Steve Canyon No. 9

Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press, 1984. Not Indicated . Soft cover. Fine. b/w Illustrations. Steve Canyon was a long-running American adventure comic strip by writer-artist Milton Caniff, published from January 13, 1947, after Caniff had retired from penning a popular previous strip Terry and the Pirates, through June 4, 1988, shortly after Caniff's death. Caniff won the Reuben Award for the strip in 1971. By 1946, Caniff had developed a worldwide reputation for his writing and art on Terry and the Pirates, the rights to which were owned by the Chicago Tribune newspaper syndicate. Seeking creative control of his own work, Caniff approached the Chicago Sun-Times with an idea for a strip he would own outright. Caniff's last episode for Terry and the Pirates appeared in December 1946, and Steve Canyon appeared a short time later, Jan. 13, 1947, in 168 newspapers throughout the country. Like many comic-strip creators, who employ uncredited assistants or ghost artists, Caniff in 1952 hired comic book artist Dick Rockwell as his assistant on the strip. A nephew of famed illustrator Norman Rockwell, Dick Rockwell penciled and inked secondary characters and backgrounds, while Caniff wrote, drew the main characters, and did finishing touches. Rockwell continued on Canyon until Caniff's death on May 3, 1988.