Camera-ready comic art drawing for Steve Canyon

This pen-and-ink drawing prepared for the Steve Canyon comic strip shows another officer suggesting to Steve that the Chinese may be smuggling contraband explosives into both the United States and Russia in hopes that each of the two countries would think the other was responsible for atomic activities.

In 1932 Milton Arthur Paul Caniff (1907-1988) began working in New York as an artist on strips for the Associated Press's Features Service. His work on what would become his most popular strip, Terry and the Pirates, was first published in 1934. Even with the success of the strip, Caniff resigned from Features Service in 1946 to obtain the rights to his own work and debuted Steve Canyon. Caniff also founded the National Cartoonists Society that year, and received its first Cartoonist of the Year Award.

Steve Canyon (1947-1988) was a comic strip about a veteran who returns to the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. The story usually followed the exploits of Canyon and his friends, who were also veterans. Cold War issues and tributes to service members were regular themes of the strip.

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