Meanwhile...: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon (Hardcover)

~ R.C. Harvey (Author)
Key Phrases: lettered strips, continuity strips, promotional drawings, Steve Canyon, New York, Milton Caniff (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

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

Review

A book for hardcore aficionados of classic comic strips, who will be rewarded if they are willing to invest the time it will take to make their way through this literally weighty tome. (Peter Sanderson - Publishers Weekly )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 952 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books; illustrated edition edition (July 11, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560977825
• ISBN-13: 978-1560977827
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.6 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #402,060 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More than great biography--, July 18, 2007

By	Mark (James Axler) Ellis - See all my reviews

--"Meanwhile" is an examination of an entire art form that sadly has fallen, not just out of favor, but by the wayside entirely.

R.C. Harvey, one of the most well-respected authorities on the history of the newspaper comic strip has written the definitive, even monumental, study of Milton Caniff and his work.

Actor Robert Culp referred to Milton Caniff as "immortal" and after reading this fascinating volume, you can understand why.

Mr. Caniff, if he didn't invent the adventure newspaper strip, certainly refined and defined the parameters for generations afterwards.

Not just an accomplished artist, Mr. Caniff was also a consummate story-teller. His influence can still be seen in many forms of media, nearly twenty years after his death.

Through Mr. Harvey's biography (he began writing it before Mr. Caniff passed away), the reader gets to know Milton Caniff as an unassuming workaholic who fit the classic mold of American patriot.

The sections devoted to Terry and the Pirates (and his most iconic creation, Lai Choi San, The Dragon Lady) and Steve Canyon are very illuminating, particularly to students of comic-strip art.

It's hard to realize now the impact the newspaper comic-strip had on the American culture from the 1930s through the 1950s, and Mr. Caniff's work was always held as the standard by which all others strived to attain.

"Meanwhile" is a great book. It's one of the few that I have read in the last few years that I have referred back to within days of finishing it.

This is a classic book about a classic artist whose contributions to American culture need to be rediscovered and celebrated.

Thank you, Mr. Harvey.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificent tribute to a cartooning legend, July 19, 2007

By	M. Kreffel "Reader, Writer & Artist" (Indpls Indiana) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I've just received my book from Amazon yesterday, so I haven't been able to complete it as yet, but upon opening the box I was staggered by the sheer size of the volume. Very few books fulfill the promise of their covers; "Meanwhile" does just that, and more. Paging through the contents I was pleased at the abundance of art included from all stages of Mr. Caniff's career. Milt Caniff's exciting brushwork and facility at crafting mesmerizing stories have always held me spellbound, and been an inspiration to me for many years in my career as an artist.

Mr. Harvey has done the magical; fleshing out the biography of an icon of the golden era of comic strips and not simply chronicling Mr. Caniff's life, but also taking us behind the scenes and into Milt's mind. It's all here: How Milt worked, what inspired him, the real people who were the models for his characters, the real world of syndicated comic strips.

Folks, this is as close to the excitement of time travel as you'll ever get, a reminder of why people waited with eagerness for the daily paper to drop upon their front doorstep in the years before DVDs and home entertainment centers so that they could catch the latest installment of their favorite newsprint heroes. As a previous reviewer so aptly stated, this is an artform that has fallen by the wayside and been forgotten. Today's comics are disposable jokes, akin to the old Joe Bazooka throwaways inside the bubblegum wrappers.

This book contains treasure, and would be worth the price of admission at twice its cost. There is a reason why Milton Caniff was called the "Rembrandt of the Comic Strip", and the story is inside "Meanwhile".

And one more thing in closing. Milt did this all by himself. No assistants to ink his pencils, no "factory" of interns to rubberstamp the same old hash every week, it was just Milt Caniff and his imagination and brushes and ink-stained hands.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Platinum Standard for Cartoonist Biographies, November 5, 2007

By	Allan Holtz (Lake County, FL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As cartoonist biographies go I daresay that there has never been, and will likely never be, another of the length and depth of R.C. Harvey's "Meanwhile...". Coming in just shy of a four digit page count it could scarcely be otherwise. Even more so when you consider that the impressive heft of the tome is not substantially padded with photos and art. To be sure the book is indeed well illustrated, but only with visual aids directly related to the narrative -- there are no long reprints of Caniff's strips here or lengthy portfolios of miscellaneous art.

It is the nature of any successful cartoonist that they spend the bulk of their life hunched over a drawing board, endlessly skrith-skratching away. This is not the sort of lifestyle that would seem to lend itself to a lengthy biography. When we consider that there are plenty of well-rounded biographies of political figures, film stars, activists, people whose lives are filled day by day with the fodder of the biographer, that manage to tell their stories in a shorter page count, we have to wonder just what in the world Harvey is on about in a page count that rivals the King James Bible.

I for one certainly approached the book with trepidation. I've been a fan of Harvey's work for years, but my enjoyment of his work is tempered with the caveat that he is on occasion guilty of going over the top. When he goes into critical analysis mode he is always perceptive and thoughtful, but he can also beat a horse within an inch of its life. I was concerned that here Harvey would be shooting the works, analyzing Terry, Steve and their creator ad nauseam.

That fear, I'm happy to say, was completely groundless. Despite the enormous page count this book is, wonder of wonders, a tightly written narrative. In the tradition of classic biography, what critical analysis there is is grounded in the opinions that Caniff himself discussed with Harvey and others in interviews. Given that Harvey says the book in its original form was some 700 pages longer (!) than the final revision, I'm guessing that any extended author's analysis fell victim to the editor's red pen. If so, the book is better for it.

So what exactly does lurk between the distantly separated covers of this volume? Well, Harvey was lucky enough to be tapped by Caniff himself as his offical biographer in the early 80s. This afforded the author with ample opportunity to question his subject at great length. While Caniff was, as Harvey relates, not a particularly forthcoming interview subject, by dint of persistence the author eventually ended up with a treasure trove of Caniffiana. The book is, as we might expect given the size, an impressively complete chronicle of Caniff's life and the times in which he lived. However, completeness doesn't necessarilty translate to interest-sustaining or entertaining, and that's where Harvey's book truly amazes. I've read plenty of long form biographies where it got to the point that I was rooting for the subject to kick the bucket to cut the narrative short. That's not the case here. While I couldn't say that every single page is riveting, edge-of-the-seat reading, Harvey does an expert job of keeping the reader involved and interested all the way through. Any reader who is at least moderately interested in comic strips, even those not particularly fans of Caniff, will undoubtedly find the book fascinating.

Speaking of being a fan of Caniff, I should admit that I am not numbered in that legion. Of course I recognize Caniff's importance in the history of comic strips and the artistry of the two strips for which he is most famous. However, I think Caniff's writing is far too precious, heavily laden with hokey slang and tortured vernacular that I find grating and distracting. His subject matter, primarily military adventure, is just not my cup of tea. His cartooning, after a relatively short but glorious period in the early 40s when he was first influenced by Sickles' innovation of chiaroscuro comic strip illustration, later takes things too far for my taste, turning the strip into a series of ink-blots (not entirely Caniff's fault, of course - the comic strip was shrinking more rapidly than he could adjust his art style to suit, finally ending up so small that no one, not even Caniff, could possibly do a realistically rendered adventure strip).

The point is that you don't need to be a Caniff fanatic to thoroughly enjoy the book. I recommend it not only to the ardent Terry or Canyon fan, but anyone with more than a passing interest in the art and business of the comic strip in America. Caniff's story is, after all, the history of the adventure comic strip in particular, and the newspaper comic strip in general. Harvey does a superb job of weaving all the various aspects of the story of American comic strips into the narrative. We see Caniff marketing his comic strips (and find out just how tireless a promoter he was), we see him coping with the miniaturization of his daily and Sunday spaces, we gain a deep understanding of the relationship between the creator and syndicate. We learn one cartoonist's reaction to the unforgiving daily deadline pressure, and how assistants and ghosts can become indispensible in the process of producing a strip that doesn't have the luxury of relying on simplistic art and daily gags. We learn the intricacies of producing an integrated daily and Sunday storyline, a balancing act that is one of greatest tests of skill that any writer could ever face. We see one cartoonist's bold reaction to the demonization of his art form when accused of being, bizarrely, a cause of juvenile delinquency. We see how a cartoonist deals with the use, and misuse, of his creations in other media like movies and television.

I have only a few minor criticisms of the book, most worth mentioning if only so that this review doesn't seem utterly slavish in its support. First, the book is divided into just nine epic length chapters. It would have been more reader-friendly had it been broken up into more manageable chunks that could be read at one sitting. And although there are illustrations throughout the book, usually well-placed to coincide with the related narrative, each chapter ends with a gallery of additional illustrations. These sections would have been better broken up and dispersed throughout the text, if only to relieve the long stretches of type-dense pages.

The narrative flow drags a bit for a hundred pages or so near the end of the book. By this time Caniff was constantly being lured away from his drawing board by an endless procession of accolades and honors from every organization under the sun. Harvey unwisely devotes a considerable amount of space to the details. This section, while it does have occasional interesting points, could have been considerably shortened. If the purpose was to show that Caniff was revered by his peers and his fans, well, that wasn't much of a secret anyway.

Finally I have to question Harvey's use of invented conversations. In the first half of the book the author occasionally uses a device where he stages a conversation, usually set in Caniff's favorite watering-hole, in which we eavesdrop on a group of cartoonists shooting the bull. Harvey uses the device to impart some information in a presumably more entertaining method than dry prose. The device falls flat, though, because the conversations are stilted and too obviously staged for our benefit. And although Harvey makes no secret that the conversations are his own inventions, in a scrupulously researched work otherwise factual throughout I found these passages somehow discomforting from the standpoint of journalistic ethics. Call me a stick in the mud.

These are all picayune little quibbles, though. Harvey's work is, quite simply, a masterpiece of biography. He has set the platinum standard by which all future cartoonist biographies will be judged. Most, likely all, will be found wanting in comparison. It is one thing to produce a thick book, and not necessarily a good thing at that. It is an entirely different thing that Harvey has achieved here. He has produced a work of lasting merit, eminently readable, brimming with meticulous research, a work that must be atop the required reading list of every cartooning fan and cartoonist.