The Complete
Terry and the
Pirates, Volume I:
1934-1936
By Milton Caniff
(IDW Publishing, $50)
In the modern, high-speed Internet age, it's
difficult, if not impossible, to really understand
the impact that the daily comic strip had on
American culture in the early part of the twentieth
century. And certainly no one had more influence on
comics, particularly during those fledgling years,
than Milton Caniff, creator of the swashbuckling
adventure strip Terry and the
Pirates. To inaugurate its new imprint, the
Library of American Comics, IDW Publishing is
presenting the first volume of a projected
six-volume complete hardcover collection of
Caniff's work, which follows the globe-trotting
experiences of wide-eyed all-American boy Terry
Lee; his two-fisted journalist pal, Pat Ryan; and
their femme fatale nemesis, the Dragon Lady. As
fellow comic artist and writer Howard Chaykin notes
in his incisive introductory essay, Caniff was "the
man who invented the visual and textual language
that defines the very vocabulary of all adventure
and character-based comic art" - and when poring
over these pages, you'll feel like you're watching
the medium develop right before your eyes. Still,
volume one, which covers Terry's first two years,
is perhaps more interesting for its historical
value than for its actual content. It took Caniff
some time to really find his feet and flesh out his
characters, but once he did, his work reveled in
risqué scenarios and showed an unusually developed
sense of female characters. After World War II,
Caniff abandoned Terry and the
Pirates to begin writing the rather more
prosaic (and politically and aesthetically
conservative) strip Steve
Canyon, yet his pioneering work here shows
why he occupies a place in the pantheon of comic
art. - Bob Mehr
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