Milton Caniff's "Steve Canyon" F-102

[Mick]

I just uploaded a skin for the Ito F-102 Dagger. It's the F-102 seen in the opening sequence of the late 1950s "Steve Canyon" television series, inspired by the Milton Caniff comic. I was inspired to paint this plane because I just finished watching the series on DVD.

For those who didn't grow up in the USA in the 1950s, "Steve Canyon" was a syndicated comic strip written and drawn by Milton Caniff, creator of "Terry & The Pirates." It depicts the adventures of Our Hero, Lt. Col. Stevenson B. Canyon, U.S. Air Force. For the first two years of the show Steve was a roving troubleshooter for USAF Headquarters, an ideal role to show different kinds of USAF aircraft in all sorts of situations. In the third season Steve was an air base commander. How he got the job, which has traditionally been a Colonel's billet, without being promoted to full Colonel is never explained.

The show was originally produced with the full cooperation of the Air Force. It has been claimed that the Air Force withdrew its support because the show made Air Force flying appear so dangerous that it was making it difficult to recruit pilot trainees - exactly the opposite of what was intended. I have no idea whether that's true!

Raise your hand if you're old enough to remember Steve Canyon!

Here's a picture. The arctic red parts don't look all blotchy like that on the plane; that's just what happens to red sometimes in JPEGs.

[Blackbird686]

Steve Canyon.... man does that bring back memories. I used to live for that strip in the Sunday newspaper. Nice paint Mick.

BB686

[Tom Clayton]

Side note... Capture, edit, and resize your screenies in bitmap format, then use something like IrfanView or Gimp to convert so that you can control the compression level. Every time you re-save a jpg, you lose more quality.

[Mick]

Side note... Capture, edit, and resize your screenies in bitmap format, then use something like IrfanView or Gimp to convert so that you can control the compression level. Every time you re-save a jpg, you lose more quality.

Thanks for the tip Tom, but bitmaps are huge files compared to JPEGs, and aren't we supposed to try to keep some control over the size of the files we put up on the server? That's why I always use JPEGs as display pictures, and when I remember to, I make them a little smaller than full screen size.

For purposes of illustration, I don't worry about the lossiness of JPEGs. I only really notice it with large areas of red.

[Mick]

Steve Canyon.... man does that bring back memories. I used to live for that strip in the Sunday newspaper. Nice paint Mick.

BB686

Thanks! Glad you like it! That was one of my favorite shows as a kid.

The Caniff estate recently had the TV show remastered and put on DVDs. The final volume was just released. Amazon has them. You can buy the three volumes separately or in a set. They are in original black & white, or course, but the quality is outstanding.

Most of the episodes include most or all of the commercials. I had to chuckle at how things have changed when I saw that the prime sponsor of a show aimed primarily at the youth market was sponsored by a cigarette company! Steve Canyon his very own self told all us kids that the "Men of America" smoked Chesterfields. Or L&Ms, depending on the episode.

If anyone from across the pond would like to see some great 1950s USAF planes in action, the DVDs are not regionalized and will play on any machine anywhere.

When I typed "Steve Canyon" into Amazon's search window and didn't specify a section, I was also greeted by a long list of books that collect the newspaper strips. I bought one of those volumes a couple years back when I found it really cheap from a book seller who deals in remainders. I'm tempted to buy all of them, but there are so many, it would get pretty expensive pretty quickly. But I couldn't resist the DVDs, and I'm glad I bought them.

If you also like Milton Caniff's other great creation, there are a lot of TV and movie serials of Terry & The Pirates available on DVD too. I'm sure you remember that opening sequence with Terry Lee in the cockpit of that scruffy, unmarked C-47 on some unnamed southeast Asian strip in some unnamed southeast Asian country. Of course, in those days nobody had heard of Civil Air Transport, Air America or Vietnam.

[Tom Clayton]

Mick, you only need to keep them in bitmap form until you're ready to upload. Once you have the image the way you like it, then you convert it, or in the case of Gimp, export it into jpg format. It's at that point that you should be able to set the compression level. Higher compression gives you a smaller file, but more flaws, or "artifacts" as they're technically known. Lower compression give you higher image quality, but the file size goes up too. The max dimensions are 800x600, and max size is 488.3 KB, so adjust the size and compression to just fit inside that.

[Mick]

Mick, you only need to keep them in bitmap form until you're ready to upload. Once you have the image the way you like it, then you convert it, or in the case of Gimp, export it into jpg format. It's at that point that you should be able to set the compression level. Higher compression gives you a smaller file, but more flaws, or "artifacts" as they're technically known. Lower compression give you higher image quality, but the file size goes up too. The max dimensions are 800x600, and max size is 488.3 KB, so adjust the size and compression to just fit inside that.

Thanks Tom