Howard Cruse on Milt Caniff and Al Capp

CRUSE:...In a lot of ways, Caniff and I are on very different tracks-as creative people as well as philosophically. I have a feeling that we would probably get into an argument pretty fast if we started discussing politics-although that's mainly just an impression I have.
RINGGENBERG: Anyone who does Steve Canyon, I would not say is a flaming liberal!
CRUSE: Well, he obviously identifies very much with the military. I've gotten over my '60s impulse to see the military as a totally negative enterprise. If you have aggressive people in the world, then you'd like to have some defenses against aggression. But the glorification of the military is something I'm uncomfortable with. However, the distinctive thing about Caniff's strips has always been the characterizations of the human beings. The characters were so fully rounded for an adventure strip. It was impressive.
RINGGENBERG: Are you familiar with his really primo stuff from the '30s-the Terrys, the China sequence, that stuff?
CRUSE: I should be, but I'm not. That's one of a hundred things I could mention that every cartoonist should bone up on, and that I haven't had time to. I grew up with Steve Canyon. I've never had a chance to go back and read all the early work. More of it is available now; maybe someday I'll lead a life of leisure that'll permit me to do it. But at this point I have I to go by Steve Canyon. Some people feel it's not as good as Terry and the Pirates, but it's been damn good, and nobody needs to make any apologies for it. I can remember any number of exciting, memorable characters from Steve Canyon. You don't just remember the action and the people being killed; you remember the funny stuff. You remember Poteet Canyon, his niece no, what was she? His ward?
RINGGENBERG: She was his ward. I think he adopted her, and she always had a big crush on him.
CRUSE: Yeah. There was always this undercurrent of sex.
RINGGENBERG: Almost incestuous.
CRUSE: Yeah. I mean, because they weren't blood relatives, it wasn't really scandalous, but it was titillating. Caniff is a master of titillation. Canyon was a very risque strip always. It went very far. I remember characters were always talking about 'making love" in the strip. It was a term that could mean a lot of different levels of interaction. I'd read that phrase in Steve Canyon when I was entering puberty and just becoming aware of the concept of making love. And it was confusing. The concept was sort of forbidden and you weren't supposed to talk about it-and there they'd be talking about it in a comic strip! I always wondered how he could get away with it! I don't think many newspaper cartoonists have ever been as sexually provocative as Caniff.
RINGGENBERG: His women were always the sexiest in comics.
CRUSE: Oh, yeah. Now some people would vote for Al Capp's women. But they could be intimidating--those Al Capp women!
RINGGENBERG: Part of the reason for that was that Frank Frazetta ghosted Li'l Abner's Sunday page for awhile. That man can draw sexy women!
CRUSE: I think Al Capp knew about breasts and curves before Frazetta. But Li'l Abner was never drawn better than when Frazetta was ghosting -assuming I correctly understand when it was that he was doing it. It was beautifully drawn when I was growing up...
RINGGENBERG: I think it was from around 1951 or '52 up until around 1960. Then he and Capp had a falling out.
CRUSE: Well, that was the period when I was discovering it. I still have some collections from that period. There were a lot of little details. The way the balloons were drawn; the positioning of the characters. There was a lot to look at and admire.
RINGGENBERG: Was Capp an influence at all on your style? On your approach to humor?
CRUSE: He was very much an influence-particularly at certain points. When I was ten or 11, I was trying very much to do a Li'l Abner. It had the same kind of continuing plots and farfetched humorous developments.