parallel lately: Canyon, Cerebus, Sandman, Krazy Kat. Apart from Sandman, they're great entertainment but, somewhat surprisingly, I'm drawn to Steve Canyon more than the others. As I indicate in my review for the 1947 volume, the way the times are rendered is very special. The stories are involved and well-paced, the art is absolutely beautiful, the characters are very identifiable in Caniff's precise renderings.

The printing and binding are excellent but the page size is too small to do justice to the art. A couple of panels, one strip and one Sunday page are duplicated - errors in edition, but at least nothing is missing. Nevertheless, the end product rates highly. I mention in my previous review that while reading, I have a magnifying glass handy to look at details.

Caniff's work, already at an extremely high standard in Canyon's inaugural year, improves here with more cinematographic techniques, more varied perspectives and highly complex panels with a great many figures. Though these would wind up in a little strip in newspapers, one wonders how he could meet his deadlines with such painstaking work. In his static art, Caniff is second to none, but in his dynamic art (though outstanding), we can see some techniques better applied elsewhere. For example, to convey speed, he shows running figures leaning forward at a 45 degree angle, which just does not work. Other artists, Hergé for example, show them up in the air, back arched, legs stretched over exaggeratedly long strides, which is really effective in conveying speed. I'll reserve other examples for reviews of later issues. Still, Caniff's work is a joy to behold and I eagerly await each new issue of Steve Canyon.

Caniff's Steve Canyon collectively pieced together makes a surprisingly wordy narrative when compared to the war comics it inspired (and later morphed into itself). It is surprising at just how long a single volume takes to get through in comparison to other graphic novels. This volume starts off abysmally slowly anyhow with a story concerning Steve's involvement in a G-rated love triangle, but eventually gets a lot better when Steve and his more cartoonish Snuffy Smith/Walter Brennan/Gabby Hayes-like curmudgeon sidekick Happy Easter are separated from civilization and bound from one adventure to the next. Steve is less an ace pilot here than an adventurer. Eventually, Steve takes leave of his own strip and we are left with secondary characters in another love triangle. It is surprising Caniff was allowed to lose focus of Steve Canyon for what must have been weeks at a time. The story and dialogue is much like an old 1940s B-movie adventure or matinee serial. It is fun and original in places, but a bit too clichéd in others. The racial stereotypes of the time are on full display, unvarnished. The supposed accents of middle easterners, for instance, sound a lot like something out of a children's bible with a lot of "thou"s and "thee"s and such.

A lot of the art is brilliant and several characters really memorable (loved the Maid of Nine and Fancy). As previous reviewers mention, it is difficult to see Caniff's little details really well with the size in which they are reproduced. Still, this series remains a nice and very affordable introduction to a comic series from a fellow Ohio native that I believe had been out of papers sometime before I was born. I do look forward to reading other volumes.

I'm grateful to the publishers of the Steve Canyon series for making this wonderful comic available again. I read Steve Canyon as a kid, but of course, as a kid, I missed some of the subtle characterizations and brilliant storytelling. And I never had a chance to read the earlier strips.

Now I'm revisiting Caniff's fly-boy, and boy, does it fly. The writing, the style, the dialogue, the history that's wrapped up in each panel. It's great stuff, and hard to put down. Lots of "Just one more chapter..." and "Well, maybe I'll start the next one just to get a taste...", which of course means finish one book and order the next.

My one misgiving about this book is its format. The panels are really just too small to read confortably for long. I've resorted to a magnifying glass to enjoy some of Caniff's finer strokes of expression, and the denser passages of text.

A larger format would have better served both the material and the reader.