George Wunder Terry Sundays 1947--4

Bor No More!

Here's the conclusion of George Wunder's second Terry and the Pirates continuity. We see the surprising end of evil fat man Theodore Bor. Surprising to me, anyway--I mean, Burma never murdered anybody and got away with it!

20 July 1947

27 July 1947

3 August 1947

10 August 1947

17 August 1947

24 August 1947

31 August 1947

7 September 1947

14 September 1947

George Wunder Terry Sundays 1947--3

Four More from the War on Bor

I'm putting off my glimpse at Alfred Mazure to post a few more George Wunder Terry Sundays. The story continues as fat man--make that vast man--Theodore Bor and sexy viperess Ermine Toy try to take over an oilfield. Terry, Hotshot Charlie, and Pat Ryan don't think so.

22 June 1947

29 June 1947

6 July 1947

13 July 1947

By the way, if you want to see the entire storyline (but not all the art) of this and the previous story, check out The Digital Comics Museum. Charlton Comics (of all people) published three issues of George Wunder's Terry and the Pirates. In typical Charlton fashion they were numbered 26, 27, and 28. Also in typical Charlton fashion, the stories are wretchedly-printed chop-ups of Wunder's first two continuities. However you can get a look at the stuff that happened between the Sundays I'm posting.  This link will take you to the Charlton Terry page.

George Wunder Originals, 1947

Original George
Since I seem to be on a George Wunder kick, I dug out my two and only Terry originals by GW. Both date from 1947. I bought them through an ad in the Menomonee Falls Gazette. They've suffered over the last forty years, having barely escaped a major ceiling-leak that destroyed much of my collection in the mid-1980s. Water chewed the bottom of the first panel of the earlier daily and both took on those brown dots which I believe are called "foxing." They're gems none the less.

Here is the daily for 14 July 1947. It comes near the end of the Theodore Bor continuity from which I've been posting Sunday pages. I've said before that I feel Wunder wasn't a great dialogue writer. In support of this view I offer the amazingly convoluted sentence in panel two.

The other original is the daily for 27 October. This is the beginning of the storyline which introduced Spray O'Hara. Spray chummed around with the boys for some time, then married Hotshot Charlie. Before long both were out of the strip. I remember reading somewhere that Wunder felt the marriage was a mistake because it severely limited Hotshot's usefulness as a sidekick. For several years afterward Wunder tried out replacements.

By examining the originals closely (they're huge--over 20 inches wide) I noted a couple of technical tidbits. I was interested to see that in many panels Wunder seems to have outlined everything first before applying shadow. For example in the second panel of 10/27 you can see Terry's eyes, nose and mouth were inked with a pen. These details were obscured by shadow. Other bits include buttons and folds on Pat's suit jacket and the steps and runner on the stairs in panel 3. This doesn't seem always to have been the case, though. I can't see signs of Chopstick Joe's hat line, ears, or collar under the shadow in panel one. Of course they might have been inked with a brush rather than a pen, in which case they wouldn't show.

The ink is remarkably black and dense. Few brush strokes are visible within the black areas. Either Wunder laid ink on really thick or the ink he used was much denser than modern inks. Maybe both. I also see that in the last panel an excess word ("to" at the end of the second line) was scratched off with a blade, yet the paper's surface is barely damaged. Sure can't do that with present-day Bristol board!

George Wunder Terry Sundays 1947--2

Nine Days' Wunder

I have no idea whether anyone is interested in these things, but as long as I have them I'll post a few more before giving it up as a waste of time. Here are nine more Terry Sundays from George Wunder's first year on the strip. In these 1947 halves Wunder begins his second storyline. The femme fatale from the previous story, Ermine Toy(!), returns in the company of Theodore Bor, an amazing fat man of the sort only Wunder could have designed. Chopstick Joe continues his supporting role and Terry's old pal Pat Ryan makes a final appearance. Again--regrettably--some strips are missing.

[UPDATE: I didn't get my facts straight. This is not Pat Ryan's final appearance. He continues into the next story, the one introducing Spray O'Hara.]

Ermine Toy represents something that irked me about Wunder's early stories. Under Milton Caniff Terry's romances had always been a big part of the strip. Wunder continued that tradition. The difference is that we could understand Terry falling in love with Caniff's women. (With the possible exception of Burma, who was plagued by the temporal paradox of having met Terry when he was a schoolboy.) Instead Wunder hooked the guy up with a string of wackos that leaves us wondering what the hell Terry saw in them. Murderous, bitchy, vain, manipulative...the prize of the lot was Baroness Popoffnikoff, who was so self-centered that she secretly dumped a cargo of desperately-needed relief supplies to make room for her fancy wardrobe. All these women had to do was approach within twenty feet of Terry, and he would instantly jettison all common sense and fall madly in love.

After awhile Wunder switched the romances to secondary characters, like Hotshot Charlie and his future wife, Spray O'Hara. This was a wise move, as it saved Terry from seeming a complete idiot. These other women were however cut from cloth similar to that of Terry's ex-paramours.

Visually Ermine is a knockout. As Wunder's angular style of character design evolved, women's faces suffered the most. Ermine combines Wunder and a bit of Caniff with excellent results. In my opinion Ermine was Wunder's hottest hottie.

I also need to mention Chopstick Joe. Wunder's work always contained a streak of humorous exaggeration, and Chopstick Joe was right up his alley. Though Caniff created Joe, it was Wunder who brought him to life. Design, posing, even his dialogue, make Chopstick Joe one of my favorite Wunder characters.

16 March 1947

23 March 1947

6 April 1947

13 April 1947

27 April 1947

11 May 1947

18 May 1947

25 May 1947

8 Jun 1947

Next time: respite from Wunder puns.

George Wunder Terry Sundays 1947--1

The Wunder of it All
I read that Hermes Press is reprinting the first two years of George Wunder's Terry and the Pirates. It's a welcome project, though a 9x12-inch book isn't likely to full justice to Wunder's artwork, Especially the Sundays. I feel a shiver whenever I read that Sundays will be "thoroughly restored."

In a recent post Ger Apeldoorn offered black-and-white samples of early George Wunder Terrys. As it happens, a couple of the Sundays which open Ger's post are the ones missing from my stack of 1947 tear sheets. Wunder took over Terry and the Pirates on 30 December 1946. As Ger notes, when he started drawing the strip Wunder followed Caniff's lead for a while before developing his personal style. However this was true mostly with character faces: Wunder's highly-detailed, heavily-inked approach to drapery and settings changed the strip's look immediately. Ger's posting prompted me to dig out my box of old Sundays and scan the few examples I have of Wunder's first Terry continuity.

In this story Wunder polishes off two major Caniff characters. Wunder only used six members of Caniff's vast cast. Three enjoyed long runs. Hotshot Charlie continued as Terry's comic sidekick for several more years. Eventually he married Spray O'Hara and left the strip. Chopstick Joe, a shady Chinese entrepreneur, was the boys' sometime employer in the years preceding Terry's return to the Air Force. The unforgettable Dragon Lady continued to pop in and out during the life of the strip, looking different every time. The other three holdovers were Terry's big-brother surrogate Pat Ryan, arch-villain Tony Sandhurst and the voiceless giant Big Stoop. Pat returns briefly in Wunder's second continuity, then fades forever. Sandhurst and Big Stoop make their final appearances in this episode.

As a young fan I used to wonder why Wunder didn't use more of Caniff's famous characters. Over the years I realized Wunder probably knew he'd never satisfy anyone with his take on the likes of Burma, Normandie, Flip Corkin, and the other wartime friends and foes Caniff had made famous. I'll wager he decided to make a clean break and create his own group of players who could rise or fall on their own merits. Except for the Dragon Lady; he'd have been a fool to dump her. At any rate, Wunder's story philosophy was different from Caniff's. Instead of complex, intertwining storylines with characters disappearing and reappearing, Wunder told self-contained stories. He almost never brought a character back.

The following Sundays were published in February and March of 1947. Sorry about the missing dates; check Ger's site to view some of them.

2 Feb 1947

16 Feb 1947

23 Feb 1947

2 Mar 1947

9 Mar 1947

Ray Bailey assists Caniff

Bailey Rocks!
Anyone who's followed this blog knows I admire the work of Ray Bailey, a Caniff-school artist who worked both in comic books and newspaper strips.

Bailey started developing his personal style on a contemporary Western strip, Vesta West, in 1942. In 1945 he launched an aviation-themed adventure strip, Bruce Gentry. In 1951 he drew Tom Corbett, Space Cadet for a couple of years. After that he went into comic books. He did some of his best work for Dell, including TV tie-in's, movie adaptations, and several issues of Steve Canyon. After Dell spun off from Western Printing to become a separate company, Bailey continued with Western's  Gold Key line doing stories in weird titles like Boris Karloff. His last comic work seems to have been for Tower (Undersea Agent) circa 1967.

Biographies always say Bailey assisted Milton Caniff on Terry and the Pirates. I've wondered just what he did and when. Bailey's personal style looked so much like Caniff's that spotting his assistant work is a tough job. But while leafing through a pile of 1945 Terry Sundays, I found what I believe are Bailey backgrounds.

It's all in the Rocks. Nobody inked rocks exactly like Bailey, and he put them in every strip he drew. Bailey rocks were based on Caniff's rocks from his Sickles stage, the mid- to late-1930s. But Caniff rocks were Caniff rocks and Bailey rocks were Bailey's.

This rockin'-out Sunday is dated 3 June 1945.

Caniff at Work Video

The Man at Work
I strongly recommend you visit Mike Lynch's always-worthwhile blog for the link to an intriguing video from the early 1950s showing Milton Caniff in his studio. The material was retrieved by one Jeff Quitney from the Prelinger Archives, a treasure trove of rare films.

Obviously this is raw footage for a short subject about Caniff. It's no documentary. Caniff's 1940s Terry work is mushed together with then-current Steve Canyon drawings. The story is told in the cornball style of humor segments from old newsreels. Caniff calls upon his acting chops for hammy scenes at the drawing board and a truly weird sequence in which he imagines he sees the real-life Flip Corkin reflected in a table top. Most of the drawing Caniff does is inking pinups of  Steve Canyon babes (though at one point he's shown adding extra strokes to an already-finished daily). One corny but amusing bit has Caniff measuring a woman's décolleté with a ruler marked to show acceptable amounts of plunge.

At one point the camera pans Caniff's reference sketches of Chinese subjects. Stylistically they look like they came from the Terry years. They're far and away the best art in the film.

If you're a Caniff fan, don't miss this fascinating video.

George Wunder, Artist

In Glorious WunderColor!

All my comics-reading life I've had a love-hate relationship with George Wunder. His was a nearly impossible assignment: to take over an iconic American comic strip from its superstar creator almost at the apex of its popularity, and make it his own. There were many reasons why Wunder's Terry never reached the heights of Caniff's. Some of them, like the fading interest in heroic adventure strips ,weren't Wunder's fault. Others, like his clunky stories and increasingly-idiosyncratic way of drawing people, were. Taken together, I still feel GW has gotten a raw deal from comics historians. He put a lot of skill and effort into Terry. Especially during its first decade, Wunder's Terry was a visual feast of elaborate chiaroscuro inking and ambitiously-detailed backgrounds. And there was something else, the subject of this post: beautiful Sunday page coloring.


When George Wunder took over Terry, the palette available to Sunday page colorists was still broad. Wunder made the most of it. He had a knack for making unusual color choices--greens, purples, pale yellows--which when laid over his film-noir artwork created stunning pages unlike anyone else's. The three samples I show here date from mid-1949.
Interestingly, Wunder's color schemes would have looked garish printed on quality paper. The softening and yellowing effect of newsprint contributed mightily to the beauty of the pages.

Years ago I read somewhere that Wunder's wife had colored his Sundays. This is quite possible, of course. I just haven't seen any other reference to her contribution. I did see a couple of illustrations Wunder did after retiring from Terry. I think they were for a book about military uniforms. He drew them comics-style in ink, then colored them with watercolosr. The color schemes were identical to those of the Terry Sundays. And being painted on bright white board they looked really garish. Which reminds me of something that happened to me because of my love of WunderColor--a story I'll tell some other time.

Grab Bag of Strips

Stuff I Used to Have
If there's one thing I love more than artwork, it's being able to pay the bills. Somehow the second love has always managed to overcome the first. So it is that today I have very few pieces of original art left. I suppose it's just as well. I never had the space properly to display them, so most of the pieces resided in file drawers. I'm sure all of them are in better homes, unless dealers have got their hands on some of them. I feel like taking it easy today, so instead of writing something important, I'll share scans of some nice originals I was fortunate to own for a while.

First is one of Neal Adams' legendary Ben Casey dailies. I still marvel at the delicacy of Adams' pen line. I grew up drawing twice up and never really adapted to smaller original sizes. The control Adams had while drawing at this tiny size amazes me. So does the lame dialogue in the first two panels.
Another master of stroke control--brush strokes, this time--was Alden McWilliams. He must have assisted, ghosted or drawn a hundred different strips, not to mention his comic book work. He must have been a prodigious worker! He also was damned good. I think only his rather mundane leading men held him back. It certainly wasn't his luscious women. Here's a fantastic example from Twin Earths.
His great inking licks have won Enrique Romero a big following. It hasn't hurt that he draws lotsa naked women with big breasts. While I admire Romero's craftsmanship, to me his characters have always had a generic look. Despite the admitted merits of his Modesty Blaise (which was far superior to his Axa), Romero never shook that Spanish-romance-artist look. This was a great example of his artwork, but note how much the fugitive in the last panel resembles Willie Garvin. By the way, I love the way time turned the pasteover balloons transparent and revealed the art underneath.
As long as we're on the subject of Modesty Blaise, here's another artist who worked (briefly) on that strip. I bought this John Burns Seekers daily thousands of years ago from the editors of the late lamented Menomonee Falls Gazette. While I like Burns' work, I was struck by how little work (especially backgrounds) he put into this.
No lack of work in this strip. It's a fine example of Caniff's wartime Terry and the Pirates. Terry isn't in this, but Raven Sherman and Captain Blaze are. The inking is top-drawer throughout, as is the composition. That first panel is a beaut. Can't believe how much dialogue Caniff could cram into a panel without it seeming crowded.
Just for fun here's an enlargement of panel 3.
We can't discuss Caniff without discussing Caniffists. Or is it Caniff-Sicklesists? Give a nod to the excellent Mel Graff. I found this Patsy daily in Italy in the mid-1980s. It was the only one I had ever seen. Since then I've seen the original immediately following this one and I gotta say, it makes this one look like chopped liver!
Winding up this trip down memory lane is another Caniffist, one who's taken a lot of flak. Someday I'll go into detail about my schizophrenic relationship with George Wunder. For now suffice it to say his very early stuff was much, much better than his later work. But he never was completely without merit. This daily was from 1946 and showed off Wunder's best aspects.
It also shows some of his worst aspects, like Hotshot's arm (which seems to have three segments rather than two) and his dreadful dialogue. But what the heck. Let's end with a closeup of the typically statuesque babe in the first panel.
To these beloved originals, wherever they may be today...live long and may you never moulder!