Terry and the Pirates

I've recently been reading the new Terry and the Pirates collection by Milton Caniff, which came out from IDW about a month ago. I have to say, I've been enjoying the Hell out of it, which is pretty hard to do. At first I was hesitant, because although I've read the first year or so of the strip and enjoyed it, I really didn't think it started getting really good until around 1940.

I'm happy to report that, pretty much right from the start, it's spectacular. I'm about a year or two into it, but I skipped over all of the Sundays that weren't running the same storyline as the dailies. Thankfully, they printed these consecutively in the beginning, so they were easy to skip right over, and will be easy to go back and read later. The storyline with the two main characters stranded on an island was one of the best 1930's storylines I've read in a long time. The art reminded me of Krigstein and Johnny Craig, both of whom I believe were big fans of Caniff.

One thing I noticed is how often the leading men of vintage strips were asked to go undercover to expose some form of criminal activity. The catch is, they're always impersonating some crazy criminal who happens to look exactly like them.

In this collection, Pat Ryan tries to break a ruthless gang of crooks, one of whom he looked exactly like. I'm just at that particular part in the book right now, so I don't know how it will end. Smilin' Jack looked just like a certain criminal too, and tried to spoil the Head's plans by going undercover. I think Dick Tracy might have done something similar, though Gould seemed a little too classy to rely on such a hackneyed concept.

Li'l Abner had his own criminal lookalike, too, as did Mammy and Pappy Yokum. Come to think of it, just about everyone in Dogpatch had a twin of some sort or the other. There must have been something in the water back then.