Product Description

Celebrating the centennial of cartoonist Milton Caniff's birth, IDW Publishing will publish a six-book series, collecting the entirety of Caniff's groundbreaking newspaper adventure strip Terry and the Pirates. The Sunday pages will be reproduced in their original color, alongside the daily black-and-white strips. Volume One contains more than 800 consecutive strips, from the series' beginning in October 1934 through the end of 1936.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #98192 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

From The New Yorker
In this ground-breaking adventure serial, a pair of eager Americans, a boy named Terry Lee and a young fortune hunter named Pat Ryan, land in China to search for an abandoned mine and quickly find themselves facing a succession of gangsters, warlords, pirates, and femmes fatales up and down the coast. Period colonialism and chinoiserie occasionally combine for some awkwardly overheated depictions, but Caniff visualized his setup—Robert Louis Stevenson by way of the pulps—with a cinematic flair that remains thrilling because it is played straight. Ryan, a two-fisted, often shirtless he-man, exhibits an arrestingly sexual chemistry with various bad girls.
Copyright © 2007 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

NY Book Review
In this ground-breaking adventure serial, a pair of eager Americans, a boy named Terry Lee and a young fortune hunter named Pat Ryan, land in China to search for an abandoned mine and quickly find themselves facing a succession of gangsters, warlords, pirates, and femmes fatales up and down the coast. Period colonialism and chinoiserie occasionally combine for some awkwardly overheated depictions, but Caniff visualized his setup—Robert Louis Stevenson by way of the pulps—with a cinematic flair that remains thrilling because it is played straight. Ryan, a two-fisted, often shirtless he-man, exhibits an arrestingly sexual chemistry with various bad girls.
Copyright © 2007 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

"Hotsy Dandy!" (But why such a small format?)
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.

What a Great Find!
What a great find. I bought this for my husband, who has been a fan since early childhood. He's had lots of fun re-reading and enjoying the adventures of his youth. If you love Canff, buy this book...well worth the price. Beautifully packaged and just a great compilation.

Still mesmerizing after 70 years
If you are old enough to have experienced Terry and the Pirates you were still too young to have truly appreciated the art of the graphic novel in serial form as presented by Milton Caniff. That describes me who had Terry read to me by my father every Sunday. Now I can read on my own and now I can appreciate this great tale as presented in this first volume. My only question is how quickly will the later volumes be ready. I can't wait. Incidently if you are too young to have read Terry, try it now. It is a winner. FPB Ann Arbor