The Press: Such Language

To the editors of Lord Beaverbrook’s London Daily Express, the six-month trial run of Steve Canyon had been quite a trial. Steve had been a problem to the 3,870,000 readers of the Express, too. Milton Caniff’s comic-strip airline operator was a likable enough chap, but how was one to understand him without a pony? Even to inveterate followers of the U.S. cinema, such terms as “leg it,” “front boy,” “Hood” and “gee” were hard to translate. Express editors, who have had to doctor much of the Canyon dialogue for British readers, were nonplussed by “Delta and I will go out and butter up some of the key peasants.” At last they decided that “some of the key peasants” meant “some of the big locals.”

Because of such problems, the Express also decided that Canyon and his jive talking crew had to go; Steve & Co. vanished from the Express without so much as a waggle of their wings. Steve’s passing gave a clue to the differences between U.S. and British comic-strip tastes. Blondie is a fixture, in the Daily Graphic. Said an editor: “It never gets beyond the trifling happenings that go on in everyone’s life all over the world.” Donald Duck, Mandrake the Magician and King of the Royal Mounted have been accepted because they are easily understood, and Super-Sleuth Rip Kirby is doing nicely in the Daily Mail. “He’s a fairly quiet chap with pipe and glasses,” said a Mazlman, “and our people seem to go for that type of hero.”

But no U.S. strip has ever matched the pulling power of British Cartoonist Norman Pett’s Jane (see cut), the uninhibited comic-stripper who got her start during the war by entrancing British troops, as a sort of Miss Lace without lace or much of anything else. Jane manages to get down to bra and panties at least once a week in London’s tabloid Daily Mirror. Fleet Street agrees that she is the only strip that actually boosts a paper’s sales. Yet Jane flopped in the U.S. last year: “I’m afraid,” said a British syndicate salesman, “that the lady wears too little clothes for your papers.”