TerryAndThePirtes

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TERRY AND THE PIRATES

Terry and the Pirates was an action-adventure comic strip created by cartoonist Milton Caniff. 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 precise reason behind including "the Pirates" in the title is a subject of some debate, but see Dragon Lady (stereotype) for one plausible version.) 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. In 1946, Caniff won the first Cartoonist of the Year Award from the National Cartoonist Society for his work on Terry and the Pirates.

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 matched wits with pirates and various other villains. He developed an ever larger circle of friends and enemies, including Big Stoop, Captain Judas, Cherry Blaze, Chopstick Joe, Cue Ball and Dude Hennick.

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Most notable of all was famed femme fatale the Dragon Lady who started as an enemy and later, during the war, became an ally. Caniff included a number of non-American women who fought the heroes and had the funny habit of referring to themselves in the third person. These included the Dragon Lady herself 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 and cross-dresser with designs on Terry's girlfriend April Kane.

Over time, 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 Second 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 United States Army Air Forces. The series then became almost exclusively concerned with the war with much of the action centering around a US 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 who was based on the real life Colonel Philip "Flip" Cochran of the 1st Air Commando Group. Comic relief was provided by fellow flyer "Hotshot Charlie". Pat, Connie and Big Stoop still made occasional guest appearances as marine commandos and 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. In it Corkin gives the recently commissioned Terry a speech on his responsibilities as a fighter pilot, including the need to respect his support crew and military bureaucracy which, for better or for 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.

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. Wunder did draw highly-detailed pictures, 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 humour. Nevertheless he kept the strip going for a respectable twenty-seven years until its discontinuation in 1973, by which time Terry had become a full-grown man and reached the rank of Colonel.

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In 1995, the strip was one of 20 included in the Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative postage stamps.

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.

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RADIO

Marion Sweet as the Dragon Lady

Terry and the Pirates was a radio serial adapted from the comic strip of the same name created in 1934 by Milton Caniff. With storylines of action, high adventure and foreign intrigue, the popular radio series entralled listeners from 1937 through 1948. With scripts by Albert Barker, George Lowther and others, the program's directors included Cyril Armbrister, Wylie Adams and Marty Andrews.

The central character, Terry Lee, was portrayed at various times by Jackie Kelk, Cliff Carpenter, Owen Jordan and Bill Fein. Terry's buddy Pat Ryan was played by Bud Collyer, Warner Anderson, Bob Griffin and Larry Alexander. Others in Terry's Far East entourage were Flip Corkin (Ted de Corsia), Elita (Gerta Rozan), Burma (Frances Chaney), Hotshot Charlie (Cameron Andrews) and Connie the coolie (Cliff Norton, John Gibson, Peter Donald). Throughout the Orient, they encountered plenty of evildoers, including the Dragon Lady (Agnes Moorehead, Adelaide Klein, Marion Sweet), in such adventurous episodes as "Pirate Gold Detector Ring," "Deadly Current," "The Mechanical Eye" and "The Dragon Lady Strikes Back."

When the late afternoon series began, it was heard at 5:15pm, three times a week, sponsored by Dari-Rich, airing on NBC's Red network from November 1, 1937 to June 1, 1938. It switched to NBC Blue on September 26, 1938, continuing until March 22, 1939. Absent from the airwaves for over two years, it returned shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack, heard in the midwest on the Chicago Tribune's WGN. That series, sponsored by Libby's, aired five days a week from October 16, 1941 to May 29, 1942.

With increasing popularity during the WWII years, the show next took off at a fast pace on ABC Blue, airing daily for 15 minutes on weekday afternoons beginning February 1, 1943. The Quaker Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice "shot from guns" commercials often had a patriotic pitch. Douglas Browning was the announcer during the mid-1940s. After 1945, with no wartime villains for Terry and his pals to fight, ratings began to drop in the post-WWII period until the final episode on June 30, 1948.

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TELEVISION

Terry and the Pirates, a television adventure series based on Milton Caniff's popular comic strip, was telecast from June 26, 1953 to November 21, 1953. The 18 episodes included "Macao Gold," "Black Market in Death," "The Boxer's Rebellion," "The Case of the Little Mandarin" and "Chinese Coffin." The syndicated series was produced in 1952 by Don Sharpe Enterprises.

USAAF Colonel Terry Lee (John Baer) heads to the Far East to locate a gold mine he inherited from his grandfather. Once in the Orient, Lee becomes a pilot with Air Cathay, a cargo and passenger airline owned and operated by the cunning Chopstick Joe (Jack Reitze), who is not always honest. His friend and co-pilot is Charles C. Charles, aka Hotshot Charlie (William Tracy), while the romantic interest is provided by the attractive blonde Burma (Sandra Spence). Lee has several encounters with his beautiful and mysterious nemesis, Lai Choi San, aka The Dragon Lady (Gloria Saunders).

MILTON CANIFF

Caniff, left

In 1932, Caniff moved to New York City to accept an artist position in the Features Service of the Associated Press. He did general assignment art for several months, then inherited a panel cartoon called Mister Gilfeather in September 1932 when Al Capp left the feature. Caniff continued Gilfeather until the spring of 1933, when it was retired in favor of a generic comedy in a panel cartoon called The Gay Thirties, which he produced until he left AP in the fall of 1934. In July 1933, Caniff began an adventure fantasy strip, Dickie Dare, influenced by series such as Flash Gordon and Brick Bradford.^[1] The eponymous central character was a youth who dreamed himself into adventures with such literary and legendary persons as Robin Hood, Robinson Crusoe and King Arthur. In the spring of 1934, Caniff changed the strip from fantasy to "reality" when Dickie no longer dreamed his adventures but experienced them as he traveled the world with a freelance writer, Dickie's adult mentor, "Dynamite Dan" Flynn.

In 1934, Caniff was hired by the New York Daily News to produce a new strip, Terry and the Pirates, the strip which made Caniff famous.^[1] Like Dickie Dare, Terry began the strip as a boy who is traveling in China with an adult mentor and freelance writer, Pat Ryan. But over the years the title character aged and by World War II he was old enough to serve in the Army Air Force. During the twelve years that Caniff produced the strip, he introduced many fascinating characters, most of whom were "pirates" of one kind or another--Burma, a blonde with a mysterious possibly criminal past; Chopstick Joe, a Chinese petty criminal; Singh Singh, a warlord in the mountains of China; Judas, a smuggler; Sanjak, a lesbian; and then boon companions such as Hotshot Charlie, Terry's wing man during the War years; Connie and Big Stoop, a Chinese Jeff and Mutt (in stature) who followed Terry and Pat Ryan around the country; and April Kane, a young woman who was Terry's first love. But Caniff's most memorable creation was the Dragon Lady, a pirate queen; she was seemingly ruthless and calculating, but Caniff encouraged his readers to think she had romantic yearnings for Pat Ryan.

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