Milton Caniff’s landmark adventure Terry and the Pirates has been among the most reprinted newspaper strips of all time…and deservedly so. The artist’s fame for establishing the tone, cadence, composition and dramaturgy of the mid-century adventure genre in comics is well known. I won’t rehash it here. The latest and most ambitious reprint Terry project concluded this week when Clover Press and the Library of American Comics shipped the final three volumes in the 13 book Terry and the Pirates: The Master Collection. As I said in my initial review of the first volumes, the series is magnificent, if you don’t mind juggling oversized tomes. The sourcing of best available art, coloration and overall reproduction are the best I have seen among the many renderings of Terry over the years. This is LOAC’s second go at the strip. The imprint was launched two decades ago with a 6-volume oblong set. The first 12 volumes of the Master Collection reprint the full run from inception in 1934 through Caniff’s exit in 1946. A thirteenth volume carries new commentary, ancillary art and all of the front matter from the earlier series. Kudos to LOAC and Clover. Unlike many comic strip reprint projects that lumber for years, or peter out in mid-run, this one only took three years to complete. This final tranch of volumes also comes with a packed in bit of extra art (see above. Most of the set is available at Amazon, or directly from Clover.
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Shelf Scan 2024: Necessary Reprints – From Anita Loos to Betty Brown
Moving through this year’s shelf of notable titles for comics aficionados, I wanted to call out several projects that revived forgotten or previously uncollected work. From a pharmacist heroine to an illustrated prayer, the ultimate 20s flapper to a pioneer of cartoon journalism, 2024 surfaced some real gems.
Continue readingShelf Scan 2024: Taschen’s Ultimate Duck
Kicking off this year’s roundup reviews of notable books for comics history buffs, let’s start with the annual Taschen doorstop.
Continue readingRockwell Kent: Accidental Cartoonist

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was not a cartoonist in any typical sense of the genre. He was insanely prolific across all media and seemed oblivious to formal silos that bother art critics and scholars. He worked in book and magazine illustration, painting, greeting cards and postage stamps, bookplates, murals, and, yes, comics (under the playful pseudonym, “William Hogarth, Jr.” for Vanity Fair). He was a working artist who liked to turn a buck, as entrepreneurial as he was genre agnostic. Which is to say that he was an artist in the American grain.
Continue readingA Usable Past for Advertising: Mucha and Art Nouveau’s Great Moment
This is a perfect time for a Mucha revival, I think. Advertising creative is exploring new depths of cultural irrelevance. Marketing seems to have become an unimaginative haven for data scientists and bureaucratic functionaries. And company efforts to align themselves with social progress and “meaningful branding” are now in full, cowardly retreat. And so, reviving both the art and thought of perhaps the greatest advertising illustrator of all time, Alphonse Mucha is not only welcome but necessary.
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