It seems impossible to imagine comics without Milton Caniff. It’s not just that he was popular during his time; many comics strips that were extremely popular in the first half of the 20^th century are all but forgotten today. Not Caniff, though, his name and style lived on in the works of followers, which included talents like Kirby and Toth;  therefore, his name lives through their modern decedents as well. His influence, as both an artist and a writer, wasn’t limited to the United States either. You can see echoes of his style in the drawings of Jije (Joseph Gillain) and in the storytelling of the long-running serial Buck Danny. And, of course, you have Hugo Pratt. Pratt, by his own right a much imitated artist, took direct inspiration from Caniff. As Dean Mullaney notes: “While still a boy, Hugo Pratt discovered the early American adventure comic strips and was so enamored with Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates that he decided to become a cartoonist.”

Yet, there is a stark difference between Pratt and Caniff (and his other followers): Milton Caniff was, on the whole, an uncurious person who couldn’t really see outside the circumstances of his birth. Despite his most famous work, Terry and the Pirates, which takes place almost entirely in China¹, Caniff hardly ever seemed to care about the Chinese as people. Most of his non-white characters remained flat caricatures throughout, and even his proposed affection for China changed the second the Cold War started and the country became “the red enemy.” His patriotism quickly became jingoism, seemingly fueled by self-loathing over his own lack of military service during World War II, and his point of view as a writer remained one-sided throughout his career – the USA was good, everyone against it was bad². Caniff was highly regarded for his research, but it was purely technical – the make and model of guns and tools, the proper geography of a scene; none of it was sociological. Because he didn’t care about people outside his own sphere.

Pratt, meanwhile, did his research as well. But he didn’t just read, he experienced, as a world traveler. And he didn’t just experience – he cared. His stories are full of empathy, whether they take place in Siberia or Ethiopia or Ireland… you never get the sense that the “foreign” characters are just extras in Corto Maltese’s story. If anything, it is Corto who always plays the outsider in someone else’s drama, often an observer and assistant rather than the protagonist of the story.

All of this long preamble is to try and position in context Atillio Micheluzzi, another well-regarded Italian cartoonist and Caniff descendent. Fantagraphics has announced a plan to publish many of Micheluzzi’s works in English for the first time, starting with The Farewell Song of Marcel Labrume, collecting two stories featuring the French Journalist³ during World War II.

It is enough to simply open the book, to leaf through it, and to stop on any random page to understand the appeal of Micheluzzi, a phenomenal artist by any standard. His character work, body language, and facial expressions are superb. His control over shadows, using them to define atmosphere and sense of location, is Toth-esq⁴. Yet none of that makes him renounce the details in his drawings. Micheluzzi is direct but not simple. He does not draw “that which is unnecessary,” but his version of necessary includes the proper folds of a shirt or a dress, the contours of a muscle in action, the window blind being askew from overuse in the desert heat. He strikes the right balance between showcasing his skill and never overwhelming the story he is trying to tell⁵.

If it were possible to judge such a thing on a scale, a technical points system, it is quite possible that I would say Micheluzzi is better than Pratt. Pratt’s storytelling involved many a shorthand (especially when it comes to backgrounds) that Micheluzzi never takes. When Pratt draws a punch or a kick, it is a comics kind of punch or kick, the hand moving in a half circle, or the legs moving straight ahead like missiles. This was not something Pratt unlearned; on the opposite – the older he got, the simpler he went. Not so Micheluzzi, who has an extremely strong sense of mass and physicality; his tired figures look like characters on a movie screen, limping across it, rather than cartoon figures. 

This, too, is from the school of Caniff, whose work with models gave his depicted worlds a sense of physical verisimilitude. A whole school of comics realism was borne out of that style⁶, even if the writing usually felt like a letdown. It was real until someone spoke in some horrible cliché accent and broke the charm. Micheluzzi, unlike Caniff, tries his hand at giving the characters actual interiority to go along with their exteriority.

But this is where The Farwell Song of Marcel Labrume hits a snag. Its curiosity is all intellectual and lacks an emotional component, and it goes not an inch deeper than a distant tour guide. Yes, you can recognize these characters as characters, as people with their own wants and desires, but you don’t care for them. There is something missing. When Pratt draws Corto Maltese simply sitting and chair and yet opens the narration with a proclamation that he is “a man of destiny” you do not chortle at the self-importance of it all, you believe it. Pratt, at his simplest, does charge his drawings with a certain essential energy that is absent from the technically more accomplished Micheluzzi. With Pratt, a dozen lines tell a story as well as any hundred by a rival cartoonist. It does not matter how well-drawn the characters in Marcel Labrume are drawn, though, if they lack this inner fire, because it is that fire that makes us come back to these stories. 

Who is this Marcel Labrume? I have spent over 100 pages with him before writing this review, yet I can tell you nothing beyond the facts. Figures such as Tintin or Luca Torelli carry their essential truth around them in every page – the young boy reporter, with boundless optimism and determination, the scum Mafioso who will sell his closest friends for a nickel. You can draw every hair on the head of your character, every fold on the shirt, but no matter how good the drawings are – there must be something more to it or the story becomes merely a perfunctory set of described actions rather than art. 

 The simple fact is that I was so mesmerized by the beauty of the drawings in The Farwell Song of Marcel Labrume that only by the end of the book did I notice I retained none of it. I could hardly tell you the name of any single character besides our protagonist, nor could I tell you their motivation and problems.

Only towards the end, a long sojourn on a boat, hovering between life and death, did the story finally become charged with the right kind of energy. Only in the direst circumstances, when fate itself seems to be at our protagonist’s heel, does Marcel Labrume come alive. After drawing and writing from a certain distance, suddenly Micheluzzi grows ever closer to his characters. The final panel of page 129, an outburst of emotion from a man who had seen everything and kept his cool, elevates the story at its final moments. It is such a powerful moment that you almost forget this is all done in a name of a female character who is directly defined by how big her boobs are.

To me, it is a case of “too little, too late”. But despite its flaws, these last few pages are like a boxer who crashed to the mat a dozen times, rising in defiance – not just of an enemy but his own obvious doom. It is at these moments that you understand why Micheluzzi is so admired. There are many who can draw a figure well but only a few who draw that fire inside. The Farewell Song of Marcel Labrume is a faulty work, but that would not stop me from seeking out further work by Micheluzzi.

1. And his second best-known work, Steve Canyon, had a global jet-set edge to it, taking place all over the globe
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2. There’s a great page in the Unknown Soldier mini-series by Garth Ennis and Killian Plunkett, in which the titular character enters a Nazi Death Camp for the first time and becomes infused with rage: If this what America must fight – then we are always right! And everything we do is right!” and this seems to be as good a summation of Caniff as a writer I ever read.
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3. Who, like Tintin, doesn’t seem to actually write any stories. ↩︎
4. And I am talking here about late late Toth. ↩︎
5. Back to the Toth comparison – one criticism of his late work is that he could become lost in his own desire to simplify that he forgot his readers. ↩︎
6. But let us not rehash arguments made in The Strange Death of Alex Raymond. ↩︎