Milt Caniff on cliffhangers

SABA: I noticed one of the new developments in comics: some people are trying to take an aspect of what you do, but to push it the other way. And I think the primary thing that makes vote the top of your field is your ability to tell a story. People are taking that kind of narration that you helped to make possible, through your techniques, and they want to do graphic novels now--start with a beginning, a middle, and an end, as opposed to a strip that goes on and on and on. Would you have ever wanted to do that?
CANIFF: Oh, I do it every day. I do six novels a year. The difference is that there's a carefully contrived umbilical between the end of one of my stories and the next, so that the audience doesn't get turned away. When you say "The End," then lots of people take you to your word, and that's the end of it and you. And, my trick is to hold you from the end of one story to the beginning of another. It's a trick, a technique, that's as old as Scheharazade again, because that's exactly what she did. Just before the end of the story, she would say, "Oh, well, tomorrow...," and so on.

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CANIFF: ...when I first started in this whole thing, the New York News people suggested that I write to Harold Gray and to Chet Gould, who at that point had just ascended. They had become widely read. I was supposed to ask if they could offer me any advice. I wouldn't have done this on my own, by the way. Not that didn't highly respect them, but I didn't want them to feel obligated, and I didn't want to feel obligated to them. But I did because the editor suggested it. Harold Gray said something that was so pertinent: he said that each day you tell a little of what happened yesterday, and tell something of what's going on now, and then tease them into reading tomorrow's strip. But always a little new, a little old, and a little maybe. Very good advice. And he used this, because nothing in his drawing ever gave him the chance that I have of shooting all around the character with the telephone and so on. It was always the same drawing, more or less. But his storytelling was so skilled that he was able to hold you to Orphan Annie. If you became an addict, you were hooked.