Terry and the Pirates Vol. 1 - Extras

Terry and the Pirates
Vol. 1: 1934-1936
By Milton Caniff

I read both of these text pieces before reading the strips in this collected edition. I decided to go back and read them again after finishing the book.

Introduction
by Howard V. Chaykin

Patience is the word with which Chaykin opens this short text piece. This collection isn’t the epitome of Caniff’s work on Terry and the Pirates. This is the beginning of the journey and yet there is a lot of development through the course of this collection. Two years in to his work on Terry and the Pirates, Caniff has laid the ground work for and started to spin the sorts of stories that justify the high regard in which it is held by many.

I understood part of what Chaykin was getting at when I first read this text piece but he made references to characters and storylines that I had yet to read. His comments went right over my head. I got more from reading it again today, now that I have finished reading all the strips in this collected edition.


Setting the Stage: “Rembrandt Raises His Brush”
by Bruce Canwell

Terry and Pirates was just one of six well known comic strips to debut in 1934. The other five were Secret Agent X-9, Jungle Jim, Flash Gordon, Mandrake the Magician (by Lee Falk), L’il Abner (by Al Capp). Alex Raymond drew the other three strips.

Milton Caniff was born and raised in Ohio. His father worked in the newspaper business when he was young. His family moved to Dayton when he was 12 and his father left the newspaper business to work in a car factory. Milton already had his hopes set on a career drawing for newspapers which at that time did not include photographs.

Caniff went to Ohio State where he worked on the school’s newspaper. He graduated in 1930 and got married around the same time. He found some work drawing comics for newspapers for the Associated Press. He started drawing Dickie Dare, the predecessor to Terry and the Pirates, in the summer of 1933.

Caniff’s work on Dickie Dare got him an offer from Captain Joseph Patterson of the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. Patterson hired him to do a strip similar to the one he was doing for the Associated Press. Patterson wanted it to include “a kid, an older guy with muscles, and pretty girls.” The strip that Caniff produced for the syndicate, starting in October 1934, was Terry and the Pirates.

Noel Sickles, also a cartoonist and also from Ohio, met Milton Caniff for the first time while Caniff was working at the Columbus Dispatch. The two men became lifelong friends and collaborated on a number of projects. They drew ads for a number of clients together (which they attributed to Paul Arthur) and shared an office in New York City.

Sickles wrote and drew Scorchy Smith at the same time that Caniff was getting started on Terry and the Pirates. Sickles designed the logo for Terry and the Pirates and the chiaroscuro style he brought to Scorchy Smith had a big impact on Caniff.

There are legends surrounding Captain Patterson’s influence on the creation of Terry and the Pirates. He is the one who suggested the name for the main character (Terry), the setting (China), the title of the strip, and some sources of inspiration for stories in the strip according to some reports. None of this can be verified or will likely ever be known.

The situation in China had been volatile since the early 20th century. Japan invaded China in 1931 and was still occupying portions of the country at the time that the strip began publication. Some of the characters that Caniff featured in the strip were an attempt to bring some truth, as he saw it, to the cast of characters.

Captain Blaze and Papa Pyzon stood in for the warlords that ruled portions of China not controlled by the Japanese. The character first introduced as Lai Choi San and later renamed the Dragon Lady was lifted from an actual pirate leader of the same name. Her ships roamed near Macau in the early 20th century. The Dragon Lady in turn inspired many other similar characters in movies, comic books, and other mediums.

Connie is the comic relief of the strip and often seems like a brother to Terry while Pat is off gallivanting with one or another of his many love interests. Caniff did not intend him to be a one-dimensional character. (This is Canwell’s assessment of Connie. Maybe he isn’t one-dimensional but the fact that he speaks only in gibberish and looks like a caricature, while most of the other Chinese characters in the strip do not, doesn’t reflect well in my eyes. Saying it was a different time doesn’t excuse how Connie is depicted and portrayed. Nor does it excuse the way that Pat and Terry sometimes talk about and treat him.)

Pat Ryan’s love interests broke the mold for female leads in comic strips at this time. The Dragon Lady, Normandie Drake, and Burma are all women who know what they want and aren’t afraid to take a stand or stake their claim when the spirit moves them.

For more notes about this volume see also: Terry and the Pirates Vol. 1 and TatP-v1