Milt Caniff on comics as art

CANIFF: ...It's pretty hard for the creator of a given thing to tag it himself. Someone else, someone on the outside has got to say it. I'm delighted when somebody says, "This is not just cartoons to be thrown away or to be wrapped around a fish tomorrow, it's art." Well, I'm delighted when people say that, but it's not for me to say.

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SABA: ...Speaking about comics as a medium in the abstract, do you see any reason why the medium could not contain some of the great art that any other medium contains?
CANIFF: Anything that's done against a deadline, of course, is always suspect, just because you don't take a year to do it like Picasso did. It doesn't mean that it isn't better than Picasso. Very possibly it is. It takes lot of time and careful thought to judge that, but people are inclined to think that something that is done against a clock has a got to be of lower quality. Well, this is ridiculous, of course. The great moments in history have been done against the clock, in a sense. The Last Supper was done against the clock, let me put it that way, but it was a milestone thing in its own context. So you can't use that as a criterion. However, people do, and you've got to face the fact that they do. The French are very good at this kind of evaluation. I had a one-man show in Paris, for instance, and what they did was to just knock out the balloons, because most of the people who were coming to the show wouldn't have been able to read them in English, anyway. They just used the drawings. They would blow up what was a single panel of something that I had done, and they put it on a whole wall.
SABA: Yeah. And how did that turn out?
CANIFF: It was marvelous. [Laughter] I was surprised myself. I didn't know I had put some of those things in there. You just put them in because it's built-in to put them in there. Composition is not something that you do consciously. You do it because you're good at drawing, or you're good at composition, or you're not. So some of these things had composition that I had not consciously put there. It was just good composition because I learned composition the second year in art school.
SABA: Well, this makes you a real journeyman, because obviously you've gone beyond having to think about those basic things.
CANIFF: Yeah. The tennis player doesn't think, "I must reserve, I must put some topspin on this ball." He just puts the topspin on the ball.