Complete Terry And The Pirates Volume 1: 1934-1936 (Complete Terry & the Pirates)
by Milton Caniff
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Book Summary Information
Author: Milton CaniffEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-09-05
ISBN: 1600101003
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: IDW Publishing
Book Reviews of Complete Terry And The Pirates Volume 1: 1934-1936 (Complete Terry & the Pirates)
Book Review: "Hotsy Dandy!" (But why such a small format?)
Summary: 4 Stars
The Library of American Comics wisely decided to make their first edition of the best of American newspaper comics the first two years of Milton Caniff's brilliant "Terry and the Pirates," which has been rightly called the best of all American adventure comics and the greatest influence on the most important comic illustrators in its wake, from Will Eisner to Frank Miller. Part of the pleasure of this first volume is seeing how Caniff started with the rudiments of his characters and visual style and so quickly made it all come together. The series starts with separate storylines running in the Sunday comics and in the daily comics: in the former, where he has much greater space to draw (and the advantage of color), he comes very quickly into his own as an artist by the second Dragon Lady story; in the latter, he comes into his own with his complex characterizations and perfectly-paced narrative exposition in the first Normandie Drake story. But the separation of these two styles does not allow Caniff to show what he can truly do, given that the daily strips do not give him the space to show how superb an illustrator he really is and the Sunday strips cannot allow him to demonstrate his skill at narrative pacing (the early Sunday-only stories end each episode with a cliffhanger, which makes everything seem to rushed). So by the end of the volume Caniff begins to integrate the Sunday strips with the main daily storyline, and everything harmonizes beautifully: he can retain his complex sense of pace but can show his gorgeous draftsmanship (particularly in his renditions of boats, planes, and architecture) every Sunday.
The other interesting thing about this first volume is to see how quickly Caniff came up with his major characters: the two-fisted and short-tempered lady-killer Pat Ryan, the scrappy and wide-eyed young Terry, and the problematically stereotyped Chinese cook Connie (whose caricatured physiognomy and confusion of "L"s and "R"s have been a sore point even for those of us who appreciate how quickly Caniff fleshed his character into three dimensions, much as Will Eisner did with the Spirit's first sidekick, Ebony). Here too are the great women characters of the strip that have influenced generations of comic writers ever since: the snobbish heiress Normandie Drake, the spirited and morally ambiguous Burma (most fans' favorite among the many women with whom Pat, Terry and Connie cross paths), and the sneering and cold-blooded Dragon Lady (whose name quickly became proverbial in American culture for dangerous powerful women). All three of them, even the Dragon Lady, are shown to be multifaceted and capable characters far more interesting than the Dale Ardens and even the Wilma Deerings of other adventure strips. The background never varies from China and the South Seas, and Caniff draws his atmospheric inspiration from Stevenson, Maugham, and American cinema.
This collection is an absolute must for ANYONE interested in comics or sequential art at all, but let the buyer beware that the format the Library of American Comics and IDW Publishing uses here is not ideal. Though the daily strips are shown at a nice big size, the Sunday strips seem shrunken down, so it's hard to see the detail and beauty of Caniff's Sunday strips.
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