Male Call

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Male Call was a comic strip created and drawn by Milton Caniff on a volunteer basis, exclusively for US military publications during World War II. ^[1] Originally appearing January 24, 1943, Caniff continued Male Call until seven months after V-J Day, ending it March 3, 1946.^[2]

The strip was a spin-off of Caniff's popular strip Terry and the Pirates. Originally the character Burma, a beautiful adventuress from Terry, was intended to be the star but due to objections by the newspaper syndicate that owed Terry Caniff introduced a new character, Miss Lace. Lace was a sexy, sophisticated, dark-haired woman who mixed with the GIs of an American base somewhere in China. She called the regular soldiers "Generals" and was prone to violently lash out if they were insulted.

The strip was a gag-a-day series aimed at boosting the morale of servicemen and was oriented towards mild humor and pin-up art. It was inspired by Norman Pett's comic strip Jane, published in the British tabloid The Daily Mirror from 1932 to 1959. Given its reading demographic, the content was somewhat racier than was permitted in mainstream civilian publications. Nevertheless the strip still had to pass muster with military censors.

Distributed by the Camp Newspaper Service, the strip appeared in over 3000 military base newspapers, the largest number of individual papers in which any single comic strip has appeared. The strip did not appear in any civilian newspapers. ^[3]

In 1987, Kitchen Sink Press published a complete collection of the strip entitled Male Call: 1942-1946 (ISBN 0878160264).

[edit] References in other works

From 1995, Dargaud has published a series of Franco-Belgian comics entitled Pin-Up, aimed mainly at adults, written by Yann Le Pennetier and drawn by Philippe Berthet. The series describes the adventures of artist's model Dottie Partington during and after World War Two. During the war Dottie becomes the model for Milton, an artist who has been commissioned to draw a strip to raise the morale of the troops. He comes up with Poison Ivy, a strip-within-a-strip, in which the titular character is a combination of Lace and Mata Hari (though she fights with the Yanks against the Japs).

[edit] References

1. ^ Yellin, Emily (2005). Our Mothers' War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II. Free Press. ISBN 0743245164. 
2. ^ Checker Book Publishing Group. Milton Caniff Biography.
3. ^ Milton, Caniff. 1945. Male Call. Simon and Schuster, New York.