Product Description: The swashbuckling adventures of the American dream flyboy continue in Steve Canyon 1954. Volume 8 includes the stories Evangeline, Overreaching, and In Formosa's Dire Straits.
Steve is the 50's There's no one like Steve Canyon. Or, maybe everyone is like Lt.Col. Stephenson B. Canyon in the 50's. Caniff's artwork is magnificent, and his stories are complicated (if predictable) and romantic. This is the world of the 50's--constantly contriving enemies, emerging tough women, and faithful lovers. And, always, the Air Force, protects us all. This is a good comic, and a trip in a time machine.
Another year of Canyon This volume is some 30 pages shorter than the previous one and covers almost exactly one year's worth of strips in three adventures.
The stories are page-turners, and Caniff stretches a little at times, but his storytelling imagination is certainly fertile. The artwork is superb with compositional elements bridging panels and entire Sunday pages. Simply flipping through, the chiaroscuro renderings please the eye.
The first adventure, Evangeline, takes place in Alaska again; Caniff handles the snow beautifully. Some highly imaginative (and I would guess unachievable) aerial acrobatics are shown. A slightly irritating device I've seen in several Caniff stories is the improbable deduction, such as the characters correctly guessing how a situation came about, for example the antagonist guessing that someone is out cold from a bump on the head (this allows the evil characters to pull an enormously improbable switch). But, we grant Caniff the licence to weave his tales out of such yarn. The story winds down with a very nice Sunday page on page 42, which pays tender attention to life's challenges on the personal level. The last panel here is superb, and the eye can't help hopping between it and the previous one.
Rescue is a very common theme in Canyon, and it appears in all three adventures. It is very well thought out in the next adventure, Overreaching, which also has the usual Caniff twists and human drama.
The third adventure, the longest in the entire series so far, is In Formosa's Dire Straits (six months). It is actually a medley of stories. This one has quite a few returning characters. The improbable deduction device mentioned above appears here in spades (for example, guessing at the nature of an injury from some brief report on the radio). One of the stories (running from page 89 to 105) looks like it was teleported from Terry and the Pirates, and it's interesting to observe Caniff's evolution since then. The storyline is more rigorous and far less naïve, the compositions a great deal more cinematographic with more complex angles and perspectives and the pacing is surer and less frantic. I won't say much about another story in this adventure except that it involves a highly optimistic plan on the part of the protagonists and severe lack of guile on the part of the antagonist.
For the entire third adventure, Checker made a mistake in the layouts and I hope that they don't repeat it if they do come out with more Steve Canyon books. Each adventure begins with a full splash page. In Formosa's Dire Straits began on a Tuesday, so there were 5 days before the Sunday page. As there are 4 strips per page in the Checker series, the Sunday page followed one strip and, for the entire six months of this adventure, every Sunday page was divided over two pages, and half the time, recto-verso. This wrecks Caniff's hard-wrought unity of the Sunday page. This problem could have been averted by putting one strip on the splash page.
The overall quality of the book, binding and, of course, the contents merit 4½ stars. I'm giving it 5, hoping this fine series will continue.
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