The Phantom: The Complete Newspaper Dailies, Volume One, 1936-37 -- Lee Falk and Ray Moore

The local newspaper when I was growing up didn’t carry the comic strip THE PHANTOM, so I never knew anything about the character when I was a kid. MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN, also created and written by Lee Falk, was in the Sunday paper for a while, but I didn’t know anything about the connection between the two strips and was never a Mandrake fan, anyway.

Over the years, as I learned more about comic strips, I was vaguely aware of THE PHANTOM but still hadn’t read any of the old strips. Then when I was in college, one day I went into Reader’s World, the little bookstore across the street from the campus and picked up an Avon paperback called THE STORY OF THE PHANTOM by Lee Falk, which had a nice cover by George Wilson. I knew by then that Falk created and wrote the comic strip, so it seemed like a good bet to learn more about the character.

I read that novel and loved it and wound up buying and reading all 15 books in the Avon series, which were written by Falk, Ron Goulart (as Frank S. Shawn), Basil Copper, Bruce Cassidy (as Carson Bingham), and Warren Shanahan (that may be a pseudonym, too, but if it is, I’m unaware of the actual author). Evidently, Falk actually wrote the novels attributed to him, which is a little unusual in a situation like that. Falk also wasn’t that pleased with the novels by the other authors, but I read ’em all and thoroughly enjoyed the series. I remember reading several of them while sitting on my parents’ front porch, and that was the right place for them.

So by now I knew the character, knew his back-story and some of his publication history, and as time went on I read some of the Phantom comic books (published by Charlton during that era?) and watched the Phantom movie serial with Tom Tyler playing the character.

In recent years, a publisher called Hermes Press has reprinted those novels originally published by Avon, and not only that, they’ve gone back to the character’s origins and reprinted the comic strip. I recently read the first volume, THE PHANTOM: THE COMPLETE NEWSPAPER DAILIES, VOLUME ONE: 1936-37. The first three storylines from the comic strip are included: “The Singh Brotherhood”, “The Sky Band”, and “The Diamond Hunters”.

“The Singh Brotherhood” takes a few days to introduce readers to The Phantom, but Diana Palmer, who eventually becomes the love of his life, appears right away, in the very first strip. She’s an adventuress and explorer on her way back to New York by ship with a load of valuable ambergris she’s discovered. What’s more, she’s located a veritable mother lode of ambergris on the ocean floor, the legendary graveyard of the whales. (Was Falk influenced by Tarzan movies where the bad guys always wanted to find the elephants’ graveyard? Who knows?) Mobsters target the ship, but The Phantom shows up and foils their plans. Turns out the mobsters were actually working for the evil Prince Achmed, who is part of the Singh Brotherhood, a fraternity of pirates that has raided and pillaged for hundreds of years.

This first long storyline finds The Phantom rescuing Diana numerous times, putting the kibosh on various Singh Brotherhood plans, and along the way telling Diana his origin story. The short version (most of you already know this): pirates marooned one of The Phantom’s ancestors on the island nation of Bengalla. (Wait, is it an island or somewhere on the South Asian mainland? I don’t know, and I’m not sure it matters.) The ancestor put on a mask and a costume and battled pirates as The Phantom and swore an oath that his descendants would do the same. I know there’s a timeline somewhere and The Phantom of the 1930s is the 14^th or 15^th Phantom (or something like that). Because it seems that The Phantom never dies, the natives from the jungles of Bengalla call him The Ghost Who Walks. He has a wolf named Devil as his sidekick.

Anyway, eventually The Phantom invades the secret hideout of the Singh Brotherhood and it winds up blowing up real good. But everything leads neatly into the second storyline, featuring a band of female air pirates called the Sky Band.

This storyline also involves The Phantom locating and infiltrating the hidden headquarters of the enemy. In some ways it’s a redo of the first story as The Phantom is captured and escapes, but it’s complicated by romantic rivalry between the Baroness, the leader of the Sky Band, and the beautiful Sala, her second-in-command, over the affections of The Phantom. Diana winds up playing a part in this, too.

The third storyline, “The Diamond Hunters”, definitely takes place in Africa, adding to the early confusion of where exactly all these fictional kingdoms and tribes are located. Such inconsistencies don’t bother me; I just figure The Phantom fights piracy and crime worldwide (a concept that’s really played up in the Avon novels, as I recall). A couple of prospectors stir up a war between rival tribes so they can grab a valuable diamond field. Eventually, Diana gets involved in this storyline, too, and gets kidnapped again so The Phantom has to rescue her. As the book draws to a close, the on-again, off-again love affair between The Phantom and Diana is off again . . . but we all know it won’t stay that way.

I really had a great time reading these newspaper strips. Lee Falk’s scripts are excellent, terse and well-paced and with moments of both humor and high adventure. The art by Ray Moore is great, with just enough detail and top-notch storytelling. He draws really good-looking women, too. I’ve found that some adventure strips are too repetitive when you read collections of them, but that’s not the case with these early Phantom storylines. They move right along like a well-done movie from that era. This volume is available in an e-book edition that can be read for free if you have Kindle Unlimited; that’s how I read it. Used copies of the hardcover edition are available, but they’re pricey. Later volumes in the series don’t seem to be available as e-books, only as expensive hardbacks. The jury’s still out on whether I’ll pick up any of them, but I sure enjoyed this one and if you don’t mind reading digital comics, I give it a very high recommendation.

From the Files of . . . Mike Hammer - Mickey Spillane and Ed Robbins

As a Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer fan for more than fifty years, I was surprised that I didn’t even know this book existed until recently. Published by Hermes Press in 2013, FROM THE FILES OF . . . MIKE HAMMER reprints the Mike Hammer comic strip that ran for less than two years in 1952 and ’53 and is still available in both print and digital editions.

Editor Max Allan Collins provides the usual fine introduction, covering the background for the strip and information on who did what. The art is by Ed Robbins, an artist I’m not really familiar with, but he does a great job all the way through, with superb storytelling and a version of Hammer that just looks right. Mickey Spillane provided plots and contributed to some of the scripts, and Robbins handled much of the writing as well as the art. Veteran comics scripter Joe Gill worked on the strip early on but didn’t last long.

Although the strips ran in the usual daily and Sunday form, with different storylines in each format, this volume collects them in different sequences. In the first daily continuity, “Half-Blonde”, Mike Hammer, always the champion of the underdog, investigates the murder of a bum. Not surprisingly, the case turns out to have a much larger scope than that. While in the hospital recuperating from injuries suffered during that case, Mike finds himself involved in the mystery of “The Bandaged Lady”. In “The Child”, he’s hired to rescue the kidnapped child of a mob boss.

The title of the next daily continuity, “Another Lonely Night”, harkens back to what many, including myself, consider Spillane’s best novel, ONE LONELY NIGHT. In this one, Mike is targeted for death by mob killers after he witnesses a gangland execution. “Christmas Story” is a minor but predictably heart-warming tale in which Mike, feeling like Scrooge, corrals a shoplifter dressed as Santa Claus. Finally, in “Adam and Kane”, Mike has an actual client for once, an elderly criminal who hires him to locate his long-estranged son.

The title of the first Sunday storyline is “Comes Murder”, which, as Collins explains in his introduction, is designed to fit with the strip’s overall title: “From the Files of Mike Hammer . . . Comes Murder”. It’s likely that Spillane scripted this story himself. It certainly reads like his work. Mike protects a young couple from a vindictive gambling kingpin, but there’s more to it than a bad debt. He gets a hand in this case from a beautiful blond Amazon who may or may not be trustworthy.

Another beautiful blonde figures prominently in the plot of “The Sudden Trap”. Mike is passing through a small town when he spots a Hollywood starlet who’s out of place there . . . especially since she was believed to have been killed in a car wreck two years earlier. Mike’s curiosity won’t allow him to move on until he’s solved the mystery of her true identity.

The third and final Sunday continuity is the aptly named “Dark City”, in which Mike gets mixed up in the dangerous affairs of a beautiful redhead and her shell-shocked Korean War vet brother. Several panels in this story are considerably more suggestive than most comic strips were in those days, and it’s thought that may have contributed to the strip’s cancellation. I’m just glad Spillane and Robbins were able to finish the storyline. It wraps everything up in a downbeat but effective manner.

I really had a fine time reading this book. It brought back a lot of memories of racing through Mike Hammer novels in study hall at school, on my parents’ front porch, and at my sister’s house. The art is good, the scripts are top-notch, and I can’t imagine any Spillane fan not enjoying this collection. FROM THE FILES OF . . . MIKE HAMMER gets a very high recommendation from me.

Classic Western Comics: El Mestizo - Alan Hebden and Carlos Ezquerra

I’m familiar with Alan Hebden’s work from his scripts for the British war comic COMMANDO, but a while back my friend Paul Bishop mentioned this Western comic strip written by Hebden and drawn by Carlos Ezquerra, which ran in the British magazine BATTLE during the summer of 1977. There are only sixteen episodes, each running either three or four pages, but Hebden’s scripts and the great art by Carlos Ezquerra pack a lot of story into that limited space. The whole run was reprinted in 2018 in a handsome hardback collection from Rebellion Books in England.

These are actually Civil War stories, not Westerns, but the two are close cousins and Mestizo certainly has Western elements in his background. He’s a half-black, half-Mexican former slave who escaped from the plantation in Alabama where he lived and went to Mexico to become a bandit and gunfighter. During the Civil War, though, he returns home to try to rescue the girl he loves but instead winds up as a mercenary working for both north and south, taking on whatever dirty jobs need to be done as long as the money’s right. Generals on both Union and Confederate sides come to depend on Mestizo to carry out the missions they give him, which include stopping a crazed southern doctor from unleashing bubonic plague in Washington, D.C., and tracking down renegades on both sides who use the war as a cover for their outlawry.

As you can tell just by looking at that cover, there’s a great deal of Spaghetti Western influence in this comic strip. Actually, EL MESTIZO would have made a great series of movies with, I don’t know, Fred Williamson, maybe, playing the character. Likewise, what a series of novels it would have made for the Piccadilly Cowboys. There’s plenty of gritty violence, and Ezquerra’s artwork makes it even grittier. I enjoyed this collection enough that I’m really sorry the series was so short-lived. If you enjoy this sort of Western, I give EL MESTIZO a high recommendation.

Happy Easter

No pulp cover this morning, but I'll wish you all a Happy Easter with this installment of Stan Lynde's great comic strip RICK O'SHAY, which I read every Sunday morning with my dad when I was a kid. The ones featuring the gunfighter Hipshot Percussion were always my favorites. (Click on the image to read it.)

Forgotten Books: Buz Sawyer, Volume 1: The War in the Pacific - Roy Crane

When I was a kid, one of the comic strips I always read in the “funny paper”, as my dad called it, was BUZ SAWYER, created, written, and drawn by Roy Crane, although as was often the case, Crane had the assistance of other writers and artists in producing the strip. (I didn’t know or care about any of that at the time.)

When I was reading it, BUZ SAWYER was an adventure strip featuring a lot of international intrigue, but when it started in 1943, it was a war yarn, as you might expect. Buz Sawyer is a young Navy pilot who flies a Douglass SBD Dauntless dive bomber off the aircraft carrier Tippecanoe in the South Pacific, along with his rear gunner/radioman Rosco Sweeney. After a few dogfights with Japanese Zeros, Buz and Sweeney are shot down and wind up on a Japanese-occupied island, along with a German planter who owned a plantation there before the war and his beautiful American stepdaughter (the first of many beautiful girls to be featured in this comic strip).

Another stretch of air combat follows, and in one of the dogfights, Rosco Sweeney is wounded and winds up in the hospital at Pearl Harbor. Buz is picked to fly a captured Japanese Kate bomber on a secret mission to deliver an American intelligence officer to a Japanese-held island. Of course, once they get there everything goes wrong and Buz winds up in a lengthy storyline involving a guerrilla band led by a beautiful young woman known as the Cobra. (As a jealous buddy comments, Buz can stumble on a beautiful babe no matter where he is or what he’s doing.)

Following that adventure, Buz is sent stateside for a 30-day leave and returns home to Willow Springs, U.S.A., taking a now recuperated Rosco Sweeney with him. He winds up in a romantic triangle with a local society deb who’s long had her eye on him and figures they’re going to get married, and the tomboyish girl next door who’s grown up into a lovely young woman. Nothing is resolved before Buz’s leave is up and he’s sent to a base in California to train on some new torpedo bombers before returning to combat status. He also runs afoul of a tyrannical new commanding officer, and things are complicated even more by a visit from the society girl who’s still after him.

After that it’s more combat and some harrowing adventures, all the way to the end of the war and the unexpected return of an old friend . . . or is that an old enemy?

This is an excellent collection of a comic strip that’s faded from most people’s memory. Roy Crane has often been compared to Milton Caniff, and there are definite similarities in the use of light and dark, the beautiful women, the exotic locations, the unmistakable air of high adventure. I still prefer Caniff—TERRY AND THE PIRATES will never be topped as an adventure strip—but Crane is very, very good and may be Caniff’s equal in the military stuff. I was a little surprised that the homefront storyline turned out to be my favorite in this volume. Sure, the plotting is a little hokey and predictable, pure soap opera, but Crane makes it work extremely well, thanks to some great dialogue and characterization. Those strips really capture the era and form a wonderful piece of Americana.

There are several more volumes in this series, and I’m thinking I’ll read at least one more of them and maybe the whole run if the quality holds up. If you’re a comic strip fan and have never checked out BUZ SAWYER, or if you read the strip decades ago and remember it fondly, like me, I give this first volume a very high recommendation.

Forgotten Books: The Complete Color Terry and the Pirates, Volume 1 - Milton Caniff

(This post first appeared on May 20, 2007, in slightly different form.) 

This volume collects the first nine months or so of the TERRY AND THE PIRATES comic strip, both the color Sunday pages and the black-and-white dailies, which follow two separate continuities at this point in the strip’s history. The dailies explain, sort of, why Terry Lee and Pat Ryan are in China to start with. Pat’s an adventure writer (although he’s too busy adventuring to ever write about it), and Terry is there to look for a lost mine left to him by his vagabond grandfather. Although Caniff doesn’t specify this, I get a sense that Terry may be an orphan, which is why Pat, a family friend, has taken the youngster under his wing. The search for the mine involves them with the first of the beautiful women who inhabit the strip throughout its run, riverboat captain Dale Scott. Later on our intrepid heroes run into a more well-known Caniff female, heiress Normandie Drake.

Meanwhile, over in the color Sundays, Caniff is in the process of introducing his most famous character of all, the female pirate Lai Choi San, better known as the Dragon Lady. Terry and Pat are captured by the Dragon Lady and taken to her stronghold, where they get mixed up in a mutiny led by the Dragon Lady’s second-in-command, who is also in love with her and jealous of the attention she pays to Pat. If you’re familiar with the Dragon Lady, though, you know she’s not going to let her heart overrule her mercenary nature. She’s always got some sinister scheme going on.

The hardboiled action and sexual tension of these yarns is what really sets them apart from other comic strips of their time and makes them the groundbreaking classics that they are. The art starts off rather crude but rapidly improves, although by the end of this volume it still had not reached the heights of excellence that it would over the next few years. You can already see the cinematic framing, the detail, the use of silent panels and darkness and light that really set Caniff’s work apart, though. This is wonderful stuff if you’re a comic strip fan, and I highly recommend it.

One word of warning: Connie, the Chinese sidekick of Terry and Pat, is about as politically incorrect a character as you’ll ever find, especially in his heavily-accented dialogue. At the same time, he’s right there to save the day on numerous occasions and despite being the comedy relief usually functions more as a third hero than a sidekick, so I’d advise modern readers to look past the surface stereotyping.

Forgotten Books: Rick O'Shay, Hipshot, and Me - Stan Lynde

I've mentioned before that RICK O'SHAY was one of my favorite comic strips when I was a kid. I was referring just to the Sunday episodes, though, which always appeared in full color on the front page of the comics section in our local newspaper. You see, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had two editions, a morning and an evening, and different comics ran in each edition. The Sunday paper ran a mixture of comics from both editions. So I never saw any of the O'Shay dailies until much later in its run, except for those occasional times when I came across an out-of-town newspaper. But I loved the Sunday strips, which were stand-alones instead of being part of the daily continuity. I always read them before I went off to Sunday School, and before I could read, my dad read them to me.

So Stan Lynde's RICK O'SHAY, HIPSHOT, AND ME held quite a bit of nostalgia value for me, in addition to being very entertaining in its own right. After a fairly brief autobiographical essay, the book reprints the first two weeks of the daily strip, to show it all began, and then ten complete storylines ranging from 1959 to 1977, including the last work on RICK O'SHAY that Lynde did.

        

One thing that came as a complete surprise to me because I'd never read the daily strip was that in its early years RICK O'SHAY was set in modern times. The settlement of Conniption was a former ghost town that looked like Western, the citizens rode horses and dressed like the Old West, but there were also TV sets, movies, automobiles, machine guns, etc., sort of like the setting of so many of those Roy Rogers movies I also loved. It wasn't until more than halfway through the strip's nearly 20-year run that Lynde changed the actual setting to the Old West. Also, it was much more of a humor strip early on, before developing into a fairly straightforward Western adventure strip in its later years (although with practically every character name being a pun, there was humor all the way through).

For me, the highlight of this volume is "Trackdown", an epic storyline that ran for six months in 1974 and '75. It's probably the grimmest and grittiest that RICK O'SHAY ever got, with Rick turning in his badge so he can pursue the men who ambushed his friend Hipshot across the border into Mexico. Lynde's ink bill must have gone up during those months, because the strip is darker than ever before, in the literal sense, and in places the use of light and shadow reminds me very much of the great work of Milton Caniff.

Lynde was an early self-publisher. This oversized paperback from 1990 was published by his own company, Cottonwood Graphics, and it's still in print.  I really enjoyed revisiting Conniption and reading some new (to me) adventures of Rick and his sidekick, the gunfighter Hipshot Percussion, who is one of my all-time favorite comic strip characters.

After leaving RICK O'SHAY, Lynde created another Western adventure comic strip, LATIGO, which our newspaper did carry. I read that faithfully all through its relatively short run and enjoyed it. Dean Owen wrote four LATIGO tie-in novels that were published in paperback. I used to have all of them but never got around to reading them. Lynde did some single-panel Western gag strips that were pretty good, self-published a few Western comic books, and eventually turned to writing Western novels, many of which are available on Amazon as e-books. I have a few of them and plan to read them soon. There's a pretty good chance I'll enjoy them . . . even if they're not quite like reading the Sunday "funny paper" with my dad.

New This Week

As I mentioned, last week was unusual. This week I have only three new books to talk about . . . but they look like good ones.

Paul Cain – THE COMPLETE SLAYERS. This is a beautiful limited edition from Centipede Press that reprints Cain's novel FAST ONE (in its original form as published in BLACK MASK) and all of his shorter fiction. It includes a lengthy biographical introduction by editors Lynn F. Myers Jr. and Max Allan Collins that reveals quite a bit of new information about the mysterious Paul Cain, including his real name. The book is signed by Myers, Collins, and artist Ron Lesser, who provided the great cover and several interior illustrations.

Max Allan Collins (again) – DICK TRACY: THE COLLINS CASEFILES, VOLUME 1. This handsome trade paperback reprints the first three storylines by Collins when he took over the writing duties on the Dick Tracy comic strip in 1977. Tracy is a longtime favorite of mine, but I haven't read these stories yet and I'm looking forward to them.

Matthew P. Mayo – WRONG TOWN. This is a new e-book edition of a Western novel originally published a few years ago in England by Robert Hale as part of the Black Horse Western line. My review of it will be coming up in a few days.

Forgotten Books: Steve Canyon 1950 - Milton Caniff

I've mentioned here before how fond I am of Milton Caniff's work on TERRY AND THE PIRATES. I've never liked STEVE CANYON quite as much, but hey, it's still Caniff, and that means it's well worth reading as far as I'm concerned.

So I didn't hesitate when I came across a trade paperback reprinting roughly an entire year of STEVE CANYON strips, dailies and Sundays. The year in question is 1950, and as we pick up the story, Steve, back on active duty in the Air Force after several years of running his air transport service, finds himself in China helping Chinese guerrillas battle against the Communists who have seized power.

There are five storylines in this year's worth of strips, none of which I had ever read before.  Steve and his Gabby Hayes-like sidekick, Happy Easter, help a British missionary and some Chinese orphans escape from the Red Chinese army, then Steve gets separated from his friends and winds up in an espionage plot when an American traitor tries to sell a "mechanical brain" (obviously an early computer) prototype to the Communists. The scene shifts back into the hills for some more adventures with the Chinese guerrillas, but the hero in these is young Reed Kimberly, a friend of Steve's. Finally, Steve travels to Vietnam, or French Indo-China as it's called then, to help track down a gun-runner known as "Monsieur Gros", or Mr. Big.

This is fine stuff, full of plot twists and action and humor, and Caniff's artwork is packed with details the likes of which you won't find in many comic strips today. It certainly doesn't hurt anything that several beautiful femme fatales such as Madame Lynx, Cheetah, and Herself Muldoon show up in these yarns. They don't quite reach the same level of sultry dangerousness that Caniff's previous creation The Dragon Lady did, but who could?

For my money, TERRY AND THE PIRATES is the best adventure comic strip of all time, just as Milton Caniff is the best adventure comic strip creator of all time. But STEVE CANYON is mighty darned good, too. I had a great time reading this collection, which was published by Checker Book Publishing Group in 2005. Checker published several other Steve Canyon collections, and you can bet I'll be tracking them down.

One More Reason I Love the Internet: Stan Lynde Edition

Stan Lynde has a blog.


For those of you not familiar with the name, Stan Lynde was the creator, author, and artist of the long-running Western comic strip RICK O'SHAY. Despite the humorous name, the strip mixed comedy and traditional Western action in a blend that was very appealing to me when I was growing up. His benevolent (but still very deadly) gunfighter character Hipshot Percussion is one of the iconic comic strip characters as far as I'm concerned, and I always loved the Easter Sunday strips in which Hipshot was featured.


After Lynde was forced out of his own strip by the syndicate that owned it, he went on to create another Western adventure strip, LATIGO, which spawned a series of four tie-in novels by Dean Owen. I read and enjoyed LATIGO, even if it never rose to the heights of RICK O'SHAY for me. In the last twenty years Lynde has turned to writing Western novels, in addition to a memoir. I've never gotten around to reading them, but I think I'm going to have to remedy that.

The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy -- Chester Gould

When I was a kid (funny how many of my posts start out that way), one of the features on the front page of the comics section in the Sunday newspaper was DICK TRACY. So I grew up reading this comic strip about the square-jawed police detective. Unfortunately, that was during an era in which the strip’s creator, author, and artist Chester Gould had taken it in some weird directions, getting away from the hardboiled police action and bringing in more and more science-fictional elements, such as hidden civilizations on the Moon. I read DICK TRACY anyway and enjoyed it, although it was never one of my favorites.

THE CELEBRATED CASES OF DICK TRACY, an oversized volume containing more than a dozen storylines ranging from Tracy’s first case in 1931 to episodes from the late Forties, is an excellent introduction to this classic strip, featuring numerous examples of the things that made DICK TRACY a success: hardboiled, even brutal, action with fistfights, elaborate death traps, and shoot-outs in which characters, both good and bad, actually died; grotesque villains with colorful names like Flattop, Mumbles, and the Brow; and at least an attempt to be realistic when it comes to police work, making TRACY an early example of the police procedural.

Chester Gould’s plotting, writing, and willingness to pull no punches in his stories are what made this strip work. The artwork starts off pretty crude, and while it improves some with time, it never comes close to the level of, say, Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, or Hal Foster. But by the Forties it’s good enough not to detract from Gould’s fast-moving storylines. My main complaint about this volume is that it reprints only the daily strips, leaving out the Sunday pages that were part of the continuity. As a result, there are some jarring gaps in the action where the reader has to figure out what happened on Sunday from the context of Monday’s strip. This isn’t a huge problem, but it can be annoying.

Overall, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. I have another Dick Tracy collection, THE THIRTIES: TOMMYGUNS AND HARD TIMES, which reprints practically the entire first two years of the strip, and I’m looking forward to reading it, too.

The Complete Color Terry and the Pirates, Volume 1 -- Milton Caniff

Continuing with my Milton Caniff binge . . . This volume collects the first nine months or so of the TERRY AND THE PIRATES comic strip, both the color Sunday pages and the black-and-white dailies, which follow two separate continuities at this point in the strip’s history. The dailies explain, sort of, why Terry Lee and Pat Ryan are in China to start with. Pat’s an adventure writer (although he’s too busy adventuring to ever write about it), and Terry is there to look for a lost mine left to him by his vagabond grandfather. Although Caniff doesn’t specify this, I get a sense that Terry may be an orphan, which is why Pat, a family friend, has taken the youngster under his wing. The search for the mine involves them with the first of the beautiful women who inhabit the strip throughout its run, riverboat captain Dale Scott. Later on our intrepid heroes run into a more well-known Caniff female, heiress Normandie Drake.

Meanwhile, over in the color Sundays, Caniff is in the process of introducing his most famous character of all, the female pirate Lai Choi San, better known as the Dragon Lady. Terry and Pat are captured by the Dragon Lady and taken to her stronghold, where they get mixed up in a mutiny led by the Dragon Lady’s second-in-command, who is also in love with her and jealous of the attention she pays to Pat. If you’re familiar with the Dragon Lady, though, you know she’s not going to let her heart overrule her mercenary nature. She’s always got some sinister scheme going on.

The hardboiled action and sexual tension of these yarns is what really sets them apart from other comic strips of their time and makes them the groundbreaking classics that they are. The art starts off rather crude but rapidly improves, although by the end of this volume it still had not reached the heights of excellence that it would over the next few years. You can already see the cinematic framing, the detail, the use of silent panels and darkness and light that really set Caniff’s work apart, though. This is wonderful stuff if you’re a comic strip fan, and I highly recommend it.

One word of warning: Connie, the Chinese sidekick of Terry and Pat, is about as politically incorrect a character as you’ll ever find, especially in his heavily-accented dialogue. At the same time, he’s right there to save the day on numerous occasions and despite being the comedy relief usually functions more as a third hero than a sidekick, so I’d advise modern readers to look past the surface stereotyping.

Milton Caniff: Conversations

For the most part this book, published by the University Press of Mississippi, is a collection of interviews with comic strip writer and artist Milton Caniff, creator of TERRY AND THE PIRATES and STEVE CANYON. Making the interviews of added interest is the fact that a couple of them were conducted by Will Eisner and Jules Feiffer, acclaimed cartoonists in their own right. Listening in on the conversations as Eisner and Feiffer sit down and talk shop with Caniff is fascinating for comic strip fans, to say the least. Several articles about Caniff from various magazines are also reprinted, as are reminiscences by a couple of his assistants on STEVE CANYON. (Caniff had no assistants during his run on TERRY AND THE PIRATES, other than a part-time letterer.)

Since most of the interviews cover some of the same ground, there’s a certain amount of repetition of facts, but that’s inevitable. They’re still entertaining and provide a lot of insight into the creation of the two comic strips and Caniff’s working methods. It’s always interesting to me how any series develops over the years, whether in books, comic strips, or some other medium.

For me, though, the highlight of this volume has to be the strips that are reprinted in it, ranging from some of Caniff’s early, pre-Terry work through STEVE CANYON. Included are the famous speech by Colonel Flip Corkin when Terry gets his wings as a military pilot in 1943, maybe the best Sunday page of any comic strip ever; the poignant final Sunday page done by Caniff for TERRY AND THE PIRATES in 1946; the first Sunday page of STEVE CANYON; numerous character sketches from both strips; and several appearances of MALE CALL, the racy gag strip featuring Miss Lace that Caniff did for the armed forces newspapers during World War II. I know I’ve been on a Caniff binge lately (and I warn you, there’s more to come), but he’s that good, and this is an excellent volume for fans of his work.

April Kane and the Dragon Lady

For the past month or so, between other books I’ve been reading MILTON CANIFF: CONVERSATIONS, a collection of interviews with and articles about the iconic comic strip artist who created TERRY AND THE PIRATES and STEVE CANYON. (More on that book when I finish reading it.) I’ve been a Caniff fan since I stumbled across a volume reprinting some of the TERRY AND THE PIRATES strip, back when I was in college.

So I was prompted to take down this book from my shelves and read it, too. It’s a Whitman juvenile novel published in 1942, based on one of the story arcs from the comic strip originally published in 1939. No credit is given to whoever turned the story into a novel, but it almost certainly wasn’t Caniff himself. There are numerous illustrations “adapted” from the strip, so while they’re based on Caniff’s work, they’ve apparently been redrawn and simplified somewhat, lacking a lot of Caniff’s trademark details.

So how does APRIL KANE AND THE DRAGON LADY read as a book? Well, my opinion of it is rather mixed. The characters are great. The teenage trio of clean-cut, all-American Terry Lee, April Kane (a Southern belle in China), and the valiant British youngster Deeth Crispin III make appealing heroes for the kids, Terry’s mentor Pat Ryan is a typical two-fisted, wise-cracking Yank, and the Dragon Lady herself is one of the most complex characters in comics, part heroine, part villainess, and always unpredictable. As you might expect from material originally published so long ago, the treatment by Caniff and the unknown novelist of Chinese and Japanese characters isn’t what you’d call politically correct, but in the end it’s Pat and Terry’s Chinese friends, Connie and Big Stoop, who do a lot of the heavy lifting to save the day.

The storyline itself finds Terry, April, and Deeth caught in the middle of the guerrilla warfare being conducted by the Dragon Lady and her followers against “the Invader”, Caniff’s euphemism for the Japanese. There’s plenty of intrigue in Hong Kong, spies, ambushes, breakneck chases, a hidden city in the Chinese mountains, rival warlords, literal cliffhangers . . . great stuff, in other words. I would have absolutely loved this book when I was twelve years old – which was, of course, the target audience for the Whitman juveniles. Reading it now, I can see that the unnamed author didn’t do a particularly good job in places, especially in the action scenes. Big battles get glossed over in a paragraph or two or occur off-screen. Hand-to-hand fights are awkwardly written and lacking in drama for the most part. But towards the end of the book things begin to come together better and the story really catches fire. The slam-bang climax had me feeling like I was twelve again for a few minutes, and that’s not a bad thing. Unfortunately, the ending is rather abrupt and leaves some elements unresolved.

Overall, if you’re a Caniff fan, APRIL KANE AND THE DRAGON LADY is well worth reading, although the comic strips themselves are much better. I believe the novel was reprinted a few years ago, but copies of the original can be found fairly cheaply on the Internet. By the way, that dust jacket picture is one that I found on-line. My copy doesn’t have a dust jacket.

And as another aside, when I was a kid the lead feature in the comics section of the local paper every Sunday was TERRY AND THE PIRATES, but it was written and drawn at that time by George Wunder, who replaced Caniff on the strip when Caniff left TERRY to create STEVE CANYON. I didn’t care for Wunder’s art and never read the strip back in those days, but since then I’ve read reprints of some of his work, and it’s not bad. I just had to be older to appreciate it. My adventure strips of choice when I was a kid were SMILIN’ JACK and BUZ SAWYER. Wonder how they’d hold up if I read them now.

Peanuts: A Golden Celebration -- Charles M. Schulz

This oversized volume was published a few years ago to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the PEANUTS comic strip, but I'm just now getting around to reading it. I first became a PEANUTS fan by picking up the Crest paperbacks in the Sixties, which led to me buying the other collections that were available then. I couldn't read the current strips in the newspaper, because the Fort Worth Star-Telegram didn't carry PEANUTS. The Fort Worth Press did, and my family didn't subscribe to it. But eventually the Press went out of business and the Star-Telegram picked up PEANUTS, where I read it until the strip ended and where I still read the reprints of old strips every day.

This book reprints hundreds of strips from all five decades of PEANUTS history, interspersed with text by creator Charles M. Schulz about a variety of subjects related to it. Most of them I'd read before, but there were some I hadn't. What struck me was just how dark PEANUTS was, going all the way back to the beginning. Like the protagonists of countless noir novels, Charlie Brown is doomed no matter what he does. But if the comedy in the strip is pretty black on occasion, it's also very, very funny most of the time. It's true that the quality declined in later years, but Schulz was still capable of brilliance every now and then. And in these days when cartoonists seem to burn out in a relatively short time, I'm not sure any comic strip will ever again be as good, for as long, as PEANUTS was. Reading this book brought back a lot of wonderful memories.