The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer

At the time of this book’s publication the wheel will, no doubt, have turned full circle and he’ll be back to Chinese.) (Feiffer, 47-8)

(If you find the image hard to imagine I refer you to his more recent incarnation in magazines like Dell’s Jungle War Stories where it turns out he wasn’t Japanese at all: He was North Vietnamese. He often sported fanged bicuspids and drooled a lot more than seemed necessary. Until the war we always assumed he was Chinese. And this time the oriental villain was Japanese. In response, Caniff began using, “the invader,” instead of, “Japanese” (26).īut as Caniff was depicting the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II revived the oriental villain. New York Daily News‘ Joe Patterson told Caniff not to write about the war in China. (226-7) Caniff’s views annoyed 2 of his publishers who were prominent isolationists. In volume 2, just months after the Rape of Nanking, the Dragon Lady gives a four strip speech exhorting an overthrown warlord’s followers to join her in fighting the Japanese. He wrote sympathetically about people struggling with British and French colonialism as well as the Chinese resisting the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. He had Chinese-American fans and informants. Still, Caniff researched his work meticulously. No other Chinese character looks like him very few say things like, “Little missy get bump on noodle in big boom-bust” as he does in volume 2 (Caniff, 234). In another setting, I might think that Connie was a different species, the only one of his kind.

Terry and Pat’s guide Connie, though, is thoroughly embarrassing racist stereotype, buckteeth, dialect and all. But, as Jules Feiffer notes in The Great Comic Book Heroes: “Who cared about, when there were oriental villains around?” (1965: 16).Įnter the Dragon Lady, stereotypically duplicitous and ruthless but also a pirate captain and, later, a nationalist leader.

Pat is kinda wooden and Terry’s wide-eyed surprise and sweater are creepy sidekick. The books’ ratios recall a time when newspapers’ daily strips were higher quality than comic books. The strip features boy adventurer Terry Lee and manly journalist Pat Ryan journeying through China. IDW’s Library of American Comics is reprinting Milton Caniff’s 1934-1946 Terry and the Pirates with archival material and even a nice ribbon bookmark. Good comics sometimes have racist renderings in them. I’ve learned something reading Terry and the Pirates: There’s no way around the yellow peril in the Golden Age.

The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer