''Male Call'' is an American comic strip series created and drawn by
Milton Caniff
Milton Arthur Paul Caniff (; February 28, 1907 – April 3, 1988) was an American cartoonist famous for the ''Terry and the Pirates'' and ''Steve Canyon'' comic strips.
Biography
Caniff was born in Hillsboro, Ohio. He was an Eagle Scout and a r ...
on a volunteer basis, exclusively for US military publications during
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
. The strip began January 24, 1943. Caniff continued ''Male Call'' until seven months after V-J Day, bringing it to a conclusion on March 3, 1946.
Spin-off strip
To contribute to the war effort, Caniff decided to draw a weekly comic strip and make it available at no cost to military camp newspapers. The Camp Newspaper Service was launched to syndicate Caniff's weekly page and contributions from other civilians. For CNS, Caniff created a unique version of his '' Terry and the Pirates'', completely different in content from his regular daily and Sunday strips for the ''Chicago Tribune'' Syndicate. It premiered October 11, 1942. Minus Terry, the CNS version focused on beautiful adventuress Burma, and she was seen in single-page situations rather than a continuity storyline. After three months, however, ''
The Miami Herald
The ''Miami Herald'' is an American daily newspaper owned by the McClatchy Company and headquartered in Doral, Florida, a city in western Miami-Dade County and the Miami metropolitan area, several miles west of Downtown Miami.G.I.'s (seldom officers) at various locales. The strip was a gag-a-week series aimed at boosting the morale of servicemen and was oriented towards mild humor and pin-up art. Though Miss Lace was often featured, she was not in every strip, and many strips featured one-off gags about an aspect of military life in which only military personnel are seen. Given its reading demographic, the content of ''Male Call'' was somewhat racier than was permitted in mainstream civilian publications. Nevertheless, the strip still had to pass muster with military censors.
Miss Lace was the certainly the most well-remembered aspect of ''Male Call'', and she does appear in a little over half the strips. A statuesque brunette with a penchant for wearing elegant but decidedly revealing clothing, Miss Lace was a definite male fantasy figure who was seemingly well-off and respectable, but was also unattached and accommodating. She believed it her duty to improve morale and thus consorted freely with American G.I.'s, all of whom she called "General", regardless of rank. Though Miss Lace would fend off the advances of those who were too forward—sometimes with a formidable punch in the face—she could be friendly and even somewhat forward herself with G.I.s who approached her with respect, and she never lacked for male attention. One strip describes Miss Lace as "sorta every G.I.'s chick ... you might run into her on a pass into town almost anywhere ... Darwin,
Belfast
Belfast ( , ; from ga, Béal Feirste , meaning 'mouth of the sand-bank ford') is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, standing on the banks of the River Lagan on the east coast. It is the 12th-largest city in the United Kingdom ...
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
Seattle
Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...
, Kodiak, Indianapolis ... wherever you hope to have a good time."
Almost no details were offered about Miss Lace's backstory, and she even point-blank refused to divulge to anyone whether "Lace" was her first or last name. She traveled, and apparently lived with, an unnamed Asian maid who was a very occasionally recurring character; where Miss Lace came from or how she maintained her lifestyle was never addressed. It was strongly implied, however, that Miss Lace was quasi-magical, a fantasy willed to life to help American soldiers win the war. Particularly sympathetic to enlisted men, she could suddenly appear at dances or in trenches, and was seemingly impervious to the realities of combat or of war material shortages. In the final strip, published after the war, Miss Lace left a note saying her mission was accomplished. She then simply vanished, never to be seen again.
Comics historian
Don Markstein
Don Markstein's Toonopedia (subtitled A Vast Repository of Toonological Knowledge) is an online encyclopedia of print cartoons, comic strips and animation, initiated February 13, 2001. Donald D. Markstein, the sole writer and editor of Toonopedi ...
described the ''Male Call'' characters:
Miss Lace herself was inspired by Norman Pett's comic strip '' Jane'', published in the British tabloid '' The Daily Mirror'' from 1932 to 1959.
Caniff would first produce a strip that was done with line drawings only, and no heavy inks. This would then be sent to the military censor who would either approve it, send it back with suggested changes, or in a dozen or so instances over the course of strip's history, reject it outright. Once approved, a stencil would be made of the line drawn copy, and the original sent back to Caniff, who would then apply more inks. The stencil version would be sent to camps which ran their local paper off on mimeograph machines, while the inked version would go to those that had actual newspaper presses. Caniff had said that he invested nearly as much time into each weekly ''Male Call'' installment as he did a week's worth of episodes of ''Terry and the Pirates''. In addition, he donated his time and talents to drawing hundreds of original unit insignia from all branches of the military.
The Camp Newspaper Service distributed the strip to more than 3000 military base newspapers, the largest number of individual papers in which any single comic strip has appeared. ''Male Call'' did not appear in any civilian newspapers..
In 1987,
Kitchen Sink Press
Kitchen Sink Press was a comic book publishing company founded by Denis Kitchen in 1970. Kitchen Sink Press was a pioneering publisher of underground comics, and was also responsible for numerous republications of classic comic strips in hard ...
published a complete collection, .
In 2011,
Hermes Press
Hermes Press is an American publisher of art books, comic books, and comic book reprints. The company was founded in 2000 and is best known for their archival reprints of classic comic book and strip series and art books.
History
Hermes Press was ...
published a complete reprint of the comic strip.
Cultural legacy
Beginning in 1995,
Dargaud
Société Dargaud, doing business as Les Éditions Dargaud, is a publisher of Franco-Belgian comics series, headquartered in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. It was founded in 1936 by Georges Dargaud (), publishing its first comics in 1943.
...
published a '' comics'' series entitled ''Pin-Up'', aimed mainly at adults, written by Yann Le Pennetier and drawn by Philippe Berthet. The series tells the adventures of Dottie Partington who models 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
Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod (née Zelle; 7 August 187615 October 1917), better known by the stage name Mata Hari (), was a Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan who was convicted of being a spy for Germany during World War I. She was executed ...