Category Archives: notes

Massey, Madame, Monroe, and Mizzou

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IMAGE: Steve Canyon, July 28, 1947. While she made an appearance in the previous day's comic, this is the first time the name Madame Lynx was mentioned.

IMAGE: Steve Canyon daily comic strip, July 28, 1947 — Copyright 2014 the Milton Caniff Estate. This is the first introduction to character Madame Lynx. She was shown in the previous day’s Sunday comic, but she didn’t reveal her name until this comic strip.

One of the earliest femme fatales in “Steve Canyon“ was Madame Lynx. In the May 1953 issue of “Pageant,” Caniff notes that Madame Lynx was based on actress Ilona Massey because she’s pretty and she often “plays the type of role that he wanted Madame Lynx to play in the comic strip.”

However, some people erroneously report that Madame Lynx was based on Madame Egelichi, a character played by Ilona Massey in the 1949 Marx Brothers film “Love Happy.” This can’t be the case however, since Madame Lynx was introduced into the comic strip in 1947 and the film was released nearly two years later. (You can catch a glimpse of Madame Lynx in the trailer for the Miss Mizzou book I made; check out my blog post about the trailer for more info.)

Marilyn Monroe also had a small part in the film “Love Happy.” Though Marilyn had done other films, this was the first one that played up her sex appeal. If Caniff was an Ilona Massey fan and he was watching her in this film, I wonder if he also took notice of Marilyn Monroe, who would later inspire Miss Mizzou?

Kewpie Mascot Celebrates 100 Years

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Photo of the 1913-1914 Columbia High School basketball team with a kewpie doll at the bottom. From the 1914 Cresset yearbook courtesy of Daniel Boone Regional Library.

Photo of the 1913-1914 Columbia High School basketball team with a kewpie doll at the bottom. From the 1914 Cresset yearbook courtesy of Daniel Boone Regional Library.

When Miss Mizzou was introduced, the character raised some eyebrows because it was reported that she didn’t wear anything under the trench coat. However, it turns out that Miss Mizzou is not the only “naked” comic character associated with Columbia, Missouri. A naked baby character called a Kewpie also became a prominent figure locally when Hickman High School adopted the character as a mascot in 1914. The Columbia Missourian has full coverage of the 100 year anniversary of the mascot in a series of stories that appeared earlier this month.

The Kewpie was the creation of southern Missouri resident Rose O’Neill for a comic that appeared in the Ladies Home Journal in 1909. The character, inspired by the Roman god of love Cupid, became popular and spun off into a successful line of Kewpie dolls that have become world famous.

How the Kewpie made it’s way into being a mascot for Columbia High School (later called Hickman High School) is more of a mystery with varying stories. One of the prominent stories has been that a reporter of a sports game remarked that the Columbia players looked like Kewpies. Another story that surfaced in 2009 came from the great uncle of Lucy Church. She tells her story here:

My great uncle was quite an athlete, who not only played basketball at Hickman but also at MU, and he was the first Kewpie to letter in four sports. Although I did not know him too well because he lived in Florida, I do recall that he came to visit us once in the 1960s. During that visit he told us about the Kewpie, which was quite significant to him. Apparently, the school secretary owned a Kewpie doll, as they were popular figurines then, and she kept it on her desk. At one of the basketball games, she placed the Kewpie in the center of the court (I guess for good luck), and the entire game was played around it without its being broken. This was somewhat remarkable since the dolls were very fragile. Because it survived the game and brought a victory, it was thereafter considered the good luck mascot. You can see a picture of it underneath my great uncle’s chair in the team photograph. Also, the Kewpie does not appear prior to 1914 in any other Cresset.

You can see a video of her telling her great uncle’s story up on Charley Blackmore’s website. Whatever the actual story is, the character stayed as the mascot for the school the last 100 years. While several mascots share names with comic characters, the Kewpie seems to be the only comic character that has inspired a mascot.

Sorry for the digression this week, but I thought this news item might be of interest. Stay tuned for more Miss Mizzou centric posts in the future.

The Duchess of Denver & Miss Mizzou

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IMAGE: Steve Canyon Volume 3: 1951-1952, published 2013.

IMAGE: Steve Canyon Volume 3: 1951-1952, published in 2013. Copyright 2014 the Milton Caniff Estate.

If you look at the cover of the “Steve Canyon Volume 3” put out by the Library of American Comics, you might think that Miss Mizzou is featured on the cover punching Steve Canyon. This is not Miss Mizzou, but another blonde character named the Duchess of Denver.

The Duchess of Denver made her debut in the strip on April 17, 1951. The Duchess had a background in the theatre, but in her appearance she’s part of a scam run by her crooked husband. Steve Canyon and Foo Ling save her from her predicament, but it seems like she wasn’t happy with being saved either. She later apparently drowns at sea at the end of the storyline.

IMAGE: Steve Canyon, April 17, 1951. The introduction of the character the Duchess of Denver. Her name is mentioned on the sequence from the previous day, but she first appears in this strip.

IMAGE: Steve Canyon daily comic strip, April 17, 1951 — Copyright 2014 the Milton Caniff Estate. The introduction of the character the Duchess of Denver. Her name is mentioned on the sequence from the previous day, but she first appears in this strip.

If you look at her as Caniff drew her in the strip, she looks quite similar in some ways to Miss Mizzou; the only major difference is her haircut. This begs the question: Was the look of the Duchess influenced by Marilyn Monroe, just like Miss Mizzou? I kind of doubt it. While Monroe was starting to get some momentum in 1951 (She was named “Miss Cheescake” by the “Stars and Stripes” newspaper later in August.) the major feature that’s against this comparison is Monroe’s hair style. In 1950-1951, Monroe had a hairstyle that was mostly straight compared to the Duchess and her curly hair.

One might be tempted to think that the debut of the Duchess of Denver might have been a play by Caniff similar to the Miss Mizzou roll-out the next year; she’s seemingly named after a specific town after all. Unfortunately I doubt her debut caused many eyebrows to be furled in Colorado. The name “Duchess of Denver” was probably borrowed from the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels by Dorothy Sayers from the 1920s and 1930s, so I doubt Denver, Colorado, saw Caniff’s character as anything but a an amusing facsimile. If you read enough of Caniff you begin to see that he often references things from the 1920s and 1930s, just like many artists reference the influences of their younger years.

Summer Olson and Miss Mizzou

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IMAGE: Steve Canyon daily comic strip, February 21, 1952 – Copyright 2014, Milton Caniff Estate. Summer Olson and Steve Canyon embrace each other.

One of the things that I don’t mention in the book is how much Summer Olson probably had to do with the popularity of Miss Mizzou. Let me explain further.

Summer Olson was a character who first introduced into the strip on May 29th, 1949. She is introduced as Summer Smith, a secretary of Romulus Brandywine:

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IMAGE: Steve Canyon Sunday comic strip, May 29, 1949 – Copyright 2014 the Milton Caniff Estate. Summer Smith is introduced as a secretary.

She was engaged to a pilot, Leyton Olson, who Steve Canyon was commanding over in Asia. By the end of that storyline, Leyton had disappeared on a mission that Canyon had sent him on, and was presumed dead. Summer Olson returns to the United States while pregnant with Leyton’s child.

Canyon of course feels bad about losing Leyton under his command, but he’s also concerned about the financial prospects for Summer Olson and her child. Steve reconnects with Olson and her son for an Air Force assignment in the states in a storyline in early 1952. Canyon eventually falls for Olson, and asks her to marry him on February 17th, 1952:

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IMAGE: Steve Canyon Sunday comic strip, February 17, 1952 – Copyright 2014 the Milton Caniff Estate. Steve Canyon asks Summer Olson to marry him.

Their plan to get married is foiled when Leyton Olson sends a telegram saying he’s coming to town. Spooked that her missing husband would show up after all this time, Canyon takes off for his next assignment. Eventually it turns out that the telegram was sent by Leyton’s father (Leyton Olson Sr.), so Canyon was spooked away for nothing.

Months pass while Canyon is attending to other air force assignments, but he eventually finds out about his mistake with Summer Olson and hopes to hurry to Chicago to try to marry her. On his way there, he’s delayed by the first Miss Mizzou adventure in the Canadian woods, which further complicates the situation between the couple.

Introducing marriage into the storyline would have raised a lot of interest in the strip in early 1952, and I’m thinking that interest brought a lot of readers to follow the Miss Mizzou adventure that fall as well. Canyon reconnects with Olson in the storyline after Miss Mizzou appears, so it’s likely that people were reading in anticipation to see what happened with the couple.

Spoiler Alert: They didn’t get married right away. When Canyon returns, Summer has just landed a high paying job with the ruthless industrialist Copperhead Calhooon. The Copperhead drives a wedge between the couple by making Summer work late hours, and their relationship cools.

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IMAGE: Steve Canyon Sunday comic strip, November 30, 1952 – Copyright 2014 the Milton Caniff Estate. Summer Olson laments that she can’t afford to give up her job and settle down with Steve Canyon because she needs to support her son.

The couple did not get married until 1970. Mostly this was a choice based in dramatic effect; Caniff wanted Canyon to be freewheeling in his adventures so he could introduce various love interests along the way to keep audience interest high. But I think Caniff knew from the beginning that Steve and Summer were eventually going to marry, as this early exchange on June 5th, 1949 implies:

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IMAGE: Steve Canyon Sunday comic strip, June 5, 1949 – Copyright 2014 the Milton Caniff Estate. Summer Smith get’s cheeky with Steve Canyon.

Caniff, Trench Coats, & Miss Mizzou

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IMAGE: Steve Canyon Sunday comic strip, August 24, 1952 – Copyright 2014 the Milton Caniff Estate. After swimming to shore, Miss Mizzou warms up with the aid of her handy trench coat.

So why did Caniff use the trench coat for the Miss Mizzou character? Trench coats primarily came into use by the armed services to stand up to the harsh weather conditions soldiers faced in the battle field during World War I & World War II. (The “Steve Canyon” strip above from August 24, 1952 makes a playful reference to the trench coat’s warming properties.) The trench coat would have appealed to Caniff readers, many who were in the military during World War II. For a military based strip like “Steve Canyon,” using a trench coat for a character would make perfect sense.

By mixing the trench coat with Miss Mizzou’s sex appeal, Caniff could also give a subtle nod to long time servicemen who remembered his work during World War II on the sexy Male Call strips with the character Miss Lace. R.C. Harvey has written an in depth article about Caniff’s struggles to convey sexuality on the comics page that’s pretty insightful in this line of thinking. My bet is that Miss Mizzou’s trench coat was yet another experiment by Caniff to test the boundaries of newspaper censorship.

After World War II, the trench coats slowly became a fashion statement worn both by men and women. (Take a look at this photo from Harper’s Junior Bazaar, July 1953; the look is remarkably like that of Miss Mizzou.) Of course eventually many characters in popular culture would don the trench coat as well. Check out this awesome Wikipedia list of trench coats in popular culture for a glimpse of how the trench coat has evolved over the years. I’m surprised at how many comic characters make the list!