Terry and the Pirates

Chicago Tribune

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Chicago Tribune, March 19, 1944

High in the Catskills, on a peak overlooking the slopes down which Benedict Arnold once crawled to betray his country, the lights burn all night every night in a glassed-in studio where labors a man who writes with his right hand and draws, paints, and prints with his left.

The studio has a true north light, but this is of little use to its current owner, for he rarely sees the day. He works with three drawing boards, a Rube Goldberg arrangement of fluorescent lights, a 24 hour around-the-world clock, and a tremendous library on the orient. Copies of the National Geographic Magazine and Asia are piled man-high behind him, and on the mantel rest a Chinese hat, a Chinese tongue scraper, a Chinese compass, and a wicked curved blade used for cutting brush in the South Pacific.

On one wall is a black plaque edged in Chinese red. On it in gold are the Chinese characters that mean “Terry and the Pirates, by Milton Caniff.”

Milton Caniff (pronounced cn-iff’) is a blue-eyed, black-haired Irishman from Ohio, and some day he is going to drop in his tracks. Artistically he is a flagellant. He loves work, flogs himself on into more, and now, white-faced and hollow-eyed, is turning out the work of three men. One man’s work is for pay. This is his justly celebrated comic strip, “Terry and the Pirates.” The others are Caniff’s contribution to the war. Just as Terry has gone to war, so have the pen and paint brush of his creator.

Caniff is 36, and Terry is somewhere around 18 or 19. Actually he is 9, for he was born, a wide-eyed, adventurous American boy in short trousers, on Oct. 19, 1934. He was just an average little boy, but in less than a year his antics had girdled the globe and he was speaking in 11 languages.

In Denmark he was and still is known as Jim; ” Jim Och Piraterna,” the strip is called. Everywhere else-France, Canada, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, China-he is known as Terry, as he was in Italy when, having reached the chronological age of 3 and the nature of a menace to no one, he was the first comic strip to be tossed out of Italy. He and Disney’s movie shorts were expurgated from the Italian vision the same day.

In China he long has been a hero, and for a while was equally one in Japan, where a major Tokio newspaper pirated the strip and ran it with Japanese wording in the balloons. The extraordinary aspect of this theft is that it took place when the strip was unquestionably partisan in the Chinese struggle. Caniff had shunted off all possible state department intervention in the strip’s neutrality by calling the Japanese “the invaders,” but the secret of their identity was made an open one by the now familiar dog faces, corn-on-the-cob teeth, and the flag of the rising sun. It was all very funny, and Caniff still wonders what the Japanese text said.

Terry has come a long way. He has grown up and become an American aviator in China. He has gone on the air five days a week over NBC’s Blue network. He has invaded the Metropolitan museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Symphony hall gallery. He has had baseballs, books, bazookas, and babies named for him.

This is quite a feat for a young American boy whose creator, never having been to China or even read anything about it, put his hero on a comfortably remote Yellow sea estuary, floating east in a stream that moved west, and talking to Chinese whose pants were held up by buttons sold exclusively in a dime store in Caniff’s native Ohio.

“When we decided on China,” Canift now confesses, “my first act was to run to the New York public library. I didn’t know one thing about the orient-but I certainly do now!”

Some people think Caniff looks like Pat Ryan, that swashbuckling Irish soldier of fortune who had been Terry’s constant companion until Terry became an aviation cadet in China and Pat donated his amazingly varied talents to the United States as a lieutenant in navy intelligence. Caniff is of medium height, with rather grave blue eyes, a quirking mouth, and an almost dead white skin, but is a trifle heavier than the lean Ryan and smokes cigarets rather than Ryan’s pipe. He has one talent which few suspect—he is ambidextrous. He plays golf with his right hand and bats with his right hand, but throws with his left. He writes with his right hand, but prints, draws, and paints with his left. However, his right-hand writing is illegible and unsteady when he is tired, whereas he can go far into the night with his left and it remains even.

Unlike the average man who has won fame and a measure of fortune as a comic strip artist, Caniff actually studied art. His interest began in high school when he obtained an after-school job as copy boy in the art department of the Dayton (O.) Journal, now the Journal-Herald. He saw the comic strip artists wander casually in and out, lords of the domain, and decided they had the softest job on a newspaper. (He later learned how wrong he was.) So he went to Ohio State univer-sity, working at night for the Columbus (O.) Dispatch, and majored in fine arts. It took him five years to get thru, and he then stayed on an extra year. “And,” he adds, “was very happy to be able to right at that time, for it was 1930.”

The Columbus Dispatch, retrenching (as who wasn’t?), fired him, which seemed an unkind deed to a young man with a shining A. B. degree, a head full of unborn ideas, and a bride of a few months, but eventually (1932) he began an adventure strip, “Dickie Dare,” for the Associated Press feature service. After two years of this he had a chance, thru John T. McCutcheon, dean of The Chicago Tribune cartoonists and a fellow Sigma Chi, to submit a trial strip to the Tribune-News Syndicate.

He decided to use China as the strip’s locale. He knew nothing of China, but neither, he reasoned, did most of the public. In his mind it was the last outpost of adventure, the single point on the globe where anything, absolutely anything, could happen. However, he had no name for his hero or for the strip. At the suggestion of J. M. Patterson, publisher of the New York Daily News, he wrote out a list of 50 boys’ names. Patterson selected Terry and wrote after it “and the Pirates,” and as Caniff had just read Freeman’s “Robert E. Lee,” he gave Terry the family name of Lee.¹

Maybe you have forgotten how the strip began. Terry and the dauntless Pat landed off the coast of China in search of a fabulous mine for which Terry’s grandfather had left a map. Here, with the aid of a whimsical Chinese guide, a happy lad named Connie who punned in dreadful pidgin English, they found the ancient temple, the mine, and its treasure, but they never managed to collect the wealth, because a rich hero is not a hero. Instead they had hair-raising encounters with bandits, pirates, and assorted very bad men—and women.

Since those early days their adventures have been breath-takingly realistic, for the strip progressed into a counterpart of the Flying Tigers, but always liberally splattered with voluptuous women, beautiful and just a little wicked. Many amateur sociologists and students of human nature have studied the strip to no avail to decide which is the greater drawing card, Terry’s adventures or them gawgeous ladies in it.

The most gawgeous of all is the Dragon Lady, that phenomenal Eurasian with white skin and slant eyes and a figure beside which that of Helen of Troy was just a canoe sinker. She has not been in the strip for two years, but Caniff still receives requests for pinups.

The Dragon Lady, incidentally, was modeled from a real person, as are all Caniff’s characters. In fact, Caniff had a succession of models for her, all of whom married one by one and moved away from his vision. The first one, Phyllis Johnson, a professional model, now is Mrs. William Bippus and lives in Nashville, Tenn.

“She is brunette,” Caniff describes the Dragon Lady, using the present tense so tenderly that the hearer suspects that the Dragon Lady will be back any day now. “I actually modeled her hair-do from this model right off the bat, but the model had no slant-eyed business at all.

“What I wanted was an oriental villain who was not a Fu Manchu. Putting this into a woman made it ten times more interesting, an irresistible com-bination, mean and beautiful. I never mentioned her age, but she had an adult personality. That was why goings-on between Pat and the Dragon Lady were watched so carefully. It was no 17-year-old lovemaking. The readers really hung on every word—or so they said in their letters.”

Pat played around with all the girls—the Dragon Lady; Burma, that slangy number who tossed wisecracks with her hips as well as her lips and drew her grab-bag name from Kipling’s line, “There’s a Burma girl a- sitting”; Normandy (his only true love, who married an oaf and can’t get rid of him now), and Rouge, the Dragon’s successor in artifice — and Terry watched. Heretofore Terry has been the hero only vicariously, for no one can have a wide-eyed child in knee pants kissing femmes fatales, blowing up Jap locomotives, and bringing villains to their just end. Terry has watched and learned and waited, and now, a fledgling aviator, he is coming into his own at last. In a sense the strip is starting all over again.

Any one who would like to get a distinguished service cross in this war should meet Caniff and pose as a prototype for one of his characters. It is a sure-fire formula for becoming a flesh and blood hero.

Consider Phil Cochran. Cochran and Caniff went to Ohio State together, but their paths actually crossed little, for Cochran was in the school of commerce and Caniff in fine arts. But back before Pearl Harbor, Cochran, by that time an officer in the air corps, was training the 65th pursuit, or Fighting Cock, squadron at Groton, Conn., a few miles away from Caniff’s eyrie. Caniff drew an insigne for the squadron, a red rooster in a green circle with a shamrock around its neck, just as Cochran wore a green shamrock on his helmet and let his good boys wear one as a merit badge.

On July 4, 1942, Cochran and Taffy Tucker, an army nurse from the “island” (Manila), appeared in the strip. Cochran was there to wipe out the Japs. He appeared as Flip Corkin (he has always been called “Corkin” by his men), and his career in the strip has been meteoric. It has been equally meteoric since then in actual warfare, for he now is Lieutenant Colonel Cochran, wearer of the silver star, the D. F. C. with two oak leaf clusters, the air medal with three clusters, and the French croix de guerre with star and palms.

Single-handed, in his Warhawk fighter, “Shillalah,” he executed a one man bombing raid on Nazi headquarters at Kairouan, Tunisia, and demolished the place with a single bomb. Last summer he came home, and was welcomed—to his utter amazement and dismay—from one end of New York to the other, not as Phil Cochran, but as Flip Corkin! He finally hid for three weeks in the camouflage of Mitchel field. Not even Caniff could find him.

Frank L. Higgs, another Ohio State classmate, was the prototype of Dude Hennick, that handsome daredevil. He now is Captain Higgs of the C. N. A. C., or China National Aviation corporation, a part of Pan American Airways under Chinese governmental control for the duration. Higgs once served as a fighter pilot under Chennault in Hawaii, then resigned his commission with Chennault, then a colonel, to teach Chinese flying cadets. When the Chinese cadet program was reorganized he be. came a transport pilot for the
C. N. A. C.

Then there was Peggy Vin-cent, the San Antonio girl who wrote Caniff that her husband, Col. Clinton D. (Casey) Vincent, was Chennault’s chief of staff. (Chennault, thinly disguised, is in the strip.) At Caniff’s request she forwarded some pictures of the handsome 28-year-old colo-nel. Soon he was in the strip as Vince Casey. As Vincent he prevailed upon Chennault to release him as commander of an advance fighter squadron (just what he was doing in the strip). In one week he got six Japs and the D. F. C. in his plane, the Peggy II.

“Each one,” Caniff says almost wistfully, “has done something more spectacular by far than anything I ever did in fiction in the strip.”

Many persons ask how he happened to get Terry into the war. His answer was that he didn’t; the war came to Terry. Terry was in China. China was too torn by war for them to avoid it, so as long ago as 1937, when the rest of the world was labeling Japanese aggression in Manchukuo an “incident,” Caniff began showing Japanese troops complete with insignia and labeled “the invaders.” At that time the Terry gang was opposed to the Jap feeding of opium to the Chinese thru making addicts of young children.

“There was no talk of war,” he says, ” but any one who could read newspapers could put it together.

“The war just served as a beacon for future sequences. I foresaw a terrific struggle for the allies, all with vested interests. About that time the military began to creep in. Girls don’t like the military—they didn’t then—but little basic truisms simply had to be included. Pat, a neutral, got a pass from the Jap army to go out thru Japan to get something he needed. His two body servants were not neutrals, but they were admitted with him, and at night they would go out and wreck locomotives and create general havoc.

“The strip began to mold itself in that period. It couldn’t be otherwise with that background. I showed the Jap-Nazi-Italian collaboration as long ago as 1940, but without names.”

Caniff had predicted the Japanese attack on the United States, but when it came he was caught off guard. Ordinarily he avoids specific geographic locales, but this time he had his characters in Hongkong, all set for months of guerrilla warfare. April Kane, Terry’s love, was off Hongkong in a small boat. And —bing! —Hongkong fell. He was seven weeks ahead of publication date in his work, and he had to work day and night to get the crew into a less doomed area. In doing it he had to abandon April Kane, who still is drifting about in the mists of time, an innocent victim.

“I think the public just under. stood,” he said rather mournfully. “They know you get caught like everybody else got caught.”

When, however, it came time for Terry to enter the war his course was inevitable. It was made so by a letter from a junior high school class:

“Our class voted that Terry will go into aviation.”

He did.

Naturally Terry couldn’t come all the way back to the United States in time of war to becorne an aviation cadet. Instead he began to train with Chinese cadets in China, a reciprocal arrangement on the part of the two allies, for Chinese cadets were training with American boys in the United States.

Check back over Terry’s training day by day, week by week, and you will find it synchronizes exactly, as far as the time element goes, with that of an aviation cadet in this country. Even in training Terry was not a re markable character. He was an ordinary bright, run-of-the-mill American whose background differed principally in that he could pronounce strange names and had learned mathematics from the back of a truck in China.

You might be interested in Terry’s graduation-the day he received his commission as a flight officer in the army of the United States. You might be interested in how Caniff wrote that particular strip, the color page of Sunday, Oct. 17, for he had just completed it the day this writer went to see him early last September.

“I wanted to have Corkin talking to Terry,” he said. “He had to talk to him man to man, friend to friend, yet as a supe. rior officer to a fledgling. I didn’t have any idea what he would say. And all at once the thing just wrote itself. Maybe you know how it is. You get an idea and don’t do anything with it, just let it lie around in the back of your head, and then all at once there it is, moving on its own momentum.”

It turned out to be a masterpiece, in the minds of army men, newspaper men, and readers. It has been reprinted by the thou. sands for morale purposes.

Was Caniff pleased? Naturally. He is modest, but he is human. Moreover, he is a consummate artist, and he had achieved a complete art, both of prose and of line, which moved.

One could go on like this for-ever, but there happens to be a white paper shortage.

Caniff frankly says he owes much to his readers. Scores of persons send him pictures, books on the orient, clippings, corrections. He now has scouts, volunteers all, scattered over the world, but especially in China and the South Pacific. As a result of this, and of Caniff’s extraordinary appetite for accurate detail, “Terry and the Pirates” is carefully documented.

Taffy Tucker produced a splendid example of this. After her introduction in the strip Caniff had a letter from Lt. Florence Hunter, an army nurse stationed at Fort Benning, Ga., thanking him for using a nurse (Taffy was a Red Cross nurse, joining the army nurse corps) and asking for his autograph. In reply he asked if she could send him any background material on Red Cross nurses. That was a year and a half ago. She hasn’t stopped writing since. She reports any changes in nurses’ uniforms, what nurses say, how they talk, what they do off duty, and wrote one entire series on what men say to the nurses and vice versa. “I’ve never seen her,” Canift says in wonder. “She’s just a name and an army serial number, but her aid is invaluable.”

Not long ago he had a navy chaplain in the strip. He drew him with fear and trembling, for the public is quick to note any military inaccuracy. He made a slight error in the cross. An army chaplain’s cross stands straight up and down; a navy chaplain’s is placed at a slight slant. Caniff slanted it in the wrong direction.

“I had scores of letters on it,” he says. “From chaplains. But I found I had some good pals.”

Terry’s public is not restricted to civilian subscribers. He appears on a post-publication basis in the Stars and Stripes. A much lustier Caniff production, Male Call, a weekly strip, appears in Stars and Stripes, and all camp newspapers.

Male Call has been a war contribution, but long before Pearl Harbor the government was calling on Caniff. His first job was to illustrate COD manuals for M day on how to put out incendiary bombs, etc. When war actually came he did a full page of illustrations on what to do in the event of an air raid. Later he illustrated the Soldier’s Pocket Guide to China.

One of the most important contributions of this artist, who back in 1934, remember, knew China only as a place mysterious and remote, was his “How to Spot a Jap” guide. The army needed a quick instruction chart for the Pacific area for use of intelligence officers who, without recourse to anthropology, might have to decide quickly whether a man was a Japanese spy or a friendly Chinese. Caniff drew a chart setting forth the basic differences in the two races. It was published in full color in The Tribune, and 5,000 special copies of the page were given to the army. Many of them now hang in barracks all over the world.

Any one who thinks these undertakings, and the countless other special war pages Caniff does, can be done in odd hilarious moments is out of his head. It is around the clock, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Caniff’s procedure is to get a mental synopsis of what he is going to do. He plans the sequence while reading or listening to the radio, then has to document it by reading from his comprehensive library on the orient and matters military and naval or by searching thru his files for pictures of, say, a French locomotive. (Incidentally, he subscribes to about 50 magazines, all of which must be scanned for text and pictures of possible use in the future.) When he put Pat Ryan in the navy, for instance, he didn’t know beans about the navy. He began with: This is a boat. The boat floats. He says he spends much more time on actual documentation than on drawing, but it pays.

He next writes the dialog. He writes it directly into the blocked-out cardboard strip forms in pencil, and Frank Engli, one of his two assistants (Engli draws “Rocky, the Stone Age Kid,” and Ray Bailey, his other assistant, draws “Vesta West”), checks the words for spelling and accuracy (not long ago Caniff used a verse from the army air corps song; he used two wrong words; Engli corrected this) and inks them in. Caniff next pencils in the drawings, then inks in the entire strip at once. He does his own coloring, an extremely important problem in this current era of uniforms, planes, and camouflage.

“I have one problem that only I can solve,” he says. “I write my own stuff. Then I have to go back and draw it, and I write myself into some of the damnedest difficulties.”

So far he has managed to get every one out but April Kane.

Chicago Tribune, February 9, 1997

Raiding other press organizations for new talent had been a hallowed practice of newspaper syndicates ever since the days of W.R. Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. So when Joseph Patterson decided to add an exotic action title to his lineup of Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate comics, he turned to Milton Caniff, then drawing the “Dickie Dare” strip for AP Feature Service.

Responding to the challenge with his usual alacrity, Caniff produced what was to become one of the most admired comic features of all time, “Terry and the Pirates,” which made its debut as a daily on Oct. 22, 1934, followed by a Sunday page on Dec. 9.

When Caniff started on his assignment, the newspaper strip of exotic adventure was already a well-established genre. With Harold Foster calling Africa his own in “Tarzan,” and Alex Raymond having annexed Southeast Asia in the wake of “Jungle Jim,” Caniff decided on China as the setting of his new feature.

As his lead characters Caniff chose the same combination of manly hero and boy companion that had assured the success of his earlier “Dickie Dare,” of which “Terry and the Pirates” (the “Pirates” had been added by Patterson) seemed not so much an offshoot as a duplication.

The youthful Terry was a slightly more with-it version of Dickie, and his adult companion and mentor, Pat Ryan, was there for guidance and protection.

“Terry’s” graphic style was at first stiff and mannered, but it soon underwent a radical transformation under the influence of the pioneering work done at the time of Noel Sickles. When dailies and Sundays merged into a single story line in August 1936, the famous Caniff style, a synthesis of cinematic narration, careful framing, elaborate lighting effects, and skillful manipulation of space, was already in full bloom.

Most important, Terry was not growing up, and often striking out on his own. There were still tales of smuggling, piracy and banditry, but they now blended into the tapestry of a China ravaged by war.

Terry and Pat found themselves confronted by a colorful roster of villains, but always lurking in the background were the heroes’ real enemies, the occupying Japanese army, simply referred to as “the invaders.”

“Terry” is perhaps best remembered for its gallery of beautiful women. They included the Dragon Lady, conceived at the outset as a Eurasian villainess, the leader of a band of cutthroats and murderers, whose real name was Lai Choi San; and the golden-haired, golden-hearted Burma, a fugitive from justice; brash, obvious, and almost outrageously endowed with lascivious charms, Burma went after Pat with single-minded determination.

The entry of the United States into World War II propelled “Terry” to the front rank of newspaper strips, as the wild adventures of Pat and Terry gradually gave way to the realities of the war.

Terry, having finally passed the adolescent stage, became a lieutenant ad pilot in the Army Air Corps and his commanding officer, Col. Flip Corkin, moved into the role heretofore occupied by Pat Ryan, but with greater equality between the two men.

After the war Terry and Pat stayed in China, and lived through a series of missions and complications, with a new foe hovering in the background: The Chinese Red Army.

Caniff abandoned “Terry” on Dec. 29, 1946, and as a replacement the syndicate settled on George Wunder.

After the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, Terry reenlisted as a captain, and the strip cruised along until the antiwar climate of the Vietnam era finally brought it down on Feb. 25, 1973. But in March 1995 Terry and Pat were brought back in a version by Michael Uslan and artists Greg and Tim Hildebrandt. Jim Clark and artist Dan Spiegle took over a year later.

Chicago Tribune, November 3, 1934

Chicago Tribune, December 9, 1934

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