Steve Canyon

Like his Chicago Imagist colleagues and contemporary Pop artists in New York, Ed Flood incorporated the visual culture of the 1960s into his work. (See also Smart Museum 2001.650-651, 2007.169.) “Steve Canyon” by Milton Caniff (1907‒1988) was a long-running comic strip about an adventurous pilot who becomes a U.S. Air Force officer. Caniff used cartoons to convey to newspaper readers (and, later, television audiences) the Air Force’s position on military issues and political realities of the Cold War.

In this work, however, Flood breaks down the multi-frame system of Caniff’s stories into static, narratively-disconnected frames, undercutting the authoritarian directionality of the comic strip. Moreover, by dispensing with speech bubbles, he negates the sequential art form’s capacity to transmit text-based propaganda. Nevertheless, considered together, they do contain images that would have resonated with mass audiences around 1965: the Vietnam War, civil rights, segregated education, a culture of violence, the assassination of Malcolm X, and Pope Paul VI’s call for tolerance in Vatican II. Uninflected, even color and clean contours characterize Flood’s minimalist style. In this way, they are formally similar to the photo-based screenprints of key images that Andy Warhol (1928‒1987) appropriated from mass media to represent the 1960s.