Product Description: The third installment in Checker's ambitious year-by-year reprinting of the Milton Caniff classic. This volume includes action-packed strips circa 1949, including: Operation Snowflower, Dragonflies and Teammates.
High adventure and jingoism My reviews for the first two issues of Checker's Steve Canyon series would suggest that my mind is made up in advance in its favour. Actually, the strip has a couple of strikes against it: 1) the hero is a little bland and too iconically good for my tastes and 2) while patriotism may have its place, if it crosses into jingoism it becomes an irritant. However, the sidekick Happy Easter provides a little peanut butter and jelly to Canyon's white bread, and the patriotism had been somewhat discreet up to this point, being limited to the bad guys' animosity to Yankee-ness and the good guys being paragons of virtue and know-how. The strip's great qualities overwhelm these minor irritants.
How Canyon's unwavering righteousness will navigate the sixties and its antiheroes, should the Checker series make it that far - and I hope it will - will be a very interesting meta-thread in which a fictional character is pitted against forces outside his semi-fictional world. It's a matter of record that this precipitated his creator's semi-retirement and the strip's decline. I hope the Checker series continues on through Steve Canyon's full run.
I was forewarned that the strip would be marred to some extent by the jingoism, which is what the patriotism turns into when it commandeers the storyline in the first thirty pages (three months (!)) of this issue where a young (and so far irritating) recruit to Canyon's team has to find the movie that is most representative of life in America, even soliciting readers' help for the task. There is also a paean to the freedoms in the USA by one character showing home movies; ironically, this was during the height of the McCarthy era. Nevertheless, the strip is a historical record and this plot detour has to be accepted part and parcel with it. Some seeds for what follows are sown in the meantime and the rest of the book is as entertaining as the others.
We are now equipped with enough hindsight to note the irony of the ode to the freedoms in the USA in a volume of strips that are concurrent with the height of the McCarthy era. As a historical record, the Canyon series could be an excellent backdrop to post-WWII American history as might be taught in high school or even college.
Consider the following sampling of topics the strip can inspire:
- communism and anti-communism; - the comics syndicates and the various filters (including consideration of the readership itself) through which American culture must pass before reaching the reader's eye; - the cigarette as a prop in movies and comics (did/does Big Tobacco finance this? does it represent emancipation, cool?); - American foreign policy, real vs. perceived - is it the same thing?; the rituals of courtship, growing up, gender-based roles; - geography - where is (fictional) Damma?, what are the (not so fictional) people of the Bear?; - the technological innovations that appear in the strip; - the styles; - the paucity of American blacks; - references to real events; - post-Pearl Harbor vs. post-9/11, followed up with comparisons between the threat of fascism, then communism, and today's threat of terrorism; - the worldview - is it worldly or is it naïve? Consider the depictions and characterizations of other races.
This series can inspire a huge number of points, many of which are highly pertinent today. The painstaking research Caniff did for his creation makes it especially reliable.
The great strengths of the strip shine through: the stories are rich and eventful, the art stunning, the characters varied and interesting, and the locales as exotic as ever. Unlike many other strips, this one does not rely excessively on cheap devices, such as crazy coincidences, cheating on timelines or resorting to deus ex machina, all of which are replete in adventure strips, though some suspension of disbelief is required. Steve Canyon is the polished work of a seasoned master.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
