The Press: Sisters Under the Skin?

Since she burst into their comic-strip world in 1956, the Texas teen-age tomboy named Poteet has brought both joy and dismay to tall-in-the-cockpit Colonel Steve Canyon and Cartoonist Milton Caniff. Last week Caniff acknowledged that he took Poteet out of the strip (607 papers) in early October because of the problems she posed. For one thing, she was upstaging Steve with her giddy flair. For another, he feared she would become sullied by association with another youthful heroine of a different reputation : Lolita.

The bond between Poteet and Lolita. the nymphet of the bestselling novel by Vladimir Nabokov (TIME, Sept. 1), seems even more vague than the “kissin’ cousin” kinship Poteet claims for Steve, who dutifully has made her his ward. Poteet plays polo and coaches basketball, is always chaperoned when she travels with Steve. Square-jawed Steve gives his ward only the most brotherly kisses, has even punished her with a sound paddling. In contrast, Lolita confines her athletics to the bedroom, romps from motel to motel across the nation with her stepfather Humbert Humbert.

Still, Poteet has always been jealous of Steve’s girl friends, is obviously in puppy love with the colonel. What is more, Caniff realized with a start last summer that Poteet was getting too big for her skin-tight blue-jean britches. Says he: “She was becoming increasingly curved in all the right places.” Playing it safe, Caniff will never bring Poteet back as a wide-eyed kid in a cowboy hat. When she does reappear some time next year, Poteet will be hovering on the edge of womanhood. Cartoonist Caniff is even now pondering his next problem: Should grown-up Poteet make a grown-up play for Steve?

If Poteet has been banished from Steve Canyon in part because of a distant tie to Lolita, many a reader who mixes some books with his comic strips is convinced that a teen-ager now raising temperatures in Dick Tracy (416 papers) is closely related, indeed, to the nimble nymphet. Slinky and scheming beyond her years, Popsie is fond of putting down her lollypop and bussing the cheek of Headache, a slot-machine maker who is not above bussing back. Cries Headache: “Owoo! That lollypop!” The very suggestion that Popsie and Lolita and Headache and Humbert are parallels draws howls of aggrieved outrage from Cartoonist Chester Gould who says he has never even read Nabokov’s book. (“Nymphet?” said Gould. “That’s the biggest word I’ve heard today.”) To him, Lolita sounds like a waste of time.