Enter The Dragon Lady

For the first couple of years of its existence, Milt Caniff's Terry and the Pirates ran separate story lines in daily and Sunday strips. The first daily strip ran on October 22, 1934, with Terry and his guardian Pat Ryan arriving in China in search of a gold mine left to Terry by his grandfather.

That initial story arc ran through January 1935. But, in the meantime, Terry and Pat began to have a completely different adventure in the Sunday strip, which began on December 6, 1934.

For those of us who are obsessed with continuity (probably due to a refusal to completely admit that such adventures aren't actually happening in real life), you can line all this up with a coherent internal chronology. If you own the superb reprint volumes that were published a decade ago, then you read the first daily adventure through the January 25, 1935 strip. Then read all the Sunday adventures that were independent of the daily strips. Then jump back to the January 26, 1935 strip and read chronologically from there. With only a few minor continuity issues, it all lines up nicely.

So you see? Terry IS real! It's all real! I KNEW IT!

Anyway, it's that first Sunday story arc that we're looking at today. Terry and Pat book passage on a freighter to Shanghai. But the it's pretty much impossible for those two to go anywhere without running into trouble. That first evening, the ship is stalked by pirates.

There's a brief fight when the pirates attack, but Terry and Pat are soon overwhelmed and captured. We saw the helmsman of the freighter gunned down by a pirate and presumably the rest of the crew are killed as well.

The person responsible for this carnage is the most memorable of the many reoccurring characters that Caniff will eventually introduce into Terry's universe. This is the Dragon Lady, the beautiful but ruthless pirate and bandit chief who will pop up again and again, often as a enemy and sometimes (especially when fighting the Japanese) as an ally.

At this early point in the strip, Caniff's art was still maturing, so the Dragon Lady doesn't quite generate the "Hubba Hubba" vibe she and most of the rest of Caniff's ladies soon will, but she's still pretty darn close. He also has her speaking in a stereotypical "Chinese" accent, though this started to fade away even before this initial adventure was complete.

But even so, the Dragon Lady is a striking, memorable character right from the start, with the potential romantic tension between her and Pat building almost immediately.  In fact, it's not long before she's trying to seduce Pat into joining up with her, though Terry manages to run interference for his buddy.

The situation changes rapidly when a rival pirate captain named Fang attacks the Dragon Lady's ship. This nearly gets Terry and Pat killed, but quick action on Terry's part saves their lives, though they (along with the Dragon Lady) are captured by Fang.

Fang keeps the Dragon Lady alive because he wants to find out where her hidden loot is kept. He keeps Pat and Terry around because he plans to force them to pretend to be in distress and lure a British passenger ship in close enough to capture it. This forces a reluctant team-up. In return for a promise to help her escape, she slips the boys a mirror, which they then use to secretly send a Morse code message to the British ship. This warns off the ship before it can be attacked and sets the American Navy on Fang's trail.

A Navy gunboat soon arrives, resulting in a desperate fight, with Terry getting a chance to take care of Fang personally.

So the pirates are dead or captured. And the Dragon Lady? Well, Terry and Pat did promise to help her escape. So they tell a fib to the Navy, identifying the Dragon Lady as an innocent hostage. She goes free to continue her own career looting and pillaging.

It's actually an interesting moral dilemma. Pat and Terry do what they think is right to keep their promise. I get that. On the other hand, the crew of the freighter they had been on--one of whom was an old friend of Pat's--were all ruthlessly killed on her orders. Now she escapes justice and is free to commit more murders. So we can legitimately argue that the boys dropped the ball here.

But I suspect the primary motivation for their decision was Caniff's desire to keep the Dragon Lady available for future appearances. He was already building a vibrant and exciting universe in which Terry would battle pirates, bandits, spies and (eventually) the Japanese. It's likely he had recognized the Dragon Lady's potential for future adventures and simply needed a way of keeping her out of the hangman's noose.

But what am I saying? Didn't we establish earlier that Terry and the Pirates are real? Isn't Caniff merely an historian recounting their adventures? So I guess my last paragraph is just so much gibberish. Sorry about that.

Next week, we fly off to Jupiter to meet and giant, evil brain and a disembodied Earthman.