by
jdp
Young Terry Lee, his guardian Pat Ryan, and their servant Connie find adventure in the Orient amongst bandits, rebels and, of course, pirates.
A wonderful new volume from IDW collecting the first two years, dailies and Sundays, of this classic strip by the legendary Milton Caniff. Caniff is known as “the Rembrandt of the comic strip”, and with good reason: his visual style and narrative approach helped to define the adventure strip and his influence on generations of artists continues to shape comic art to this day. Though the strip starts off rough by Caniff’s eventual standards it rapidly improves, and about a year in everything comes together. Caniff’s bold use of light and shadow, his sexually charged female foils, and his surprisingly rich characterization are impressive even today, and it is impossible to overstate how vitally important they were to the development of the medium. Caniff’s pacing of the strip is very well done, reading smoothly in compilation… many strips, because of the recap needed to keep reader attention from day to day, are clunky when read in a block, but Caniff’s stuff works. The one thing many modern readers might balk at is the depiction of the non-whites in the strip, which is pretty off-color and features some bad stereotypes, particularly of Asians. While much of this material may offend the modern reader, those who are able to relegate it to its proper historical context will find this as exciting, provocative and entertaining an example of the classic adventure strip as there is to be found. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the genre.
tags:
adventure
classics
comic_strips
golden_age
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