R.C. Harvey is a cartoonist, critic, and author of many books on cartooning. I first came upon his work through his Rants and Raves column in the now defunct “Comic Buyers Guide,” which is probably where I first heard about Milton Caniff. Yes, R.C. Harvey is probably to blame for my interest in Caniff. You can still subscribe to his ongoing Rants and Raves column on his website.
I asked Harvey to send me an advance review blurb for the book, and he provided a wonderful quote. I had to truncate it slightly for the book, but here’s the whole quote below:
In his Steve Canyon comic strip, Milton Caniff tried hard to create a character as provocative as the Dragon Lady or Burma in his Terry and the Pirates. The closest he came was Miss Mizzou, who shows up only five times, each time wearing a trench coat and, she assures us with a knowing wink, little, or perhaps nothing, else. In this slim and impressively researched volume (the footnotes are as fascinating a read as the main narrative), we find out that Mizzou had an equally tantalizing life beyond the borders of the comic strip, and J.B. Winter never fails to remind us of what she was wearing (or not) beneath the trench coat.
I like that he references the Dragon Lady and Burma in regards to Miss Mizzou. I didn’t mention much of this relationship between Caniff’s past characters in the main text of my book, so this was a perfect compliment to include in the front of the book as a blurb.
Recommended reading:
- Every Caniff fan should own R.C. Harvey’s biography “Meanwhile…: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon.” This is a thick and heavily researched volume, filled with rare and fascinating facts about Caniff.
- R.C. Harvey has also collected a series of interviews with Caniff and released it as “Milton Caniff: Conversations.” These interviews give a rare peek inside Caniff’s thinking and are the perfect compliment to Harvey’s biography. Did you know it’s the only other book other than mine that has Miss Mizzou on the cover?