EDITORIAL REVIEWS


"penguincomics.net"

"Milton Caniff broke the mold with Steve Canyon...

...One of the many  touches that makes these books interesting is the reproduction. The high quality of the images leads me to believe that they were scanned from original art , or proof prints. A nice touch is the overlap on many of the pages, sort of like newspaper widescreen I guess."

...My first encounter with Steve Canyon was in the papers of my youth. I was struck by the incredible talent that he possessed, and when I found out that Checker Books was reprinting the series, I had to see what I missed. I was not dissapointed. From the color covers, the complete year collection of strips, and insightful commentary on Canyon at the end of the tales, they don't miss a beat. I enjoyed the tales, and had a hard time putting them down as I wrote this review.


"comics worth reading"

Checker Books continues its reprint projects with a classic adventure strip. Caniff began Steve Canyon in 1947 after a successful run on Terry and the Pirates. With this new strip, he kept the copyright, and it ran until his death in 1988.  (I vaguely remember reading the late days of this strip in the 80s, far from its glory days, when to me it was just another non-funny comic strip, like Apartment 3-G. That was a long time before I'd begun to understand the colorful history of the form or heard of the wonders of the great adventure strips. Reading this collection was eye-opening.)  (It was also post-Vietnam, when the character of a veteran airman who always supported the military was somewhat suspicious instead of the adventurous he-man he is here.)

After the war, Steve Canyon starts his own air transport company. The first storyline, "Copperhead", begins with a smart-aleck secretary setting a snappy mood. Copper Calhoun, "the she-wolf of the stock market", wants to hire Canyon's firm for an expedition. Steve plays hard-to-get, though, turning the situation into a question of whether he'll accept her as a client. ...continue