Definitive Milton Caniff biography to be released next month

From the AAEC web site comes news that R.C. Harvey’s biography of Milton Caniff, creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon is due out next month.

“Twenty-five years in the making,” Harvey joked: “I started on it in 1982, interviewing Caniff, who was still alive then, and I finished the first draft in 1989. It was a monstrous 650,000-word document, and no publisher would touch it at that size. Then a couple years ago, Lucy Caswell at the Cartoon Research Library, which was founded with Caniff’s papers, wanted the book published in time for the centennial of his birth this year. She arranged to underwrite some of the production cost, and Fantagraphics agreed to publish it if I could reduce the text somewhat. So I did.”

The book is published through Fantagraphics books and will contain many illustrations, sample strips, personal photos, sketches and “other rarities from Caniff’s files.”