Over at The Comics Journal, historian and cartoonist R.C. Harvey writes a lengthy piece on who made the initial suggestion to Milt Caniff that lead him to create his most-famous character — The Dragon Lady.
From the piece:
The idea of the Dragon Lady came from quite another source. It’s fairly certain that Captain Joseph Patterson, honcho of the New York Daily News and the syndicate bearing that name jointly with the Chicago Tribune, suggested the Dragon Lady to Caniff. Not by name, though.