Terry and the Pirates (comic strip)
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Terry and the Pirates was an action-adventure comic strip created by cartoonist Milton Caniff. Colonel 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 daily strip began October 22, 1934, with the Sunday color pages beginning December 9, 1934. Initially the storylines of the daily strips and Sunday pages were different but on August 26, 1936 they merged into a single storyline.
The adventure begins with young Terry Lee, "a wide-awake American boy," arriving in 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 and his growing list of friends adventured through China, matching wits with pirates and various other villains, especially famed femme fatale The Dragon Lady. However due 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 became increasingly concerned by the contemporary Sino-Japanese War, but was prevented by his newspaper 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 U.S. Army Air Force, while Pat Ryan became a naval commando and the Dragon Lady and her pirates became Chinese guerrillas. The series then became almost exclusively concerned with the war. This change of tone is considered the end of the strip's prime although it remained highly acclaimed. A notable example is the October 17, 1943 Sunday page where the recently commissioned Terry receives a speech on his responsibilities as a fighter pilot from his trainer, Flip Corkin. In an unusual honor the episode was read aloud in the U.S. Congress and added to the Congressional Record.
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.
Although Terry and the Pirates had made Caniff famous the strip was actually owned by the newspaper syndicate and, seeking creative control of his own work, Caniff left the strip in 1946. Caniff's last Terry strip was published on December 29, and the following year he began Steve Canyon, an action-adventure strip that ran until shortly after his death in 1988.
After Caniff's departure Terry and the Pirates was assigned to Associated Press artist George Wunder, who produced it for twenty-seven more years until its discontinuation in 1973.
In 1995 the strip was one of 20 included in the Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative postage stamps.
That same year an attempt was made to revive the strip using characters updated by Hollywood producer Michael Uslan and illustrated by noted artists Tim and Greg Hildebrandt. The new version debuted March 26 but ran for little more than a year before being discontinued.
In 1953, Canada Dry offered a "premium giveaway" (freebie) with a case of its ginger ale — one minibook in a trilogy series of Terry and the Pirates strips printed by Harvey Comics. Other incarnations of Caniff's beloved work included a television series and a radio show.
Related topics
External links
- Milton Caniff biography (http://www.comic-art.com/bios-1/caniff01.htm)
- Toonopedia (http://www.toonopedia.com/terry.htm)
- Internet Movie Database entry for Terry and the Pirates (http://www.imdb.com/Title?0033139) (1940 movie)
- Internet Movie Database entry for Terry and the Pirates (http://www.imdb.com/Title?0187669) (1950s television series)