Terry and the Pirates was an action-adventure
comic strip created by cartoonist Milton Caniff.
Colonel Joseph Patterson, editor for the Chicago
Tribune-New York News Syndicate, had admired
Caniff’s work on the children's adventure strip
Dickie Dare and hired him to create the new
adventure strip, providing Caniff with the title
and locale. The daily strip began October 22,
1934, with the Sunday color pages beginning
December 9, 1934. Initially the storylines of the
daily strips and Sunday pages were different but
on August 26, 1936 they merged into a single
storyline.

The adventure begins with young Terry Lee, "a
wide-awake American boy," arriving in
contemporary China with his friend, two-fisted
‘journalist’ Pat Ryan. Seeking a lost gold mine
they meet George Webster "Connie" Confucius,
interpreter and local guide.

Initially crudely drawn backgrounds and
stereotypical characters surrounded Terry as he
and his growing list of friends adventured through
China, matching wits with pirates and various
other villains, especially famed femme fatale The
Dragon Lady. However due to a successful
collaboration with cartoonist Noel Sickles Caniff
dramatically improved to produce some of the most
memorable strips in the history of the medium.

Caniff became increasingly concerned by the
contemporary Sino-Japanese War, but was prevented
by his newspaper syndicate from identifying the
Japanese directly. Caniff referred to them as
"the invaders," and they soon became an integral
part of the storyline.

After America's entry into World War II, Terry
joined the U.S. Army Air Force, while Pat Ryan
became a naval commando and the Dragon Lady and
her pirates became Chinese guerrillas. The series
then became almost exclusively concerned with the
war. This change of tone is considered the end of
the strip's prime although it remained highly
acclaimed. A notable example is the October 17,
1943 Sunday page where the recently commissioned
Terry receives a speech on his responsibilities as
a fighter pilot from his trainer, Flip Corkin. In
an unusual honor the episode was read aloud in the
U.S. Congress and added to the Congressional
Record.

The intensely patriotic Caniff, who donated design
and illustration work to the military, created a
free variant of Terry and the Pirates for the
military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Originally
starring the beautiful adventuress Burma it was
racier than the regular strip and complaints
caused Caniff to rename it Male Call to avoid
confusion. Male Call was discontinued in 1946.

Although Terry and the Pirates had made Caniff
famous the strip was actually owned by the
newspaper syndicate and, seeking creative control
of his own work, Caniff left the strip in 1946.
Caniff's last Terry strip was published on
December 29, and the following year he began Steve
Canyon, an action-adventure strip that ran until
shortly after his death in 1988.

After Caniff's departure Terry and the Pirates
was assigned to Associated Press artist George
Wunder, who produced it for twenty-seven more
years until its discontinuation in 1973.

In 1995 the strip was one of 20 included in the
Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative
postage stamps.

That same year an attempt was made to revive the
strip using characters updated by Hollywood
producer Michael E. Uslan and illustrated by noted
artists Tim and Greg Hildebrandt. The new version
debuted March 26 but ran for little more than a
year before being discontinued.

In 1953, Canada Dry offered a "premium giveaway"
(freebie) with a case of its ginger ale — one
minibook in a trilogy series of Terry and the
Pirates strips printed by Harvey Comics. Other
incarnations of Caniff's beloved work included a
television series and a radio show.