Terry and the Pirates

If you have any love for the medium of comics at all, I strongly suggest - nay, demand - that you check this out. I'd been on a feeding frenzy of classic comics, having gotten through a run of E.C. Segar's Thimble Theater (better known today as Popeye), and Alex Raymond's beautiful work on Flash Gordon. I'd heard of Terry and the Pirates in passing in my searches, and decided to check it out from the library.

For those of you who don't know (I didn't), Terry and the Pirates was a newspaper strip by written and drawn by Milton Caniff between 1934 and 1946. The Library of American Comics now publishes his run in six hardcover volumes. For many modern cartoonists, this series marks the genesis of graphic storytelling as we know it.

As Howard Chaykin says in his introduction in volume one, patience is a virtue with this series. At first, it's a bit of a letdown, as it took Caniff a while to nail down the style of the series. But midway through 1935, it kicks into gear and never lets up. The art is terrific, and it has a thrill-a-minute movie serial approach that makes it a great page-turner. And apparently, this strip actually originated the term "Dragon Lady" with its recurring villain, which is just cool.

The one disclaimer I must put up for the bleeding heart liberals like myself is that you have to overlook a certain amount of racist stereotyping to dig for the treasure here. The series is about Chinese pirates, and you can more or less imagine what a 1934 American comic strip makes of the Chinese. One of the central trio of heroes is actually a Chinese boy with large teeth and squinty eyes who speaks in broken English. It's the sort of thing that initially turns me off, but I found that as the series wore on, he actually became an interesting and valued hero in his own right. Anyone who's read Lovecraft has seen worse, at any rate.

I can't believe that nobody ever made a movie of this. It very much deserves all the success that Flash Gordon and Popeye have enjoyed over the years.

I hadn't heard anything about those. Must search.

I'm into Volume Two now, and learning that Caniff was the first to bring sex appeal to the comics. Before the Dragon Lady and Burma, apparently, women just weren't portrayed as sexual creatures. And the more I read, the more I love Pat Ryan's cluelessness with women. He attracts them by the score, and has no idea how to handle them. For a character who starts out as your standard-issue American Hero Guy, he becomes pretty interesting down the line.

I'm also pretty damn sure that Papa Pyzon is supposed to be gay. He certainly loves to point out how much he dislikes women. Plus he's got this whole Oscar Wilde thing going on.

Terry and Flash launched in the same year, apparently. And having read both, I'd have to say that there's a certain lack of maturity in the Raymond vision of women. The sexuality in Terry has a frankness to it that makes it much more interesting than Raymond's work. Caniff seemed much more interested in appealing to grown men than adolescent boys. At any rate, I certainly wouldn't say that Raymond's work was "waaay more sexual" by any stretch. Skimpy outfits are not the same thing as sexuality. Burma is a far more sexual creature than Princess Aura, no matter how much skin Aura shows.

As I read more of this, it occurs to me that Johnny Quest has got some serious 'splainin' to do. The kid's Terry. Hadji is Connie. Race Bannon is Pat Ryan. Not that I ever thought Hannah-Barbera was a bastion of artistic integrity, but come on.

Quite likely.

According to what I've been reading, an associate of Caniff's took over the strip when he left over ownership issues, and continued on it for many years, eventually having Terry grow up and become a colonel in the army. But I think that only ran into the seventies. I may have to look into that again.

Edit:
Well here's one mention of what you're talking about. The artist was Dan Spiegel, apparently.