Product Description: More exotic locales and groundbreaking cartooning from Milton Caniff in the 7th Checker release of Steve Canyon, collecting May 15, 1953 to August 5, 1954, which includes the stories Indian Cafe, The Princess and the Doctor and The Halls.
The best of the series so far I was getting a little bored with the domestic side of Steve Canyon, but a teaser at the end of the previous volume promised foreign intrigue, and the first adventure in this volume delivers.
We revisit the series' antihero, whom I will not identify, a perfect foil of a sort to Canyon. I actually prefer the antihero, and the USA may, at this juncture (1953), already be ripening for the sixties deluge of such heroes. In such an environment, Steve Canyon will languish. But right now, it's 1953, and we have a great adventure on our hands. What is essentially the concluding panel (last panel, September 8) shows the antihero, who by definition is something of an iconoclast, in a stirring scene that is strongly reminiscent of the last, memorable, panel in Tintin in Tibet (1960) [which adventure I referred to, ironically enough, in my review to SC 1952].
The second story requires a little force fitting on the author's part and I, as a reader indulge him. It's still quite good, set in a certain "neutral country between India and the USSR" - that would have to be Afghanistan, right? In fact, it would place him in the province neighbouring the Afghan province of Kafiristan of "The Man Who Would be King" fame.
Not only are these foreign adventures exotic, but Caniff has built up a more interesting gallery of characters around them. His rendering of these locales is beautiful and there are signs these days - 2007 is the hundredth anniversary of his birth - that he may gain recognition not just as a great comic artist, but as a great artist, period. (To those interested, as part of this anniversary, the complete Caniff Terry and the Pirates is being released.)
The second adventure ends flush with the year-end. The books, labelled 1947, 1948, and so on, have been covering a little more than a year each, with each edition creeping a little further ahead into the next year. This one has about seven months of 1953 and seven months of 1954, so more than half of the next issue, "1954", will really be covering 1955. I'm not complaining: we get about 165 pages of dense adventures, and the series probably delivers the greatest quantity of comics per dollar of anything I've seen, while the quality is generally very high.
The first story is the best, the second is fun, light if a little trite, the third is great action (with a couple of dollops of déjà vu), and the fourth brings us back stateside, but this time with a much better than average Summer Olson story.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
