Who is Robert Kanigher?

Today -- and for the next few weeks -- I will explore the man who created Johnny Cloud. His name is Robert Kanigher.

So who is he? And, how was it that he created a character as complex and nuanced as
Johnny Cloud?

I regret that I never met the man. Comic fandom came late to me, so I missed the interviews. Still, this master storyteller penned his way into my boyhood. My little fighters flew most of these missions. Kanigher was the hidden hand, pulling the strings. But who was he, really?

Our task now is to unmask the writer.

Did Kanigher create Johnny Cloud by himself? How? Why? I desperately want to know. But most of all, I want him to tell me that Cloud was special … that Cloud was his favorite.

Yet, I’m not so sure.

I would like to think that Cloud is real. I see him on the page. He is there, in color, panel after panel, blasting Me-109s out of the sky, and shaping my boyhood. Cloud was my superhero, my Big Brother in the Sky.

But reality bites as they say. Johnny Cloud was but a figment of Kanigher’s mind. A figment? What is that, but a flight of fancy – Happy Braves and Battle Hawks – all made up on some frantic afternoon, in a crowded office, on a tired Royal typewriter.

And decades later, Cloud is my figment too. I turned the props of his P-51s. And did I say that I had a squadron of them. After all, Cloud crashed and rammed his way through the war. It seems belittling to call him a mere figment. Nonetheless, when we discuss Johnny Cloud, we are probing the inner workings of the writer’s (and editor’s) mind, and his name is Robert Kanigher.

Let’s make a list of questions. Had Kanigher been planning a fighter pilot series to complement his ground-pounders and tank jockeys? Was his artist-friend Irv Novick a co-conspirator? Did the idea of a Navajo warrior spring from their Westerns?

We will never get the answers we want, but here’s the thing: Kanigher was a blur, furiously typing with no outline, and always on to the next thing. Frankly, I don’t think he would have tolerated too much psychobabble. In fact, he might not have been able to pinpoint the spark the led to Cloud or Rock or Stewart (much as we would have liked him to).

But I wonder: Did Kanigher intend to fashion a superhero? Did he write Cloud as the Avatar of the Great Warrior Spirit, his Big Brother in the Sky? Or, did Cloud assert himself on the page? This is not a fantastic suggestion, as many fiction writers have remarked that their characters took over by sheer force of personality and circumstance.