More from Cartoonist PROfiles, the long-running “unique quarterly magazine for the professional, the cartoon buff, the student, and all who enjoy cartoons.” Our own modest collection of PROfiles was augmented by almost two dozen issues we received from Friend of LOAC Bill Chadbourne, as shown here and here. In this case, we offer a bit of historical background — and extend a hearty 21st Century “Thank You!” to reader-of-this-space Jon Francis for nudging our memories — before unveiling some truly fascinating pages taken from Cartoonist PROfiles …
The challenges and innovations from 1974 seem almost quaint today, more than fifty years later. To those living through them, however, they seemed seismic in nature, in ways both positive and negative: Stephen King first published Carrie; “The Troubles” raged throughout the United Kingdom, including a bomb that exploded in the British House of Commons as an act of Irish Republican Army defiance; Skittles and the Volkswagen Golf both made their debuts; the culmination of the long Watergate scandals saw the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, who was replaced by Gerald Ford, still the only Chief Executive who was never elected to either the Vice Presidency or office of the Commander in Chief.
February of that year saw the start of one of the most improbable stories of the entire decade: Patty Hearst – daughter of millionaire publishing magnate Randolph Hearst and granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst – was abducted by a small activist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). [Click images throughout for an isolated view.]
Various SLA communications and demands kept the story on the newspaper front pages in the following weeks. Two months later the story took an unusual turn when Patty Hearst declared in a taped message that she had joined her captors, identifying herself as “Tania”; on April 15th she participated in the group’s robbery at a San Francisco Bank. This photo of the revolutionary Patty became ubiquitous during its day:
The story faded over time, as stories are wont to do, especially once most members of the SLA were killed in an armed confrontation with Los Angeles police, though Hearst and two fellow surviving SLA members remained at large until later in 1975, when they were arrested and taken into custody in San Francisco.
Media attention again spiked during a high-profile trial that resulted in a guilty verdict. Hearst was sentenced to seven years of incarceration; in 1979, then-President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence to the twenty-two months she had already served up to that point, and in 2001 President Bill Clinton granted her a full pardon.
What does all this have to do with comic strips in general, and Steve Canyon in particular, let alone with the Cartoonist PROfiles magazines we’ve been recently spotlighting?
Working well ahead of his 1974 publication dates, Milton Caniff was developing a new Canyon story that would begin running in subscriber newspapers in April. It was a story upon which he voluntarily pulled the plug and instead hurriedly substituted a story touching again on the soap operatic “Poteet/Steve/Summer” relationship. Several weeks before Patty Hearst was abducted by the SLA, Milton was developing a story about a young, wealthy heiress being kidnapped by an extremist group.
All the way back to his Terry and the Pirates days, Caniff had established a reputation for being able to predict future technologies, future events. His prescience was perhaps never more acute than with this story idea. These five unfinished Sunday pages, first printed in an issue of Cartoonist PROfiles, not only depict the heiress’s kidnapping, they also anticipate her falling in with her abductors and assuming a nom de guerre. Milt exaggerated the situation – his heiress, Horshoffer Jones, is considerably younger than twenty-year-old Patty Hearst, and “Horse” assumes a leadership role in her outlaw group that Patty never attained – but from a Big Picture perspective, this was an almost eerie overlapping between Art and Life.
In February 1974, Caniff couldn’t know all the ways his in-development story would resonate with the Hearst kidnapping. He held his breath, hoping the situation would quickly resolve itself, but once it became clear that was not in the cards he opted to scrap Horshoffer’s story in favor of a plotline unlikely to parallel current events. Milton had concerns about how Canyon’s audience would respond to a story that seemed torn from the day’s headlines, no matter how coincidental that similarity might be; even more, business reasons fueled his decision. Steve Canyon‘s heyday had passed by 1974, and it was smart policy to avoid giving any newspapers a reason to drop the strip, including Hearst-owned newspapers such as the San Francisco Examiner, where this particular story might hit especially close to the bone.
Eight years passed following the headline-grabbing exploits of the Symbionese Liberation Army that caused this Canyon story to be sidelined. By the summer of 1982, Caniff believed the Patty Hearst kidnapping had sufficiently receded from the public consciousness to allow him to pick up this tale, complete these pages, and add the necessary companion pieces to complete the story, which ran in Steve Canyon from August 30th to December 2nd, 1982.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this taste of a long-delayed Canyon storyline. It’s another reminder of what an invaluable resource Cartoonist PROfiles was during its long publication history.
