Entertainment, Books - Marine Corps Times

Cartoonist kept loyal Air Force following with straight-laced adventures of fictional flyboy

Milton Caniff was hardly fighter pilot stock. If it weren’t for his phlebitis, a vein ailment, the narcolepsy alone would have barred him from the cockpit.

Instead, he found a back door to Air Force glory. Caniff, a cartoonist, simply drew his way into the service’s inner circle.

Through his long-running comic strip “Steve Canyon” — starring a fighter pilot with lemon-colored hair — Caniff became the Air Force’s most regaled civilian. He was treated to classified files, audiences with generals and, when he died in 1988 at age 81, a funeral with full military honors.

As the Air Force celebrates its 60th anniversary, so do fans of Caniff’s most enduring strip. Steve Canyon debuted in 1947, the same year Defense Department leaders molded the Army Air Forces into a stand-alone branch.

A special Steve Canyon

2007: In action in Afghanistan

From the Steve Canyon archives

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Feb. 8, 1960: Promoted to full colonel

On the tube

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The Korean Story

Caniff’s drawings gave the service a public identity when it needed one most. Through its 41-year run in hundreds of newspapers, Steve Canyon offered an insider’s look at the characters, missions and ideals driving the Cold War-era Air Force.

Caniff made the Air Force look noble+ and sexy. In turn, he was rewarded with extraordinary access. The cartoonist kept so many Air Force materials and documents in his New York studio that visiting it required security clearance, said Robert Harvey, author of "Meanwhile ... A Biography of Milton Caniff."

“To the Air Force,” Harvey said, “Steve Canyon was their unofficial spokesman.”

The phenom — Terry

Caniff’s closest brush with military service was the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at Ohio State University. There, the Hillsboro, Ohio, native served alongside Curtis LeMay, who later gained notoriety as a ruthless Air Force general and served as chief of staff from 1961-1965.

However, Caniff became an illustrator with The Associated Press. In 1934, four years after graduating college, the New York Daily News hired him to produce “Terry and the Pirates,” a strip about a young man named Terry surrounded by oddball smugglers, thieves and warlords. The phenomenally popular storyline, published in a staggering 300 papers, followed Terry’s travels through China.

It was threaded with hard-nosed patriotism, and when Terry was old enough to join the war effort, Caniff made him a pilot with the Army Air Forces. He later introduced a character named Col. Flip Corkin, strongly modeled on Caniff’s real-life pal, Col. Phillip “Flip” Cochran, commander of the 1st Air Commando Group.

Cochran, a wily officer beloved by his men, provided rich material for Caniff. Their relationship foreshadowed the cartoonist’s intimate ties with the Air Force. A stickler for accuracy, Caniff studied the Air Force: its people, places and tactics. From his workshop, he was able to convey the Air Force’s complex mission one frame at a time — and sometimes predict its next move.

Stationed in India, Cochran was intent on attacking the Japanese forces through Burma. To thwart Japanese radar, he sent troops over the border on low-flying gliders. Col. Corkin, his pen-and-ink counterpart, did the same. And soon after that storyline was published, the FBI came for Caniff and demanded to know how he learned classified tactics.

His answer? Coincidence.

“That comic appeared the day before Cochran was about to launch the glider invasion,” Harvey said. “If you look at the map and where the troops were, you could tell they were going to invade Burma. Someone paying that much attention to the allies in Southeast Asia could come up with something close to what was actually happening.”

If Cochran fed the cartoonist intel, Harvey said, “Caniff never admitted it.”

Good connections

Though “Terry and the Pirates” gave Caniff a reputation for realism-tinged adventure, the cartoon was owned by a newspaper syndicate, and Caniff wanted full creative control and ownership. He left the strip in 1946, although it continued for another 27 years under the authorship of Associated Press cartoonist George Wunder.

His next strip would rely even more on military procedure and bring Caniff deeper into the Air Force’s fold.

Enter Steve Canyon, a square-jawed Air Force adventurer with a blue-eyed twinkle. Initially a veteran manning his private air cargo business, Canyon re-enlisted during the Korean War to fight in newsprint, just as real men fought in the war-torn peninsula.

Steve Canyon was never bloodthirsty or gruff. He was an adventurer with a light touch, a leader with compassion for rank-and-file airmen. He often defended the Air Force’s actions in plainspeak, whether it was emphasizing the service as a counterweight to foreign invasion or simply rationalizing noisy late-night jet sorties to a fictional military town called Indian Cape.

“The Air Force loved him,” said Harry Guyton, Caniff’s nephew and a former Army Criminal Investigation Command officer. “He was their best public information officer.”

Airmen also kept him accountable. Once, at Holloman Air Force Base, N.M., Caniff was allowed to spend 20 minutes alone in an F-104 Starfighter, a now-defunct supersonic interceptor. That night, Guyton said, he inked a sequence featuring Steve Canyon in the jet. But after the strip was published, Air Force pilots wrote letters detailing discrepancies. “They said, ‘If Steve was flying at 40,000 feet, the gauge would’ve said this,’” Guyton said. “Milton loved it.”

Outsiders often marveled at Caniff’s pull with the Air Force. As filmmaker Stanley Kubrick filmed “Dr. Strangelove,” a 1964 satire famous for its portrayal of the U.S. military’s Soviet-obsessed absurdity, he was frustrated in his attempts to obtain stock B-52 footage needed to complement a climactic scene. (The unflattering film culminates with pilot Maj. T.J. “King” Kong riding a plummeting nuclear bomb like a wild steer.)

Kubrick reached out to Caniff through a film contributor and cartoonist. “He said, ‘Just give me a couple minutes,’” Harvey said. “Caniff picked up the phone, called someone in the Pentagon and got them their footage.”

“Anything he wanted, he pretty well got it,” he said.

Honorably discharged

After the Vietnam War, much of America had lost its taste for straight-faced patriotism. Steve Canyon took a circulation hit, but Caniff continued producing the strip until his death. Guyton said he remembers seeing a drawing board on Caniff’s lap at the New York City hospital where he died.

Though Caniff was a lifelong Air Force apologist, he never veered into vapid patriotism, Harvey said. “He never bleated patriotism for God, country and flag. He talked about military considerations and political realities. Steve [Canyon] was all about, ‘I’m here to do a job, and I won’t let my pals down.’”

During the strip’s 41-year run, Caniff received numerous awards, including the Air Force’s Exceptional Civilian Service Award — the highest granted to a civilian — and, twice, Cartoonist of the Year from the National Cartoonists Society.

And, strangely, Steve Canyon also departed with a bit of fanfare. After Caniff passed, the Air Force issued an honorable discharge for the fictional colonel, providing official paperwork that includes a real serial number and service record.

Though unknown to younger generations, Steve Canyon remains marketable to the comic’s aging fans. Years’ worth of strips are reprinted in anthologies and, this fall, Caniff’s estate will release a remastered DVD of the “Steve Canyon” NBC television series broadcast in 1958 and 1959.

Two post-Caniff renderings of the strip have been produced by Russ Maheras, a published cartoonist and retired Air Force master sergeant who now works as a civilian in the service’s National Civic Outreach Office in Chicago. One was published in the 1997 Air Force Times’ 50th Anniversary edition. The other, for the Air Force’s 60th, appears in this issue.

Today, a comic strip with Steve Canyon’s guileless approach faces a much more cynical public, Maheras said.

“I think the sincerity behind the strip really reflects the way a lot of people view their mission,” he said. “If there’s cynicism towards an attitude like that, that’s really a shame.”  

To learn more about Steve Canyon’s legacy, visit http://stevecanyondvd.blogspot.com.