IMAGE: Steve Canyon Sunday comic strip, August 22, 1954 – Copyright 2014 the Milton Caniff Estate. Miss Mizzou sings in a nightclub up north in Canada. Steve Canyon is “roughed up” by some of her adoring fans in the audience.

Did Caniff draw on films for plot elements of his stories? Let’s take a look at an example featuring Marilyn Monroe.

On April 30, 1954, “River of No Return” came out in theaters. At the beginning of the film Monroe plays a “nightclub” entertainer in a tent city full of gold prospectors. She quickly leaves the lifestyle for the main plot which involves a gold hungry boyfriend, a farmer recently released from prison, and a trip down a dangerous river in hostile Indian country.

In early August of 1954, the Steve Canyon strip started having another storyline featuring Miss Mizzou. The story finds Mizzou employed as a nightclub entertainer in a small town built around temporary workers constructing radar detection stations. Mizzou is in a similar position to Monroe in the film, so I think it’s possible that the film may have influenced Caniff to write the sequence. Considering that Caniff usually worked at least two or three months ahead around that time, the timeline for this theory fits.

It’s hard to say if Caniff would so brazenly borrow from “River of No Return” for his 1954 story. In 1986 he wrote that the 1952 Miss Mizzou story might have been sparked by the 1944 Alfred Hitchcock film “Lifeboat.” He also added, “Generally speaking, though, films are a subliminal thing. You have to be careful because you don’t want to copy or steal. Some readers won’t let you get away with it.”