Milt Caniff on original comic strip art

SABA: To go back to something that we were talking about before, you said that you studied the films and the stories to learn what techniques might be effective and saleable and so on. Were you conscious, when you were introducing such techniques, that you were expanding the medium?
CANIFF: I don't think I was conscious of it from the point of view of what would now be retrospection. At the time I was just trying to forge out ahead of the crowd, like a distance runner, in a marathon, and to get out there and stay out there. I never thought of it in terms of posterity. I didn't even bother to save the originals. It was of the moment.

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CANIFF: ...The original after it was done, was nothing. There was no intrinsic value. You couldn't have sold it for a dime. They used to burn them at the New York News. They took them out in carts and burned them. Now that the market has occurred for these things, I'm very sorry. But at the time, we didn't bother. We were off on the next week's batch.