Escape Artist

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Undergrads, Upper Classes. In the readership polls Caniff seldom beats out Ham Fisher's hammy Joe Palooka or Chic Young's just-folksy Blondie. But his comparatively small (31 million) audience is, comparatively speaking, a class audience. It includes collegians (from Harvard to Siwash) and their professors, the Duke of Windsor, Margaret Truman, John Steinbeck†— and, significantly, hundreds of newspaper executives. Two years ago, when a score of syndicate salesmen began to spread the word of a new, as yet unnamed and undrawn comic by Caniff, they had nothing to sell but Caniff's name. For U.S. publishers, that was enough.

Dig, Dig, Dig. In the last months of his '305, Milton Arthur Caniff is a handsomely hefty (195 lbs.), blue-eyed, relaxed man with an indoor look and a sociable nature. He is almost never seen in the Stork Club or at El Morocco, although many a G.I. or plain reader might naturally assume that Terry's generally sophisticated dialogue was clutched from some such glamor-scented air.

Actually, it comes out of Caniff's head. Among cartoonists—fellow members of what he calls "the pariah profession"—he is well liked, but seldom seen. He lives and works (12 to 18 hours a day) on the outer suburban ring of New York City, in a town with the confusing name of New City, N.Y. (pop. 992). Neighbors in the New City intellectual colony include Playwright Maxwell Anderson, Artist Henry Varnum Poor and Author J. P. McEvoy.

A year ago, clearing his decks for the big change from Terry to Steve Canyon, Caniff swore off smoking and drinking. Though he hates to exercise, he even went for walks on brooding Tor Ridge (the locale of Anderson's 1936 play High Tor), to keep his weight down. Says he: "All I could think of was 'God, I wish I were inside!'" So he reminded himself that the ridge was full of copperhead snakes anyway, and gave it up.

No Idle Hands. A man who hates to know the time of day (it is always later than he thinks), Caniff gets to his studio late in the forenoon, spends his daylight hours writing with his right hand, drawing and drinking coffee with his left. "It's hell being your own master," he says. "You work a 40-hour day instead of a 40-hour week." His pretty blonde wife, Esther—he calls her Bunny—brings the coffee, gets the meals and keeps guests from gumming up the production line. Slim, slack-clad Bunny Caniff doesn't have much to say when her talkative husband has visitors. Says she: "I'm afraid people will miss something Milt is saying."

The production line cannot stop, but Caniff, a dreadful procrastinator, does his best to slow it to a calm, unhurried pace. He seizes on any excuse—like the postman's arrival with fan mail—to break off work. To his assistant, Frank Engli, he is a casual boss who slings the slang along with the strips they hand back & forth for inking, lettering and checking.