J. Williamson sent this one to me…
On one of the Walt Kelly panels at Comic-Con a few years ago, you started to tell a story about how Milton Caniff was assisted by a letterer and I think another artist on his strip but you got sidetracked and never told it. Could you tell it on your blog?
Certainly. Here is how Milton Caniff "drew" the Steve Canyon newspaper strip for at least the last decade or two of its existence. Caniff would write it, lightly sketched, on ordinary typing paper. I don't know of him getting help with the writing but that's not impossible.
He would then send the script to the letterer, who for a long, long time was a gent named Frank Engli. Engli would have a supply of the art paper on which the strip was drawn and he'd cut the paper to size, rule off the image area, letter in the balloons that Caniff had written and then send the lettered (but otherwise blank) strips and Caniff's script on to the ghost artist. For much of that time, it was Dick Rockwell.
Rockwell would tight-pencil the art and ink everything except the heads of the main characters. Then he'd send the strips to Caniff who would ink the heads and he'd redraw anything he felt needed redrawing. Once upon a time, he had done everything on the strip himself except for the lettering, but this is the way he chose to work in his later years.
Then Engli died and Caniff gave the lettering job to a "kid" whose name is not known…and this is kind of interesting. Caniff was a staunch political conservative and Engli was pretty liberal. They remained good friends but Caniff, when he got into a right-wing preachy mood in the strip, sometimes enjoyed that he was forcing Engli to letter dialogue which Engli found repugnant. It was a friendly jab, kind of like a prank between buddies. Engli would sometimes call Caniff and debate what he was required to letter.
The unknown "kid" who succeeded him was someone Caniff found by asking at a local art supply shop. As I understand it, this was his only brush with the field of comic strips but he could imitate Engli's style. The problem was that he was even more liberal than Engli and he simply refused to letter certain speeches. When he tried discussing politics with the goal of changing of changing Caniff's mind, Caniff called Shel Dorf. Yes, this was the same Shel Dorf who was involved in the birth of the annual event we now call Comic-Con International and is sometimes — wrongly, I'm quite sure — treated like its sole founder.
Shel had no real experience lettering but this was his big chance to get involved on a professional level with his favorite comic strip and his favorite comic strip creator. According to him — and I didn't believe everything Shel told me but I believed this — Caniff said, "You've got to help me. I'm desperate!" I suspect Caniff was banking on Shel's personal loyalty, his longtime yearning to be a part of the creative side of comics and the fact that Shel had a pretty large collection of Steve Canyon originals lettered by Engli to study.
So Dorf made a series of field trips to visit various folks he thought could teach him how to letter. He spent an afternoon at my house looking at original art and having me explain whatever I knew about the craft. One thing I taught him was how to use an Ames Guide, which was a little tool that most letterers use to rule guidelines. One of them looked like this and you can still buy one at Amazon for under six bucks…
He spent some time with Alex Toth, which must have been odd because Toth had a frequently-voiced disdain for Caniff's work. This was not about the politics. It was more along the lines of "If he can't draw as well as he did in the forties and fifties, he should do the honorable thing and retire!" That's not a quote but it's close.
I forget who else Shel "studied" with. Maybe Mike Royer and/or Bill Spicer and/or Russ Manning. I think he may have even dropped in on Jack Kirby, which probably was of little help since Jack hadn't lettered a comic in thirty years. Then Shel lettered up some samples and Caniff awarded him the exalted (to Shel) position of lettering Steve Canyon.
Thereafter, Dorf was sent Caniff's handwritten/sketched script…and Shel was one of the laziest people I've ever known. Though not being paid very well for the job, Shel actually hired his own assistant to cut the paper to size and rule off the image area, paying a different "kid" something like fifty cents a strip. Then Shel would letter in the balloons and send the strips to Rockwell, who'd do the same thing he'd done when Engli was lettering the strip.
The strips then went to Caniff for finishing. He would sometimes change his mind about something in the balloons and reletter it himself, which was difficult. They did the strip in India Ink, which does not dry instantly. When a left-handed person letters with that kind of ink, he often drags his hand across the not-yet-dry lettering as he letters and smears it. Caniff was left-handed and when he had to letter, he would write the lettering out in pencil left-to-right and then ink it right-to-left.
That obviously is not a great way to work, which is why Caniff was so desperate. Eventually, he found a brand of markers which dried instantly and he was able to letter left-to-right with them when he had to letter.
He would also still ink in the faces of the main characters and do any art corrections or redraws he felt were necessary…and that's how a strip was done until Caniff passed away in 1988. Rockwell hoped the syndicate would let him continue it and Dorf really hoped they'd let it live on and he'd somehow be in charge of it. He kept asking me if I'd ghost-write it if that happened and I kept telling him no and that whenever Caniff passed, the syndicate would end it. It was in very few papers by then and because Caniff had a guarantee of a certain minimum fee, the syndicate was losing money on it.
As it turned out, I was right: They kept it going for the rest of Caniff's lifetime out of respect for the man and his long service. But once he died, they let Rockwell finish up the storyline-in-progress and then Steve Canyon received a decent funeral. I'm not sure very many people besides Shel noticed.
