Review: Terry and the Pirates: Enter the Dragon Lady

Terry and the Pirates: Enter the Dragon Lady by Milton Caniff
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Terry and the Pirates is a one of those phenomena that time forgot. For a while not so long before and during World War II, it was one of the leading comics of its moment, up there with Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie as one of those cultural touchstones that every kid would have known and every adult would have recognized. Terry told the adventures of its title character and some of the adults he met in his travels in China and the Far East. And, more famous than even the strip’s heroes, was its seductive villainess, the Dragon Lady.

There’s an adventurousness to all this, and it’s only fair to note that Caniff could really draw. It’s amazing to think he wrote and drew a daily strip and then, at least for part of that time, added a full-blown Sunday as well.

But, but, but, the racism and sexism are simply shocking. I read this because I have a student doing some very interesting work on the image of China in the West – shout out to Alexis – so I finished something that often felt flat-out insulting. I mean, can you imagine someone referring to a woman as a “slant-eyed broad”? Or, can you imagine a servile sidekick, Connie, who happily accepts being kicked around and mocked, even by Terry and their hero-pal Pat? And “very” spelled as “velly”? Ugh.

It’s easy to forget now, but both Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie were conservative political imaginings. I did a part of my dissertation on the anti-immigrant implications of Dick Tracy’s capacity for recognizing villains as ethnically other. And there isn’t much more to say about Little Orphan Annie than that her adoptive father is Daddy Warbucks, a reimagining of the war profiteer as secretly generous…despite what those commies might think.

The crucial difference here, though, is that while those strips dealt with difference within America – as they performed what my old advisor Carl Smith called the “cultural work” of naming the differences among our different American constituencies – Terry and the Pirates dealt with a purely imagined “Orient.” Its hero is allowed to be tougher than everyone else. He can be referred to as “the handsome one.” He can be sold into slavery as a mercenary, but he commands a dramatically high price because of his capacity to outfight everyone else.

And, of course, the Dragon Lady is imagined as a woman of staggering beauty who cannot be satisfied by any but a white Western man.

As such, Terry ultimately had less to say about “us,” about America as it was, than it did about an American vision of China and the East that never could be. It’s a fantasy, one firmly rooted in jingoism and, yes, sexism. Dick Tracy may have been square-jawed and all-too-certain in that police-state way, but he dealt with the reality of crime. Terry and the Dragon Lady celebrated a sense of privilege and Western supremacy that, especially in retrospect, seems full of an anxiety it never finds the courage to confront.

The whole premise is ugly and, outside its intriguing art work and historical role, there isn’t much reason to remember it.

Still, Alexis is working to show that the trope of the Dragon Lady – of the Chinese woman who uses her beauty and wiles to entrap Westerners – is an enduring one. There may have been hints of it before Terry, but she made it full blown. And it persists today. I’m thinking in particular of the disappointing news that the generally culturally sensitive J.K. Rowling has announced that Voldemort’s snake, Nagini, was originally an Asian witch who transformed.

I satisfied some curiosity in reading this one. I’m happy to move on and leave it to Alexis.


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