Review: Meanwhile... a Biography of Milton Caniff

Meanwhile... a Biography of Milton Caniff is a 2007 book published by Fantagraphics and written by R. C. Harvey (who is now deceased). In his life, Harvey was a major fan and promoter of the work of Milton Caniff and had a lot of access to Caniff during the latter years of his life. Meanwhile clocks in at almost 1000 pages yet apparently Harvey's 1st draft was almost twice that length and had to be pared down.

In the early chapters you might well wonder what exactly was pared down - I did. The space spent covering Caniff's early life prior to his professional career as a cartoonist are extremely padded. For instance, to explain something about U.S. culture in the 1920s, Harvey spent two paragraphs recapping the plot and substance of Sinclair Lewis' novel Babbitt. An entire chapter was spent discussing the history of newspaper comics. At times Harvey scripted imaginary conversations he assumed Caniff must have held with other cartoonists. But digressions and rabbit trails (Babbitt trails?) such as this became fairly rare once Caniff's career took off.

Indeed, as Caniff was (and is) best-known for his comic strip Terry and the Pirates (1934-1946), Harvey devoted more time and energy to those years of Caniff's life to the point that most of the storyarcs from the strip were recounted in the text by Harvey. That stands in stark contrast to Caniff's long-running Steve Canyon (1947-1988) strip for which Harvey noted certain highlights in the strip's history but comparatively glanced over much of the content.

I own a set of the complete Terry and the Pirates strips by Caniff that was published by IDW some years ago. I love the strip and I have a lot of respect for Caniff's storytelling and art. I'm less enthusiastic about Steve Canyon - I have vestigal memories of that strip from my childhood and my impression then was that the strip was about as boring as Rex Morgan M.D. or Mark Trail. Of course, as I learned in Harvey's tome, Caniff didn't really draw the strip for very long, turning the penciling duties over to Dick Rockwell and only supplying inks for the majority of the strip's run.

Although I'm overwhelmingly for Milt Caniff, I wasn't prepared for the tone of Harvey's book. Harvey approaches Caniff as though he were beyond criticism. One snippet I found revealing was this, where Harvey engaged with some criticism written by Canadian Arn Saba (today Katherine Collins); Collins (Saba) wrote:

"[When Steve reenlisted in the Air Force], the strip became a vehicle for right-wing political views in that completely transparent and guileless way that Americans have of not even realizing that there might be any other point of view..."

Harvey immediately pushed back against this:

"I don’t wholly agree with Saba. Caniff was a mainstream moderate not a right-wing conservative: he scarcely approached Harold Gray’s end of the political spectrum."

As a fellow Canadian, I understand Collins (Saba)'s perspective as an outsider viewing American culture. Harvey seems unable to consider how American views appear to the world at large, how very right-wing his nation's culture is. One needn't be as far-right as Gray to espouse a right-wing viewpoint. Many of what I see Americans calling centrist views, I would call right-wing if they were uttered by a Canadian. Harvey's own right-wing views were evident when he discussed the protests against Vietnam, where he repeatedly cast shade on the protestor's motivations, at one point calling them "self-indulgent" and generally engaging in bad faith representations of why the war protests broke out.

But for me the most troubling part of Harvey's defensiveness (defensive of the USA and defensive of Caniff) is when he discussed racism in Terry and the Pirates. Despite Harvey's verbose writing style and indulgent 1000 page count, he spent less than 2 pages on this topic. Here's a snippet of the praise he lavished on Caniff:

Almost from the start, Caniff’s treatment of the Chinese in his strip had been respectful—even within the permissive conventions of the medium in a relatively racist society. Caniff’s Chinese villains had been villainous, but they hadn't been racial caricatures: they had been realistically rendered. Some of the early heavies had leaned a little too far in the direction of the Oriental villains of melodrama, but before the strip was six months old, Caniff had scuttled stereotypes like these. And all the other Chinese who crossed Caniff’s stage performed their functions as appropriate to their assigned roles (whether large or small) without any particular attention (or slight) to their race. Not all Chinese were pirates; not all pirates were venal. Not all Caucasians were good guys; and even the good guys had faults.

It really is fair game to talk about racism in Terry and the Pirates. I love that strip, but I also won't hesitate to call it racist. There absolutely are mitigating factors such as Harvey notes above, but any contemporary reader who sees a Caniff drawing of the character Connie will not hesitate in calling him a racist caricature. There's definitely a debate to have on that subject, probably an especially good one to hear from a critic of Asian descent (to say nothing of the Dragon Lady, who I myself saw targeted for criticism in a female Asian student's comics presentation at my university). I don't think Harvey's attempts to cast Caniff as going against the tide of his culture will really resonate with today's audiences; I think they'll simply see Caniff as (at best) a product of his times - and because of his great influence on comics, a fair target for criticism.

So Meanwhile is a hard book to recommend. If you are really enthralled by Caniff's work, I think it's indispensable. Otherwise, no one would want to engage with the book - it's too big, too overwritten, too hagiographic for the casual reader.