| Terry and the Pirates | |
| Author: | Milton Caniff (1934–1946) |
| Current: | George Wunder (1946–1973) |
| Status: | Concluded daily and Sunday strip |
| First: | 22 October 1934 |
| Last: | 25 February 1973 |
| Syndicate: | Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate |
| Genre: | Adventure |
Terry and the Pirates is an action-adventure comic strip created by cartoonist Milton Caniff, which originally ran from October 22, 1934, to February 25, 1973. Captain Joseph Patterson, editor for the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate, had admired Caniff's work on the children's adventure strip Dickie Dare and hired him to create the new adventure strip, providing Caniff with the title and locale. The Dragon Lady leads the evil pirates; conflict with the pirates was diminished in priority when World War II started.[1]
The strip was read by 31 million newspaper subscribers between 1934 and 1946.[2] In 1946, Caniff won the first Cartoonist of the Year Award from the National Cartoonists Society for his work on Terry and the Pirates.
Writer Tom De Haven described Terry and the Pirates as "the great strip of World War II" and "The Casablanca of comics".[3]
The daily strip began October 22, 1934, and the Sunday color pages began December 9, 1934.[4] Initially, the storylines of the daily strips and Sunday pages were different, but on August 26, 1936, they merged into a single storyline.
Although Terry and the Pirates had made Caniff famous, the strip was owned by the syndicate, which was not uncommon at the time. Seeking creative control of his own work, Caniff left the strip in 1946, his last Terry strip being published on December 29. The following year, with the Field Syndicate, he launched Steve Canyon, an action-adventure strip of which Caniff retained ownership,[5] which ran until shortly after his death in 1988.
After Caniff's departure, Terry and the Pirates was assigned to Associated Press artist George Wunder. Wunder drew highly detailed panels, but some critics, notably Maurice Horn, claimed that it was sometimes difficult to tell one character from another and that his work lacked Caniff's essential humor. Nevertheless, Wunder kept the strip going for another 27 years until its discontinuation on February 25, 1973, by which time Terry had reached the rank of colonel.
On March 26, 1995, Michael Uslan and the Brothers Hildebrandt produced an updated version of the strip which carried over no continuity with the original. The Dragon Lady is portrayed as a Vietnam War orphan. The Hildebrandt/Uslan team left the strip and was replaced on April 1, 1996, with the team of Dan Spiegle (art) and Jim Clark (writing). The strip ended on July 27, 1997.
The adventure begins with young Terry Lee, "a wide-awake American boy," arriving in then-contemporary China with his friend, two-fisted journalist Pat Ryan. Seeking a lost gold mine, they meet George Webster "Connie" Confucius, interpreter and local guide. Initially, crudely drawn backgrounds and stereotypical characters surrounded Terry as he matched wits with pirates and various other villains. He developed an ever-larger circle of friends and enemies, including Big Stoop, Captain Judas, Cheery Blaze, Chopstick Joe, Cue Ball, and Dude Hennick.
Most notable of all was the famed femme fatale, the Dragon Lady, who started as an enemy and later, during World War II, became an ally. Caniff included a number of non-American female antagonists, all of whom referred to themselves in the third person. These included the Dragon Lady and crooks and spies like Sanjak and Rouge. In a rather bold move for a 1940s comic strip, Sanjak was hinted at being a lesbian cross-dresser with designs on Terry's girlfriend April Kane.[6] Caniff purportedly named the character after an island next to the isle of Lesbos.[7]
Over time, owing to a successful collaboration with cartoonist Noel Sickles, Caniff dramatically improved to produce some of the most memorable strips in the history of the medium., Caniff's assistant on Terry and the Pirates, went on to create his own adventure strip, Bruce Gentry.
Caniff became increasingly concerned by the contemporary Second Sino-Japanese War, but he was prevented by his syndicate from identifying the Japanese directly. Caniff referred to them as "the invaders", and they soon became an integral part of the storyline.
After America's entry into World War II, Terry joined the United States Army Air Forces. The series then became almost exclusively about World War II with much action centering on a U.S. Army base in China. This change of tone is considered the end of the strip's prime, although it remained highly acclaimed. Terry gained a new mentor in flying instructor Colonel "Flip" Corkin, a character based on the real-life Colonel Philip "Flip" Cochran of the 1st Air Commando Group.[9] Comic relief was provided by fellow flyer Hotshot Charlie. Pat, Connie and Big Stoop still made occasional guest appearances as marine commandos, while the Dragon Lady and her pirates became Chinese guerrillas fighting the Japanese.
One of the highlights of this period was the October 17, 1943, Sunday page, "The Pilot's Creed": Corkin gives the recently commissioned Terry a speech on his responsibilities as a fighter pilot, including the need to consider all who have contributed to the development of his plane, respect his support crew, spare a thought for ones killed in the fighting, and respect military bureaucracy which, for better or worse, has kept the American army going for over 150 years. In an unusual honor, the episode was read aloud in the U.S. Congress and added to the Congressional Record by Congressman Carl Hinshaw.[10]
The intensely patriotic Caniff, who donated design and illustration work to the military, created a free variant of Terry and the Pirates for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Originally starring the beautiful adventuress Burma, it was racier than the regular strip, and complaints caused Caniff to rename it Male Call to avoid confusion. Male Call was discontinued in 1946.
In 1946, Caniff won the first Cartoonist of the Year Award from the National Cartoonists Society for his work on Terry and the Pirates.[11] [12]
NBM, under its Flying Buttress Comics Library line, reprinted all of the Caniff Terry strips (10/22/34 to 12/29/46) in two hardcover series as well as in a series of trade paperbacks. The first 12-volume series contained all of the dailies and the Sundays in black and white. The second 12-volume series contained all of the Sundays in color with each page split between two pages. The daily strips were also printed by NBM in a 25-volume softcover edition (reprinting all of the dailies and the Sundays that ran concurrent storylines) with the strips in a smaller size and a lower quality than the hardcover volumes.
Kitchen Sink Press began a new hardcover reprint series with dailies and Sundays (in color and presented complete on one page, including title bars in the strips from the first year that were omitted from the NBM series), but discontinued it after only two volumes. These out-of-print series can be hard to find.
In March 2007, IDW Publishing announced a new imprint, The Library of American Comics. It published The Complete Terry and the Pirates a collection of six hardcover editions reprinting the Sunday strips with their original color alongside the daily strips.[13]
As of 2015 Hermes Press has reprinted two volumes of the George Wunder comic strip (1946–1949) as 12" x 9" hardcovers with supplementary material and historic essays.[14] [15]
In 1953, Canada Dry offered a "premium giveaway" with a case of its ginger ale — one mini-book in a trilogy series of Terry and the Pirates strips by Wunder printed by Harvey Comics.
Other incarnations of Caniff's work included a 1940 movie adventure-serial by Columbia, a television series, and radio show. The August–September 1953 issue (#6) of Mad featured a satire by Wally Wood titled "Teddy and the Pirates" where Teddy and Half-Shot Charlie encounter the Dragging Lady, resulting in Half-Shot being thrown to the sharks while Teddy reveals the reason for the strip's name — the pirates work for Teddy.
In the Warner Bros. cartoon China Jones, Daffy Duck plays a private detective, and goes to a Chinese bakery to receive a "hot tip". The informant sends him to visit the "Dragon Lady", who, upon meeting Daffy, breathes fire on him. Later, the informant asks him, "How was that tip?", and Daffy answers, "A little too hot for my taste."
Terry and the Pirates has been cited by fellow comic illustrator Doug Wildey as one of his main inspirations for the 1964 Hanna Barbera television cartoon Jonny Quest. Joseph Barbera directly credited Terry and the Pirates during Barbera's Oral History of Television intervew as his inspriation for Jonny Quest.[16]
Robert Culp said that the comic strip Terry and the Pirates was his inspiration for the "tone" and "spirit" and "noir heightened realism" of the 1965 NBC television series I Spy when he was writing the pilot.[17] It had been Culp's ambition to write, produce, and direct a screenplay based on the comic strip, but Culp died in 2010, before he could finish it.
Enter the Dragon producer Paul Heller used the strip as a guide to production design and the look of the film. "It was high chroma reds, blues, golds, and it just lent itself to this project so closely," said Heller.[18] [19]
Artist John Romita Sr. got the idea to kill Peter Parker (Spiderman)'s girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, after Terry and the Pirates killing of Raven Sherman.
Umberto Eco's novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana references Terry and the Pirates.[20]
In 1995, the strip was one of 20 included in the "Comic Strip Classics" series of commemorative postage stamps.
