The Origins of Milton Caniff and Terry and the Pirates
In October of 1941, the public mourned the loss of a young woman named Raven Sherman. Raven was a wealthy socialite who had given up high society to make a difference in the world. She worked in China providing medicine and shelter to those displaced by the Japanese invasion. Tragically, in an attempt to stop a group of hijackers from stealing medical supplies, she was shoved out of a speeding truck in the isolated mountains of China and suffered severe head trauma and massive internal injuries.
Fourteen hundred letters of sympathy along with numerous funeral wreaths were sent as the public attempted to make sense of the life lost and come to terms with the death of such a kind woman. On the day she was buried, four hundred and fifty students of Loyola University in Chicago paid tribute to her by gathering on their campus and facing east for one minute of silence.
These displays of grief are made all the more astounding by the fact that Raven Sherman never existed outside of the newspapers. She was, in fact, a comic strip character from the daily adventure strip, Terry and the Pirates, created by cartoonist Milton Caniff. It’s a true testament to Caniff’s skill as a storyteller. He never short changed his readers. He made stories that you could believe in, he made his characters real.
Milton Caniff was born in Hillsboro, Ohio in 1907 with newspapers in his blood. His father printed the local newspaper and was named after his father’s boss, Milton Wedding. In 1919, Milton and his family moved to Dayton, Ohio due to his father’s deteriorating health. It was here that Milton’s career in newspapers would begin, working part-time as an office boy in the art department of the Dayton Herald-Journal.
It was also in Dayton that young Caniff would meet the love of his life, Esther Parsons. He and “Bunny,” as he affectionately referred to her, would marry shortly after college and remain together until Milton’s death more than 50 years later.
In the fall of 1926, Caniff moved to Columbus to attend The Ohio State University where he would later donate his work, starting what would become the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. While attending OSU, he majored in Fine Arts, served as an art director for a campus humor magazine called The Sun Dial, and began acting in campus theatrical productions. His love for theater was so great, in fact, that Caniff almost gave up on his artistic dreams to become an actor. Fortunately, his artistic mentor at the time, Billy Ireland of the Columbus Dispatch, bluntly told young Caniff to “Stick to your inkpots, kid. Actors don’t eat regularly!”
Shortly after graduation, Caniff accepted a staff artist position at the Dispatch, but it was not to last. As the Depression hit Ohio hard, the Dispatch found itself forced to make cutbacks and Caniff soon found himself jobless. Quickly, Caniff scrambled to setup a commercial art studio with his friend and fellow artist from the Dispatch, Noel Sickles.
Their business was short lived when, three months in, Caniff was offered a job with the Associated Press and, through the urging of Sickles, took the job in New York. In addition to doing news art, portraits, and illustrations for feature stories for the Associated Press, Caniff produced the single-panel comics Puffy the Pig and Mister Gilfeather, which would eventually transform into The Gay Thirties.
By the summer of 1933, Caniff was assigned a new daily comic strip by the name of Dickie Dare. An action-packed strip that followed young daydreamer, Dickie, and adult adventurer “Dynamite” Dan Flynn on their journeys around the globe on a tramp steamship. It was around this time that the Associated Press began recruiting artistic talent and Caniff recommended his friend, Noel Sickles.
Soon the two found themselves sharing studio space again, with Sickles taking over the aviation comic Scorchy Smith when its original artist fell ill. During this period, Sickles began to experiment with tools and techniques, always with an eye on speeding up the relentless grind that came with drawing a daily strip. Through these experiments, Sickles pioneered the chiaroscuro approach which defined an image using only blacks and lights. Caniff took note of the techniques effectiveness and would soon find himself adopting it for his next strip.
Caniff’s work on Dickie Dare eventually led to Captain Joseph Patterson, of the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, approaching Caniff about creating a new adventure comic similar to Dickie Dare. Upon their first meeting, Patterson mused to Caniff that the Orient was a location that adventure could still happen. With that, the stage was set for Caniff to begin work on what would become one of his most beloved comic strips, Terry and the Pirates.
Caniff would work on Terry and the Pirates from 1934 to 1946. The strip would be read by 31 million newspaper subscribers and, for many, be their first glimpse of China and Eastern cultures. During WWII, Chinese officials would publicly thank Caniff for keeping the menace of Japan and China’s brave fight against it in the spotlight. Among other things, a speech from one strip would end up being inserted into the congressional record and the name of his most famous villain, Dragon Lady, would become a part of the public lexicon for a femme fatal with a dangerous blend of beauty and brains. Needless to say, the strip was a huge success, garnering Caniff the first Cartoonist of the Year Award from the National Cartoonists Society and along the way creating stories and characters that would captivate the general public for generations to come.
References:
- Caniff : a visual biography, edited by Dean Mullaney
- Milton Caniff, Rembrandt of the comic strip by John Paul Adams, Rick Marschall, T. Nantier
- Meanwhile … : a biography of Milton Caniff, creator of Terry and the pirates and Steve Canyon by Robert C. Harvey
- The complete Terry and the pirates, 1934-1936 by Milton Caniff
- Attachment and grief: the case of the death of Raven Sherman by Francisco Saez de Adana
- The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum