Over the years, Milton Caniff's celebrated adventure strip has been adapted as a radio drama, a television series, a film serial, and even a postage stamp. It serves as a direct inspiration for the likes of Johnny Quest and Venture Brothers. Caniff wrote and drew the series from 1933 to 1946, leaving it to originate the Steve Canyon series which (unlike Terry) he partly owned.
Terry Lee and his friends initially fought the Dragon Lady and her pirates in the South Seas, but the onset of World War II changed the direction of the strip. Terry aged visibly from teen to young adult, enlisted in the Air Force, and made common cause with the pirates against the Japanese. Caniff's widely-read strip linked the troops with their families back home. His military scenes gave the home front a sense of life on the battlefield, while his cast of female characters gave deployed soldiers a welcome sight not available in the trenches.
The June 12, 1944 strip introduced the spunky orphan ingenue Willow Belinda, who befriends the worldly Burma and fends off a drunken gorilla while the two women are stuck in a jungle temple together. They spend the next two months getting the local G.I.s hot and bothered while Burma dodges a nosy reporter who threatens to expose her criminal past. The reporter abandons his story after bonding with Terry during a harrowing aerial dogfight.
Willow and Terry become romantically involved when the scene shifts to a large Indian city. Mistaking her for a high ranking WAC, Japanese agents capture Willow and threaten her with a hot poker, in a scene reminiscent of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Terry must find her before the military police, who suspect her of being a spy. The 'Willow Kidnapped' story ran from October 25 to December 25 of 1944, concluding with a dramatic car chase.
Now that Terry Lee has outgrown his mentor Pat Ryan and received a promotion to second lieutenant, he needs a sidekick. Enter Charlie "Hotshot" Charles, a young Boston pilot with a streetwise swagger, who debuted in late June 1944. He was named after Boston's Charles River, which in turn was named after the British king.
In this particular strip, Willow Belinda recaps her plight while Terry Lee and Hotshot Charlie find a valuable clue to her whereabouts. The sixth and seventh panels contain a rare action sequence, with unstable Kirby-esque poses which show the figures in implied movement. Or perhaps Kirby is Caniff-esque?
Sunday strips face three plotting challenges:
First, not all newspapers carry both the daily and color Sunday versions of a given comic strip. Second, some newspapers truncate the Sunday strips, removing panels each week to save space. 'Terry and the Pirates' solves both of these problems simultaneously by using the first three panels (the width of four panels due to the title) to recap plot from the preceding week. In this case, that means that Willow Belinda repeats an expositional monologue she had already given in the Thursday and Friday strips just prior. The second panel alone summarizes weeks of previous plot! Though the dialogue is repeated, the art is new. And third, many newspapers displayed the strip in a landscape format, necessitating uniform panel sizes so that the grid could be re-arranged from 3x4 to 2x6.
This piece was acquired from the estate of science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. I've had my eye out for a good Terry strip, and this one fits the bill nicely, combining action, suspense, and a damsel in distress.
