Which is Rarer- Caniff Terry Art or Steve Canyon?

Milt Caniff Terry and the Pirates original art regularly sells at far higher prices than Caniff’s Steve Canyon. What’s interesting is that Canyon may be rarer especially in certain periods due to so much of it being archived at Ohio State University. Thanks to the work of OSU archivists who keep good records and collector Ethan Roberts who printed counts in CFA APA 31 in 1993 - we know how  much of both strips are archived and thus not available for collectors to own.

 The Caniff Archives at Ohio State University has only 198 dailies (or 5%) of the over 3700 Terry originals Canniff drew. On Sundays they are a bit better with 211 (about a third of all that were done) .  A major problem with both Terry and early Steve Canyon Sunday art is that most were cut up and repasted in order to produce printers proofs in various formats- as such many of them are incomplete and missing panels.

While more art was produced for Steve Canyon (which Caniff did for 42 years as opposed to 12 for Terry) a higher percentage is archived with 2/3rds of all originals residing at OSU.  This varies a lot by year as almost 80% of the post 1958 art is archived. In contrast only 35% of the earlier pre 1958 Canyon dailies and 41% of the Sundays are at OSU.  70% to almost 100% of the art for Canyon is archived for 26 of its 42 year run.

Shown are panels from a Terry and the Pirates and a Steve Canyon original. The Canyon was done for the Famous Artists course and is part of  a series of 3 showing how Caniff draws from rough pencils to a finished -panel . All three pieces are shown in my keepers-strip gallery under Hagenauer in the gallery section.

George Hagenauer is a graying 55 (as of 2005!) and has been collecting art since 1967.  While he has collected, art, written a few comics and run the longest continual comic art charity auction, he has never written a column before. Feedback about what you want in this column can be emailed to yellowkd@terracom.net (no attached files please- the anti-virus eats them anyway) or sent to Box 930093, Verona WI. 53593.