Captain America may be dead, but Steve Canyon lives

Click on the thumbnail to see the full image

Over at the ASIFA-Hollywood Archive, Steve Worth has posted some jim-dandy panels of the classic Milton Caniff comic strip, "Steve Canyon", donated to A-HAA from the Caniff family's private collection.

Caniff started "Steve Canyon" after walking away from his classic "Terry and the Pirates" strip. The strip continued until a month after Caniff's death in May 1988. When and if I read it as a kid, it was when my dad wasn't looking, for Caniff's right-wing, pro-military politics made him anything but politically correct in our circles.

I've been making up for lost time by following the strip at Humorous Maximus, which started posting the original strips in sequential order on January 13 of this year, the fiftieth anniversary of its first appearance in a newspaper.

Go to Humorous Maximus at the link above and click on the calendar to go to the Sunday panel they published on February 4 of this year (sorry, but the site is hard-wired against direct-linking). Compare this with what gets published in Sunday comic sections nowadays (and how the newspapers publish it). Tell me you don't agree that this is newspaper comic art at its finest ... hell, it's storyboarding at its finest.

And counting from when he started "Terry", Caniff kept this up for fifty-four years.

Anyway, this is an animation blog, so my question is ... why wasn't "Steve Canyon" ever done in animation? Could it have been animated?