Wayback Whensday: Steve Canyon Extras
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To paraphrase Eric Burdon:
When I was young it was more important to get my comics as a half page. Yeah, when I was young.
The half page Sundays of my youth were always the best version … except when they weren’t.
One exception was Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon. By the 1970s the third page format was the full Steve Canyon.
The other formats were chopping off the bottom third of the panel art.
Compare the quarter and half page versions with the third page comic:
Even the tab was cut off, though that could be to make room for the masthead and so reformatted the quarter.
The above strip was from Christmas Day 1977, the following week, New Year’s Day 1978 saw Milton Caniff, for the first time, add some incidental art to the opening panel between the Steve Canyon logo and the brief summary of the previous week’s dailies (Caniff ran the same story daily and Sunday).
Like the bottom art in the strip’s panel this new art was only seen in the third page version.
The new art added to the page would run every Sunday until the penultimate Sunday strip ten and a half years later (the last Sunday Steve Canyon was a tribute to Milton Caniff who had died April 3, 1988).
After a few years the silhouettes gave way to full illustrations.
Unsure if these inserts will ever see print other than the original newspaper sections. IDW is printing collections of Steve Canyon and is up to 1969/1970, but IDW is having problems staying afloat. And even then their last volume (#12) was printing the shortened Sunday half pages instead of the full art of the third page.
Comics Revue Presents has been running the full Sunday art and should reach the January 1978 strips later this year, so there is hope that we will see the new title art (cleaned and in color) in print.
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