IMAGE: The microfilm reader at Columbia Public Library.

As I write in the afterward to the Miss Mizzou book, I first came upon Miss Mizzou in 2007. I’m pretty sure that it was this Milton Caniff/Alex Raymond post from Mike Lynch’s blog. There’s just a hint about what the character was in that post, and back then at least, there wasn’t much else online about the character.

I never grew up with Milton Caniff. “Steve Canyon” was in newspapers until 1988, so I theoretically could have seen the strip growing up in the 1980s, but I don’t think any of the newspapers I read carried it. In my teenage years I did see glimpses of Caniff work in comic trade magazines and I always marveled at his excellent brushwork. I have to say that until I got to researching Miss Mizzou, I hadn’t fully read much Caniff work at all.

My interest in the research was trying to figure out why Caniff, one of the biggest celebrity cartoonists of his day, would create a comic character around the small town of Columbia, Missouri. I started to poke around in the microfilm from various newspapers for information about the character. I got addicted to the thrill of the search, and ended up finding new bits of the story piece by piece, but it was slow going. Eventually the difficulty of finding answers through microfilm got tough enough that I put the research aside for a few years to work on some other projects. I picked the research back up around 2012 and decided to get a few more answers and call it quits.

Throughout the research process, I was wondering what the final product would be? I can tell you, a book was the furthest thing from my mind. I thought at best I might get a small article that I could publish somewhere. I worked up a short version of the story, but it was of such length that it was hard to market. Somewhere in the last 10-20 years, article lengths for newspapers and magazines have deteriorated to the point where my story just didn’t seem to fit in. To be fair, longer articles still exist in publications, but they usually have some sense of importance on a larger scale from what I can tell. The Miss Mizzou story is an interesting quirky story, but just didn’t seem to fit in modern publications.

I gave some thought to morphing the research into a book, and thought that the print on demand market might work pretty well for information like this; a local history book with a slight appeal to comic fans as well. I dug up some more research and started forming it into a book.

Stylistically, the book is a bit of a compromise. I was hoping to strike a balance that would meet both popular and academic readers. Did I succeed? That’s for you to decide.

The Miss Mizzou book is a product of my research, but don’t mistake it to be the final word on the character. There’s a lot of loose ends that I didn’t get the chance to research, and I may have unintentionally gotten some of the story wrong. The chance of a revised edition of the book seems like something that would be a possibility, or perhaps I’ll just add a few more blog posts to this blog as new information is discovered?

IMAGE: An error in a story about Milton Caniff that I’ve corrected using a red pen. (I’ll leave out the details of who made this mistake, but the image is included in my Miss Mizzou book if you care to look.)

Before my Miss Mizzou book came out last year, many past newspaper articles had gotten the story of Miss Mizzou wrong. Yes, sad but true, the errors involved with reporting stories on Miss Mizzou are numerous and plentiful. I thought I’d write up a blog post to correct some of the persistent errors that I’ve come across.

False: Milton Caniff visited Columbia Missouri in 1948.
True: Milton Caniff visited Columbia, Missouri, May 5th, 1949.
This error seemed to crop up right around the character’s debut in 1952. Once printed, this false information has been a perennial mainstay of the Miss Mizzou story that is hard to shake. This isn’t the only date that has been messed up by reporters, but it seems to be the most prevalent.

False: Milton Caniff is an MU Alumnus.
True: Milton Caniff graduated from Ohio State University.
I think what get’s this misconception going is a confusion between cartoonist and MU Alumnus Mort Walker and Milton Caniff. They both produced military strips, so they should be the same guy, right? Not exactly.

False: The Miss Mizzou character graduated from MU.
True: The Miss Mizzou character did not attend MU.
Caniff made clear from the beginning that the character was a waitress from Columbia, Missouri, and people at the diner she worked at called her “Miss Mizzou.” She liked the college in the strip, but she never went to school there.

False: Caniff was inspired by a local waitress to create Miss Mizzou.
True: Caniff did not use a local waitress as inspiration for Miss Mizzou.
Time and time again I’ve seen journalists who deliver this supposition, but Caniff refutes this point whenever he’s been interviewed about it. One interview in the 1980s had Caniff pointing to a waitress that he knew of during his college days that might have inspired the character, as I write about in the book.

False: Bek Stiner was the only person to model for Caniff as Miss Mizzou.
True: Bek Stiner was the first to model for Caniff as Miss Mizzou.
Can’t really blame anyone for this misconception too much, since I didn’t find out how many women had modeled for Caniff as Miss Mizzou until I started writing this book. There are at least two other models that we know of via photographic evidence, and perhaps a third though a report in a newspaper column.

If you have any other corrections, let me know! I will say that while I think I may have got most of the facts correct on Miss Mizzou, my book is of course prone to errors too. There may be parts of the Miss Mizzou story that I may have interpreted wrong or gotten specific facts garbled. Please feel free to send me a note or leave a comment on this blog correcting my mistakes. Thanks!

IMAGE: The front and back of a Miss Mizzou bookmark created to promote the Miss Mizzou book.

This is a bit of a personal post I wanted to write to explain why I didn’t want to create any Miss Mizzou merchandise to go along with the Miss Mizzou book. A couple of practical reasons:

• I wanted to err on the side of caution while dealing with a complex character with a controversial past. The character is not as simple and beloved as the Truman Tiger mascot for example.
• The rights to Miss Mizzou are complex; MU has the “Mizzou” trademark, but the Caniff Estate owns the character. Luckily I got permission to do the book because it was history, but merchandising might be a different situation.

More than these reasons, merchandising didn’t interest me because I want to promote the story of Miss Mizzou, not the character. I’m interested in sharing the story with a new generation of Columbians, MU students, and comic fans. While a lot of my book examines frivolous things, I think there are also interesting lessons to be learned from the story of Miss Mizzou. My role is amateur historian and comics scholar, not intellectual property marketer.

With the interest of sharing the story, I did create one item that might fall in the merchandising category: Bookmarks. These are hopefully a modest promotional tool that I’ve been handing out for free so I can promote my book, and the story of Miss Mizzou.