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.

Never Fly Without Your Wingman

Last week, we spent some time with comic book hero Buz Sawyer, who flew two- or three-man bombers for the Navy during World War II. Terry Lee (title character of Milt Caniff's brilliant strip Terry and the Pirates), in the meantime, was training to fly single-seat P-40s for the Army.

But that doesn't mean Terry would ever fly into combat alone. Or if he did--he'd get himself a stern talking-to afterwards.

Terry seems determined to get himself in trouble during a story arc that stretched over the winter months of 1943/44. First, when a transport plane full of important Chinese officials lands at his base, he's a little too free with blurting out this news in a public setting.

When the plane takes off, it's ambushed and shot down by the Japanese. On board at the time aren't just the officials, but the comic strip's current Eye Candy--USO performer Grett Murmer.

By the way, it's a little unfair to call Grett (or Milt Caniff's other female characters) Eye Candy. Not completely unfair, mind you. Like many other comic strip artists of the time, Caniff knew it was the father of the house that bought the newspapers, so he made sure that at least one pretty girl was present in nearly every story arc. But his female characters all had strong, individual personalities as well.

Back to the story--the enemy knew about the plane, but it's not Terry who is responsible for the security breach. A visiting Free French pilot named Captain Midi isn't really Captain Midi. In fact, he's not even a HE.

Midi is really a female criminal named Sanjak (whom Terry had encountered in an adventure from the late 1930s). She's currently working for the Japanese, but it takes awhile before Terry eventually picks up on a clue that gives Sanjak away.


In the meantime, a radio message is received from the downed plane. Terry's C.O.--Flip Corkin--quickly puts together a rescue mission. What follows is a brilliantly executed action sequence, with Terry and several other soldiers parachuting down to the plane to help hold off approaching Japanese troops until another transport plane can land and pick everyone up.

The rescue mission is a success, but a bombing mission flies into another trap and circumstantial evidence points to Grett Murmer as the Japanese spy. When Terry finds firm evidence pointing to Midi/Sanjak, the spy steals a plan and makes a break for it. On his own initiative, Terry flies another plane in pursuit. In another great action scene, Sanjak is nearly shot down by the Japanese, but manages to land on one of their air strips. Caniff often allowed his villains to escape so that he would have the option of bringing them back again--though I'm pretty sure never got around to using Sanjak again before he left the strip at the end of 1946.

All this means Terry is alone and surrounded by enemy planes. Only the timely arrival of Flip Corkin and a squadron of P-40s save Terry's sorry butt.

Terry learns himself a lesson about flying into combat without your wingman. And Colonel Corkin, just to make sure Terry has really learned, gives him a rather stern...um... lecture on the subject.

Milt Caniff has been called the Rembrandt of the Comic Strip and, gee whiz, he earned that title. His figure work and compositional skills are impeccable; his storytelling skill and his synergy of writing and art was breathtakingly good; and his characters are so real it's sometimes surprising when you remember that they are fictional. This story arc is a well-constructed and exciting tale that showcases all these strengths. 

I'm writing this particular post in December and saw the new Star Wars movie last night. This will influence my choice of comic books to examine next week--we'll visit the original Marvel Star Wars series and return to Tatoonie with Luke Skywalker.

Dive Bombers, Fighter Planes and Pretty Girls

I mentioned in a previous post that we're living in a veritable Golden Age for classic comic book reprints. And we are indeed, as made obvious by the recent publication of Buz Sawyer, volume 1: The War in the Pacific.

Buz was a creation of Roy Crane, who had recently left his long-running Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy strip to start something new.

Wash Tubbs had been a brilliant effort. The first true adventure strip, it had been filled with a pretty much perfect combination of action and humor. Crane's storytelling skills combined with a slightly cartoony art style to create a visually unique and very entertaining world. Storylines often included full-scale battles and fights to the death, but Crane's layouts always made it seem like good clean fun.

With Buz Sawyer, he went a more realistic route. Buz was in the Navy, flying a dive bomber (at first a Dauntless--later a Helldiver). His radioman/rear gunner was Roscoe Sweeney--a loyal friend as well as crew mate. Together, the pair would have one hair-raising adventure after another.

The change in characters and shift in tone didn't effect Crane at all as an artist. If anything, he got better. He drops Buz and Roscoe into trouble right from the strips premiere in late 1943, giving us an exciting dog fight that runs for a week or so.

Crane keeps the action going non-stop. Soon after the above dogfight, our heroes are shot down and forced to ditch in the ocean.

Eventually, they end up on a Japanese-held island, forcing them to play a dangerous game of hide-and-seek with the enemy.

Of course, they soon run across a pretty girl. Buz ran across pretty girls in the most unlikely situations.

The art is just fun to look at, carrying the story smoothly from one day to the next. Crane, with a couple of decades of experience behind him on Wash Tubbs, expertly mixed together character, plot and visuals.

One interesting thing to note--in addition to meeting girls in the unlikeliest places, Buz also had a tendency to get shot down a lot. This, of course, was the most logical route to get Buz and Roscoe into more personal adventures. In a later storyline, they run low on gas while flying close air support for ground troops, forcing them to land on an airstrip still partially controlled by the Japanese. Later in the war, after Buz has been transferred to torpedo planes, he and Roscoe are forced to ditch in the ocean again after taking anti-aircraft hits. They're picked up by a Japanese submarine, giving them the interesting problem of how to escape from a submerged vessel.

Each of these stories were great. In fact, the quality stays high on Buz Sawyer throughout the war years. It's interesting that Crane choose to make Buz a dive bomber/torpedo bomber pilot rather than go the more glamorous fighter pilot route. But then, these planes had two- or three-man crews, so this gave Buz a built-in sidekick for his ground-based adventures..

Not that being a fighter pilot would have made for boring storytelling. Over on Terry and the Pirates, writer/artist Milt Caniff had tossed his title character into the war and trained him to fly a P-51. Young Terry was a little late in enlisting (slowed down after being wounded while escaping from the Philippines, then spending time helping break up a Japanese spy ring), so when Buz joined the war, Terry was still finishing up his flight cadet training in Asia.

But Terry would get a chance to fly a few combat missions as well before long, though he'd never lose his tendency to run across spies while on the ground. And, like Buz, he'd also tend to run across drop-dead gorgeous dames on a regular basis.

Buz and Terry become one of those cases where you wish there had been a team-up at one point. But even though they never met, their war-time adventures represent their respective creators at the pinnacle of their skill as artsits and storytellers.

1937--A Good Year for Adventure

By pure coincidence, I just read a couple of books that were both originally published in 1937. Both were good mysteries featuring established characters and it got me to thinking. What were all the famous detectives and adventurers doing that year?


We’ll start with the Whisperer—the secret identity of James “Wildcat” Gordon, police commissioner of an unnamed big city. Gordon isn’t satisfied with the slow course of official justice and the corruption that slows it down even more. So, on top of his efforts as a cop, he often assumed the identity of the Whisperer. Using specially designed dental plates to disguise his voice, he wielded a pair of silenced automatics to dispense a somewhat faster method of justice than the court system allows.


In The Red Hatchets, he finds himself caught between two opposing forces when a Chinese tong wages brutal warfare against a local gangster. A lot of mobster skulls get split with red-handled axes while the Whisperer tries to rescue a kidnapped girl and sort out exactly what’s going on.


Beautiful girl reporter Torchy Blane (the inspiration for Lois Lane) had several 1937 adventures chronicled in the movies. One of them, Fly-Away Baby, had her traveling around the world to keep tabs on a suspected murderer. She and her boyfriend, NYPD Lt. Steve McBride, eventually confront a killer aboard the zeppelin Hindenburg.


Interestingly, Charlie Chan had been aboard the Hindenburg (though traveling in the opposite direction) while pursuing a spy in Charlie Chan at the Olympics. Of course, though that film was released ’37, it was recounting events that took place the previous year. For Charlie’s 1937 adventure, we need to look to Charlie Chan on Broadway, where he sorts out a killer’s identity from among a bevy of Damon Runyon-esque gamblers.



Terry Lee and Pat Ryan (from the comic strip Terry and the Pirates), while still bumming around the Far East, begin the year escaping from the bandit leader Pyzon, though Pat gets shot in the process. While recovering, he encounters his long-lost love Normandie Drake and her sleezy husband Tony Sandhurst. Terry and Pat rescue Sandhurst from kidnappers, but the chubby villain then attempts to frame Pat for several felonies.


Dick Tracy spent a large part of 1937 breaking up an insurance fraud ring. In the end, he is forced to track the main bad guy through a pitch-dark theater.

Hercule Poirot was in England that year, responding to a letter for help from a rich woman who feared one of her relatives was trying to off her. The letter is delayed and the poor woman is dead before Poirot arrives. But he can at least put the finger on the killer, as recounted in the book The Dumb Witness.


Back in New York City, gargantuan detective Nero Wolfe looks into a murder in The Red Box. It’s a case complicated when one of the suspects has the bad taste to die in Wolfe’s office, presenting him with a possible conflict of interest in his further investigations. But, with the help of his hard-boiled assistant Archie Goodwin, the overweight genius manages to figure it all out.


There was, in fact, quite a bit of action in the Big Apple that year. The Shadow was quite busy, but his most notable case that year was recorded in The Shadow Unmasked. While looking into some jewel thefts, the Shadow is forced to abandon his usual secret identity of Lamont Cranston. For the first time, we learn who he really is—Kent Allard, an aviator who was supposedly killed in a crash years before.


The Spider had a busy year as well. In Dictator of the Damned, he prevented a madman from using assassinations and an army of thugs to take over the city. It all comes to a head with a desperate gun battle inside a riverfront building, while the lovely Nita Van Sloan is caught up a yet another death trap. I think that poor girl may have even beat out Lois Lane for the number of death traps various villains tossed her into.


Ellery Queen had a quieter but still fascinating adventure when he tried to deduce who had plunged a pair of scissors into the neck of a famous novelist in The Door Between.


Doc Savage was hopping around the globe quite a bit that year (as he was throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s.) His adventures included battling an evil dwarf armed with a super-weapon in Repel and preventing some mercenaries from taking over a Central American nation in The Golden Peril. That latter case was especially important—the country is the source of Doc’s great wealth, regularly supplied to him in gold by some grateful Mayans he once helped out.


Over in Los Angeles, famed criminal attorney Perry Mason solved a murder aboard a gambling ship in The Case of the Dangerous Dowager. A little later that same year, Della Street gets tossed in jail for a short time helping her boss figure out The Case of the Lame Canary. She also gets the first of what will be several marriage proposals from Perry in that book. But she believes Perry needs a secretary who will back his plays no matter what more than a wife, so she always turns him down.


Even when I read the books, my mental image of Della is that of Barbara Hale from the TV series. I don’t blame Perry for being persistent in his proposals. Gee whiz, that gal was purty!


And that’s only a small portion of the vigilantes, detectives, and explorers that had adventures that year. It was an adventurous year indeed. But whatever problems might arise, whether it was a single murder or the threat of world domination, there were more than enough heroes scattered about the globe to keep the innocent safe.

BEST COMIC STRIP EVER!!!!!

Terry and the Pirates was the best comic strip ever. And I'll fight anyone--all at once or one at a time--who dares disagree with me.
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The strip was created in 1934 by Milt Caniff, who continued as writer/artist through 1946. After this, he left the strip and created Steve Canyon. Terry continued on until the early 1970s, but it was never as good as it had been during the Caniff years.

Caniff was a superb storyteller, using both dialogue and visuals to build exciting adventure stories infused with realistic, memorable characters. The main character was a young orphan named Terry Lee, who comes to China with his guardian (Pat Ryan--an aspiring writer who is quick with both his fists and his wits). In their initial adventure, Terry & Pat are looking for a gold mine willed to Terry by his grandfather.

This doesn't work out too well and Terry and Pat spend most of the 1930s bouncing around the Orient, battling bandits, thieves, con artists and invading Japanese soldiers. Reoccuring characters (most notably those of the drop-dead gorgeous female variety) come and go throughout the strip.

Terry aged normally through the years, so he was old enough to enlist after Pearl Harbor. He ended up flying fighter planes, but got himself dropped into the middle of an occassional espionage plot as well. The feel of the strip during the war years is inevitably different than it had been during the free-wheeling 1930s. But the quality of the stories and the artwork remain just as high.

Currently, a company called IDW is in the middle of publishing a 6-volume set containing all the Caniff Terry and the Pirates strips. Volume 4, which includes a very emotional storyline involving the death of a key character, has just become available. The individual volumes are priced a little high, but they are worth it. If you can't afford them--understandable in these times--at least request that your public library acquire them. In any case, Terry and the Pirates is must reading.

They aren't real--but by golly, they should be: Part 4: Jonny Quest and Terry Lee

JONNY QUEST:

Actually, it’s not just Jonny whom I would like to move into the real world, but his entire extended family. That includes his dad, brilliant scientist Benton Quest; his best friend Hadji; and the family bodyguard Roger “Race” Bannon.

The original 1964-65 animated adventure series is a true classic. Like all Hanna-Barbara TV entries, it used somewhat limited animation. But great characters designs (by artist Doug Wildey) and nifty locations, vehicles and scientific devices were all combined with solid storytelling. The results were 26 half-hour episodes that still entertain over 4 decades later.

Images from several episodes are, in fact, practically iconic. The giant mechanical spider-thing in “The Robot Spy,” for instance, is a magnificent visual. The sequence in “Turu the Terrible,” in which Dr. Quest and Race don jet packs and grab a bazooka in order to hunt down a pteranadon, is easily one of the coolest things ever.

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Dr. Quest, in fact, was the go-to guy for just about any sort of strange situation. Whether the problem was ships being mysteriously destroyed at sea, recovering an experimental missile from its crash point in the Arctic, or dealing with an apparent werewolf in the Canadian woods, Dr. Q was your man.

Race and the two kids would inevitably tag along and end up playing a key role in the adventure. Race handled the heaviest of the strong arm stuff—though both Dr. Quest and the boys were no slouches in that area. (Watching Jonny and Hadji judo-throw thugs was always fun.)

Jonny was the sort of kid we all (as kids) wished we could be. His life consisted of travel to exotic places, highlighted by one adventure after another. If he had to tolerate the occasional assassin sticking a tarantula in his bed while he slept—well, that seemed to be a more-than-fair trade-off.

TERRY LEE (from Terry and the Pirates):

One of the admitted influences for Jonny Quest, Milt Caniff’s newspaper strip Terry and the Pirates is arguable the finest adventure strip ever.

When it began in 1934, Terry Lee and his guardian Pat Ryan arrive in China, looking for an old mine left to Terry by his grandfather. The ensuing adventure, involving a bandit base secreted in the tunnels of the mine, was slam-bang exciting right from the start.

Caniff proved to be a masterful storyteller. As the strip progressed, his art became more refined and realistic. The characterizations were wonderful, while the storylines always enthralling and often complex. Terry was maybe twelve-years-old when the strip premiered and, like Jonny Quest, he had one heck of a childhood. He encountered pirates, bandits, invading Japanese soldiers, murderers and con artists. Villains came at him with fists, knives and guns, but he took it all in stride. Like Jonny, he was wish-fulfillment personified.

He also met the absolutely best-lookin’ gals ever to grace a comics page. The Dragon Lady, Burma, April Kane, Raven Sherman—just to name a few. Caniff had a real talent for drawing a pretty lady.

Terry aged normally as the strip progressed and was old enough to serve as a fighter pilot during World War II. By the time Caniff left the strip in 1946, Terry was flying a cargo plane around China while working undercover for Military Intelligence.

But whether man or boy, Terry Lee was one heck of a guy. Neither he nor Jonny Quest are real—but, by golly, they should be.

Comics, Radio and the Prelude to War, Part 1

Over the course of the 1930s, the Nazis had gained power in Germany and the Japanese had invaded China (which was already being torn apart by civil war). Another World War seemed more and more likely as the decade neared its end.

In the United States, the thought of war understandable frightened many people--the horrors of trench warfare were still very fresh in the collective consciousness. Many, though, recognized the threat fascism presented--they felt the sooner we dealt with it, the better.


Others were staunch isolationists. Europe and Asia might be awash in blood, but the U.S. (protected by wide oceans on both sides) could and should remain neutral.

So how did those producing popular entertainment deal with all this? A look at Milt Caniff's classic adventure comic strip Terry and the Pirates tells us a lot.

Terry is, in my opinion, the finest adventure strip ever done. During the 1930s, the size of the daily newspaper strip was noticably larger than it is today. On Sundays, strips were given either a full page or a half page each. This allowed for detailed art work, more dialogue and (consequently) complex and satisfying storylines.

Caniff's strip took place in and around China, where young Terry Lee and his mentor Pat Ryan bummed about that part of the world, encountering bandits, rebels, smugglers and pirates. Indepth characterizations, strong plots, great action and wonderful art lifted the strip into classic status almost as soon as it first appeared.


Inevitably, Caniff ended up doing stories dealing with the Japanese invasion of China, in which he presented the Japanaese as the bad guys. But--to avoid any chance of newspaper editors with isolationist feelings from cancelling the strip--he never actually refers to the invaders as the Japanese. Despite drawing their uniforms and equipment accurately and making it clear to anyone who ever glanced at a newspaper headline that they were Japanese, they are consistently referred to as the "invaders" in the strip.











































When Britain and Germany went to war, he even did a storyline involving an unnamed, anti-British nation that was working to destroy British ships in the Pacific (until Terry and his friends helped foil their plot, of course).







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Eventually, the company that syndicated Caniff's strip did ask him to back away from stories implicitly about the Japanese and Germans. Caniff agreed, but then Pearl Harbor was bombed and it didn't matter anymore. Terry joined the Army Air Corps and there was no longer any problem with identifying the Japanese 0r the Germans as the enemy.

But did everyone tip-toe around these issues during the 1930s? Some did, but others had their fictional creations face off against the Nazis without any qualms at all about neutrality or isolationism. I'll do one or two more posts on this subject, in which we'll look at several Warner Brothers films, the Superman radio show and Timely (later Marvel) comics.

{For anyone who might be enjoying the dinosaur movie posts--don't worry, I haven't forgotton about them.}