MYTHCOMICS: "THE DUCHESS OF DENVER," STEVE CANYON (April-Aug 1951)

I touched on the influence of Milton Caniff in my review of FABLE OF VENICE, noting how he made his greatest impact with 1934's TERRY AND THE PIRATES, which he departed in 1946 in order to work on a strip he could own outright, 1947's STEVE CANYON. The latter strip, though popular, never had the massive influence that TERRY had on comics-art. Both strips involved footloose young bravos tooling around various parts of the world, but TERRY seemed to catch a spirit of pure adventure characteristic of the 1930s, while the postwar world of CANYON was considerably more button-down.

Both strips, however, displayed Caniff's genius for creating vibrant female characters.  The best-known character from TERRY, the Dragon Lady, has become a sobriquet for any sort of dominating female, but the original character was a cool, resourceful schemer who could out-think and outmaneuver most men-- though not so much Pat Ryan, the he-man star who escorted young Terry Lee into assorted adventures  At the same time Caniff also utilized other character-types who were not nearly as original. In addition to Ryan's dalliances with the exotic Dragon Lady, he also enjoyed romances with a Sweet Young Thing, name of Normandie Drake, and with a Shady Lady named Burma. a dame who gave every impression that she got around. Caniff continued to use all three types throughout CANYON as well, and in 1951 he came with one of his more interesting psychological myths: "the Duchess of Denver." She may have taken her name from a character in a 1920s "Peter Wimsey" detective novel, but I suspect her real source was Caniff's ambivalent feelings toward the opposite sex.

For Caniff the "Shady Lady" type stands between the Sweet Young Thing and the Dominating Woman (represented in the CANYON strip by a businesswoman with the evocative name of Copper Calhoun.)   The Shady Lady is basically sympathetic despite having some sort of criminal or socially-disreputable past, wandering from place to place and at home nowhere. Often, when the Caniff hero encounters her, he must rescue her from some caddish fellow to whom she's loosely associated. This is how Pat Ryan encounters Burma, whom he must protect from a fiend named Captain Judas.

Because Caniff aimed his strips at family newspapers, the precise relationship of the lady to her ungentlemanly paramours was always left vague, but often one could read between the lines pretty well. Though Caniff's women were often gutsy or clever, the world of TERRY-- and of CANYON-- was pretty much a man’s world. Thus it was a given that even women of independent minds ought to hook up with a man, either for financial or psychological support.

The Duchess of Denver belongs to the Shady Lady type, but with some interesting differences.  Steve Canyon makes one of his frequent jaunts to the Orient on some spy-mission, and a he sees the comely Duchess-- never given any other name-- being auctioned off at a slave-market by a despicable individual named Fungo.   However, after doing his Galahad act, Canyon learns that Fungo and the Duchess are actually married, and that the auction is a scam to fleece customers. Further, the Duchess isn't the usual "weak woman" enslaved to a brutish man. In a reverse of the usual expectations, the Duchess, though not physically prepossessing, is a former circus strongwoman who can beat up most men who give her grief, while Fungo is short and ratty-looking. But because the Duchess has some inexplicable love for the nasty fellow, she simply takes it when he slaps her around.  The relationship is never explored in depth, but Caniff commented on it more directly in STEVE CANYON MAGAZINE #13: “It was a sadism-masochism thing, which I was playing with very gingerly at the time.”   

LIke many earlier Shady Ladies, Duchess is basically good at heart, and is revolted by the criminal activities she must undertake for him-- and yet she remains in erotic bondage to her swinish lover. Finally, she rebels in an indirect manner; after Fungo tries to kill Canyon, the Duchess joins Canyon as they flee the city via ship. In contrast to many modern uses of similar tropes, there is never a cathartic moment in which she gets to whale on her abusive husband to pay him back. When the ship sails, Fungo is still hale and hearty, having lost nothing but a useful pawn in his auction-racket.

Whenever a female character in literature suffers abuse, some critics have been known to go overboard, seeing conspiracies by male creators to degrade womanhood, at least through fictional surrogates.   I’m leery of this kind of “woman-as-eternal-victim” reading, but I can see why someone might read the "Duchess" continuity in this fashion. Even though Duchess is physically stronger than most women, she remains psychologically dependent on a man for her self-validation.   In fact, in one of her few revealing moments, she tells Canyon, “I’m so strong I have to be calm—my mother told me to THINK like a helpless little girl.”   Canyon then asks, “Is that how you were thinking when you married Fungo?” This bit of impertinence earns him a punch in the face from the strongwoman.

I’d like to think, not that Caniff wanted to see a strong woman dominated by an evil man, but that he intuited that the socialization of women in the early 20^th century—the insistence that all women should be “feminine” to the extent of helplessness—put them in a vulnerable psychological position, resulting in a tendency of women to have masochistic tendencies no matter how physically strong she might be. At the same time, one can’t quite overlook that the Duchess never really triumphs over her dominator, but merely escapes him.   She does get to triumph over a more comic antagonist, though. Once Canyon and the Duchess take passage on the ship, they find out that its captain, the humorously named "Curly Kew," is an unscrupulous pirate, who decides to keep the two of them prisoner while trying to romance the Duchess. Duchess fends off Kew several times and subdues him physically twice, making it quite unnecessary for Canyon to perform his usual “knight-in-shining-armor” routine. Amusingly, one of the first story-lines in TERRY AND THE PIRATES dealt with Terry and Ryan being held captive on board a junk owned by the Dragon Lady and her piratical minions, and how Ryan had to keep coming up with ways to keep himself from being seduced by another type of "strong woman."

The shipboard menace comes to an end when Kew is taken prisoner by Communist forces: Canyon and the Duchess, not looking upon the Reds as rescuers, opt to escape the ship in a lifeboat.  During the escape Canyon’s “lady” becomes his “dragon,” for the Duchess catches a chill while the boat is at sea and becomes delirious. A storm arises, increasing the dramatic peril, and the Duchess hallucinates that Canyon is her abusive husband. She belatedly tries to take vengeance for her mistreatment by killing "Fungo," forcing Canyon to endeavor both to restrain her and to keep the boat from being swamped. “If I’m to lose a wrestling bout,” he cracks with a touch of male masochism, “it might as well be to a beautiful dame.”

  However, when push comes to shove-- that is, when she tries to bash him with an oar-- he does defend himself and knock her out.An extreme feminist might say that by so doing he merely reinforces the same male tyranny represented by Fungo, but this is somewhat backward thinking, given that Canyon is never less than the perfect gentleman. Then the storm serves as Caniff’s device to end the continuity. The boat is swamped, hurling both refugees into the ocean. Just in time Canyon is rescued by American military. The Duchess, who never again appears in the strip, is last seen about to sink beneath the ocean-waves.

One can’t entirely escape the feeling that Caniff, in creating the Duchess, spawned a character too powerful to play the damsel in Canyon’s normal knight-errant routine, and that she is written out of the strip as quickly as possible because Caniff could think of nothing else to do with her.   Since the artist doesn’t explicitly show her death, Caniff may have entertained some thought of bringing her back. But in all probability her remarkable physical strength would have made her too freakish to have become a returning figure like the aforementioned Burma. Still, she remains an interesting footnote to any considerations of Caniff as a creator of femmes formidables.

MYTHCOMICS: FABLE OF VENICE (1977)

It's long been observed that American genre-comics tend to travel a more straightforward, plot-determined path to get to their destinations, while similar works in Europe tend to wander about in peripatetic fashion. I don't make this observation for the reasons of elitist critics-- to tout the innate superiority of the European approach-- but to apply the distinction to this week's mythcomic.

Milton Caniff's comic strip TERRY AND THE PIRATES cast a long shadow over the world of comics long after Caniff departed the strip in 1946. The Italian Hugo Pratt was one of many artists who to some extent emulated Caniff's bag of visual tricks. For a comics-critic confined to the English language, it's difficult to assess Pratt's overall work. Almost the only works translated are Pratt's stories of Corto Maltese, and these stories caught the attention of American fans largely thanks to Frank Miller talked up Pratt's work during the height of Miller's popularity.  

The titular hero bears a loose resemblance to the tough adventurer Pat Ryan of Caniff's TERRY, but Pratt's Corto Maltese is much more laid-back and eccentric, and where Ryan is confined mostly to China, Corto wanders many parts of the world during the early 20th century. His creator knew some of these locals from personal experience. According to a preface in NBM's 1990 translation of FABLE OF VENICE, Pratt based this 1977 album-novel on his own experiences growing up in Venice. 

Given the protagonist's name, I find it logical that a particular influence on FABLE must have been Dashiell's Hammett's 1929 novel THE MALTESE FALCON and/or its film-adaptations. The novel is named for a fabulously valuable statue of a falcon, over which the novel's hero and his antagonists contend. The novel, much like Caniff's strip, is usually concerned purely with worldly concerns of profit.

But Pratt, who claims to have experienced uncanny phenomena in his encounters with the variegated cultures of Venice, takes the same idea of a character seeking a fabulous treasure but uses the idea to illustrate the arcane traditions of the Mediterranean cultures. FABLE starts with Corto falling through the ceiling of a room in which a group of Venetian Masons are convening. But where this might lead to some wild brawl in a Caniff storyline, the Masons simply escort the unfortunate sailor out of their sanctum. But the scene gives Pratt a chance to establish Corto's philosophical status with the reader. He shows that he knows something about the esoteric tradition, and yet tells the Masonic leader that "I'm just a free sailor-- at least, I  hope I am!" 

From then on, Corto wanders the streets of Venice, encountering both old acquaintances from past visits and new people, most of whom are directly or indirectly associated with esoteric matters. He has a few dust-ups with the authorities, just like Caniff's hero:

But on the whole, the wandering plot is mostly about the mysteries of Venice, where Corto observes that anything can happen. The treasure he seeks is a supposedly magical emerald, but he quests after this prize not for personal gain, but because a late associate, Baron Corvo, challenged the sailor to find the emerald. The emerald has a storied history like that of the Maltese Falcon, but the gem goes much further back, supposedly passing through the hands of myth-figures like Cain and Lilith and into the slightly more historical-seeming figures of Simon Peter and Simon Magus.

While trying to track down the elusive jewel, Corto meets various people associated with occultism, particularly Hipazia, who believes herself to be the reincarnation of Hypatia, the renowned Neoplatonic scholar who lived in Egypt during the 4th century A.D.  Hypazia projects the sense of being almost other-worldly, though Corto tells a friend "that girl can only love what she can't have."

FABLE puts forth a cornucopia of arcane references from the Greco-Roman world, the Bible, Islam, and even Nordic mythology. I don't think any of them add up to much individually, but these references, like the characters I discussed in this essay, "take on mythic status through their association." No literal magic is seen, so the novel registers an uncanny phenomenality through the trope of "weird societies." In addition, Corto has a bizarre dream in which he has a long conversation with a genie who looks like one of his old adversaries. And though he awakens from this dream, after the treasure-hunt (and murder-mystery) is solved, it turns out that the novel itself is something of a dream. FABLE ends with Corto bringing all of the characters "on stage"-- even those who have died-- to take their bows, and then leaves to appear in his next story. In my experience, this is one of the few times that a "delirious dream" took place WITHIN the context of a "fallacious figment."

INCORRECTLY CORRECT

Reader A. Sherman Barros brought to my attention a comment that HU columnist Robert Stanley Martin made about Milt Caniff's TERRY AND THE PIRATES: After linking to Digital Comics Museum's copy of TERRY AND THE PIRATES #7, Martin wrote: "Those who click to read the online scan should be aware the stories feature racist caricatures." He wrote some other stuff in the comments-section as well, but first I'll deal with the actual comic book itself, which reprints a selection of Caniff's famous comic strip. What exactly happens in the issue to merit the caution about racist caricature?

Well, as far as I can tell, the only "racist caricature" in the story is that of recurring character Connie. Here's a representative scene:

As far as I can tell, Connie's offenses are twofold: he speaks in a comic dialect, and he's as homely as sin, with big ears and buck teeth.

Now, I'm not at all a fan of Caniff's character. I think Caniff writes his dialect in an ootsy-cutesy manner I find abominable. However, he's far from the only character who speaks in an affected or stilted manner, and that includes the titular Terry's nominal guardian Pat Ryan. What I take away from Connie's fractured dialect is not that he's part of some racist conspiracy to make Chinese people look stupid, but that Caniff wasn't especially good at rendering English in dialect-form. 

As for his ugliness-- well, yes, Connie's not pleasant to look at, but I for one would look for other evidence that proved him to be a racist construct. For instance, Connie would definitely be racist if all other Asians in the strip were similarly depicted. If they're not-- and I think Martin would admit that they are not-- then Connie may be more in the vein of the "funny looking sidekick" than of the "racist caricature."

Most of the funny looking sidekicks of comic strips are forgotten now, but superhero comic books gave the form a new lease on life-- and a fair number of them are Caucasians.

One of the most famous is Doiby Dickles from GREEN LANTERN:

And here's Stretch Skinner from WILDCAT:

Notice the common factors: both sidekicks talk funny, and both are homely.  Both function, in essence, to make the main hero look and sound even better than he ordinarily would.


Now, I'm not denying that it's possible for an artist to create a racial caricature that does communicate ill will toward the race depicted, and to do so subtly . It's even possible that an artist might depict most of the characters in his story as relatively normal, yet choose to single one character out to make him the butt of racist jokes. Certainly Connie is the target for sidekick-humor. But is it racist humor?

Here's an interesting scene from TERRY #7:

To fill in some blank spaces: the fellow getting hung up on the dragon by Big Stoop-- a Swedish character very improbably disguised as a Chinese laborer-- is a rich white guy named Sandhurst. Not long after some of the locals disparage him for being an American who puts on airs by talking Brit-style, Sandhurst orders his car's driver to run Connie down. Stoop pulls Connie out of the way. Sandhurst orders the car to stop. Then he attacks Connie, hitting him with his cane-- at which point Stoop introduces him to the dragon. So the sequence ends with Connie the racist caricature having the laugh on the rich WASP. Moreover, when the story was first published readers did not yet know that the silent strongman was not Chinese, and so the original effect is that of two Asians having the laugh on a nasty white guy.

All of which raises two questions:

(1) Is it possible to have a POC sidekick without having him look at least nominally handsome, as with the reboot of THE SPIRIT?

(2) If the only ugly, dialect-using sidekicks out there are white guys like Doiby and Stretch-- does that not constitute a subtle form of racism in itself?

DRAGON LADY DREAMS

I had read the 1934-36 stories from Milton Caniff's classic TERRY AND THE PIRATES in various arrangements before this, but IDW's big 2007 collection of all the strips for these three years makes for heady reading. Although a couple of indie comics-authors have chosen to view the blossoming of the adventurous comic-strip as a decided comedown for the comics medium, it's clear to me that the early adventure-strips-- exemplified by TERRY, PRINCE VALIANT, TARZAN and DICK TRACY-- represent an elaboration and deepening of that medium's storytelling potential. The adventure-strips may have been born of cultural myths that became less and less believable by the 1950s, so that thereafter the themes of the adventure-genre could only find expression in the related medium of the comic book (however mixed the results). But even knowing that newspaper comics could never have sustained such myths, even knowing that the medium would eventually revert back to the gag-strips of its beginnings (YELLOW KID, meet DILBERT), I can't comprehend any critic with half a brain not appreciating the high adventure of Caniff's TERRY.


Most of Caniff's sequences follow a pretty basic pattern. Footloose adventurer Pat Ryan and his boy sidekick Terry go gallivanting in some part of a post-dynastic China controlled by various warlords (the "pirates" of the title). They get caught by some warlord and then have to resort to assorted strategies, both comic and daring, to keep themselves alive before making a Great Escape. This pattern allowed Caniff to toss in lots of jokes to keep the overall mood light, which may be viewed as Caniff's way of keeping some appeal with the audience that still mostly liked their funnies for the gags. Anyone looking for the sometimes heavy-handed political ideology of Caniff's later STEVE CANYON will look in vain: though the navies of Britain and the U.S. are around, hovering like emissaries of a more rational world-order, here Caniff generally uses the forces of the West as little more than cavalry. An exception here is a 1936 sequence that has Ryan venturing into Steve Canyon's regular territory when Ryan elects to play spy for the British government. This sequence was the harbinger of the less footloose paths the strip would take during the years of WWII, but most of the stories here are still focused on glamorous, sublimely-nonsensical adventure.



There are fair criticisms one can make of Caniff's opus. The racial stereotyping must be acknowledged, though it's always qualified by the fact that Caniff's most mythic character-- far more so than his two American protagonists-- is a woman usually identified as Chinese (though possibly intended to be Eurasian in origin, like Fu Manchu's half-Chinese, half-Russian daughter). I refer to the Dragon Lady, who is one of the more formidable femmes in any of the popular media of the 1930s. Aside from having her speak less than perfect English in her first appearance, Caniff thereafter always characterizes as courageous and possessed of a razor-sharp intellect. The character deserves to inspire much more allegiance from comic-book feminists & fangirls than she does presently-- more so than Caniff's rather routine heroines (Normandie Drake and a couple of other forgettables in this volume) and his trademark "shady lady" Burma. Arguably Caniff did far more versions of Burma throughout his many years on both TERRY and STEVE CANYON, but to my knowledge he never did another female character as formidable as the Dragon Lady.

As a "realistic" adventure-author, Caniff does not evoke mythology very seriously, but he does use a myth to suggest how the Dragon Lady, despite her gender, might have advanced to the position of leading a band of male pirates. In a 12-15-35 strip, comic relief "China-boy" Connie asks the imprisoned villainess as to why she's called "the Dragon Lady." In answer she relates that "when the last actual dragons were killed their evil spirits were preserved in other living things," and then seriously asserts that she is a dragon in truth. The last panels then provide a comic set-up at Connie's expense, where Connie's pet goat contrives to drink gasoline and eat matches, resulting in its "fire-breathing." It's not much of a joke, and I doubt that the story was ever referenced again, but it seems feasible that Caniff had some notion of the Dragon Lady using such a myth-tale to manipulate her superstitious underlings.

BATMAN fans may enjoy some of the similarity between the first Dragon Lady tale and the first few stories where Batman and Robin encounter Catwoman. Both stories have a stalwart mature hero and his preteen sidekick encountering a formidable female who makes no bones about wanting to jump the bones of said mature hero. The kid-hero then becomes a sort of Jiminy Cricket to his mentor, advising him to steer clear of such dangerous shores, or even interrupting a potential lovemaking scene (as in TERRY's 1-6-35 strip). As a character, DC's Catwoman is originally closer to the mold of TERRY's other shady lady, Burma, in being an independent adventuress without a pocket-army at her command, but after a while Catwoman also attracts a coterie of the usual hero-fighting henchmen, though she never quite attains the Dragon Lady's reputation for ruthlessness.

While the campy interpretation of these goings-on might suggest sexual jealousy on the part of Terry and/or Robin, it seems a lot more likely, given the targeted readers, that the only love Terry and/or Robin feared losing was the love of adventure, if their mature mentors got themselves entrapped by the coils of Venus. Notably, though, Terry doesn't seem to have a problem with Pat hooking up with a less "fatale" femme like the aforementioned Normandie Drake, whereas Robin always seemed threatened by any feminine incursion. But maybe this had something to do with the comic books heroes existing in a hermetic isolation, where no one ever aged, while some comic strips did allow for advancing years. Some commentaries (on strips I have not read) even assert that Terry eventually "takes over" from Ryan in the department of romancing the dangerous Dragon Lady-- which, if true, would be a lot more Oedipal than I would expect of a Caniff comic strip.