Thursday, December 15, 2005
Caniff at the Columbus Dispatch
Milton Caniff's career has been pretty thoroughly chronicled, but I have seen little discussed of his first major newspaper cartooning job at the Columbus Dispatch. He did a great deal of work at the Dispatch, from journeyman spot illustrations to full-fledged daily titled cartoon features. His longest running feature was Escapes From The Pen, which went through a number of incarnations, but today we'll highlight another long-running feature of his titled Life Is Like That. This was a weekly feature that ran in the Dispatch's Sunday entertainment section. As such many of the cartoons concern local theatre and music events, but Caniff also used the space for humorous personal commentary, as shown in a few of our samples here. Also interesting to note is that Caniff was obviously still exploring different styles -- I selected these samples to show a little of the range he was working through.
Life Is Like That ran in the Dispatch from 7/20/1930 until 1/17/1932.
Comments:
It's all downhill from there, to the Dispatch's current mainstay Dick Wright. ...But that's just the liberal in me talking.
I grew up in Worthington, Ohio the son of a Columbus Dispatch cartoonist, Barney Vavroch. (1958-1960).My dad was recruited to play football at OSU using Milt Caniff as a promoter. Somebody paid to fly my future father to New York to meet Mr. Caniff who was apparently successful in persuading him to become a Buckeye.
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