The Library of American Comics and Clover Press are proud to publish Terry and the Pirates: The Master Collection. Reproduced from Milton Caniff’s personal set of color syndicate tabloid proofs that were unavailable for previous books, this series is the ultimate edition of Caniff’s masterpiece. We present the Sundays in an unmatched color fidelity and larger than they have ever before been reprinted – an unparalleled upgrade that no Terry fan can afford to pass up.

The complete strip will be collected in twelve deluxe 11 x 14
hardcover volumes, with a complementary thirteenth volume by Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell that tells the behind-the-scenes story of the strip.

Terry and the Pirates debuted in October 1934. For the next twelve years, Caniff would weave a spell of exotic adventure, sex appeal, and humor. The cartoonist set the strip in exotic China, where historic events occurring in the region during the 1930s provided the raw material from which he blended fantasy and reality to create an extraordinary graphic narrative. The series introduces young Terry Lee, his adult pal Pat Ryan, their sidekick Connie, as well as an array of unforgettable brigands such as Captains Judas and Blaze, and the two toughest women to ever sail on the China Seas: the alluring Burma and the inimitable Dragon Lady.

No cartoonist has so heavily influenced his medium as has Milton Caniff, and no comic strip has had more imitators than Terry and the Pirates. Terry and the Pirates was read by 31 million newspaper subscribers between 1934 and 1946.

Vol. 1 collects all dailies and Sundays from the strip’s beginning on October 22, 1934 through the end of 1935 in a deluxe 192 pp, 11 x 14 , hardcover.

In the first few years of Terry and the Pirates, Milton Caniff invented the visual and textual language that defines the very vocabulary of all adventure and character-based comic art…. It is the greatest adventure comic strip ever done-a genuine masterpiece of its art form.

• Howard V. Chaykin