Terry and the Pirates, Irresponsible Publishing, and Racism

I cannot tell you how mad I am about the new “Terry and the Pirates Master Collection.” The comic itself is collected beautifully, and I’d love to talk about it in more detail, but a series of poor decisions that were either thoughtless, racist, or both means that I’m discussing those instead of the paper quality or the colors on the Sunday strips.

Let me be clear from the jump: this was an irresponsible, racist reprint effort. Editorial completely failed to consider the effects of real people, and by writing on the subject of ‘how to correctly read Terry’ kept digging themselves in to a hole throughout the process in ways that were solvable without altering the content of the reprints.

I knew this could be a problem after my interview last year with editor Bruce Canwell, well before I got the books. You can check out the interview here, but here’s a quick refresher on how that went.

I thought we could start by acknowledging that the Chinese caricatures, stereotypes and slurs present in Terry and the Pirates were racist, then go on to talk about the responsibility publishers have in reprinting racist material for a modern audience. I wanted to facilitate a conversation about why he thought reprinting Terry was worthwhile, discuss content warnings, and why the series remained unaltered for historical purposes. This seemed like a good way to talk about the reality of a world that recognizes the humanity of people other than white men, and how that must be considered in publishing.

This went off the rails almost immediately when Canwell would not say that the material in Terry was racist, followed by a weird defense of Milton Caniff as a person rather than a discussion of the material. Throughout the interview, he used language that echoed one for one how Comicsgate people present their talking points. Canwell assured me that an extensive essay that he had written was presented in the book itself, and that it would address many of my questions in more detail.

I figured that once I got the book, I’d read the essay (which is in the back of Volume 13, which can only be ordered directly from the publisher as part of a bundle or subscription, marked as an ‘Addendum’ rather than front and center), review the book here, and inform potential readers of how the racist material in Terry and the Pirates was discussed by the publisher so that they could make a more informed decision regarding whether they’d want to buy it for themselves. Instead, I read the essay, swore for awhile, shared it with some other people to make sure that I wasn’t misunderstanding it, swore some more, and decided to write this instead.

Now let me be very clear on this point. I’m not here to argue that Terry and the Pirates is a bad comic. It’s a very good comic, and often exceptional. But it is unquestionably a racist one. Accordingly, I want to talk about how the presentation of the comic failed to do justice to the people reading it today, and specifically how the publisher screwed this up in both forms of addressing this issue.

Why I used the word Comicsgate

I used the word “Comicsgate” a few times in the original interview and this article, even though Canwell never actually used the word himself, and I think it’s worth explaining why. Have you ever heard the expression “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it’s probably a duck?”

This is a helpful expression in discussing Comicsgate. It’s not a group in the sense that it hands out membership cards, it’s an umbrella term encompassing a few core beliefs. These beliefs are bad for comics and bad for people as a whole, whether you’re associated with the group or not. 

Here’s a critical piece in what I’m about to discuss. Since Comicsgate isn’t a monolith, it’s impossible to win an argument because you’re arguing against an amorphous group of people who pass the buck the second it looks like they’re losing. Because of this, I decided to focus on the broad ideas presented in the text, not the details – my issue is the ideological points, not the specific word choices. No matter how bad it is to hear “Caniff ignored blacks” and “so-called ‘Jim Crow’ laws” or a very long tangent about why it was okay to call Chinese people slurs when other ethnic groups were called slurs of their own at the time.

Here are a few of those beliefs, and why I took issue with the way Canwell spoke in the interview and the essay.

Comics shouldn’t be political – Superman was an anti-war, pro-federal government benefit program, worker’s safety character from the beginning, Stan Lee was pro-Civil Rights and specifically indicated this in his comics. Even without the historical basis of his editorials, writing is politics. What is good, what is evil, who needs to be stopped and why. What an injustice actually is.

Much of my discussion with Canwell regarding Connie and the way Chinese people are depicted in the comic has a common theme – Milton Caniff wasn’t interested in social change. This does, of course, ignore his efforts to more authentically depict China and Chinese people. And Caniff’s veiled commentary (which would have been more open if editorial had allowed it) opposing the Japanese invasion of China in the Second Sino-Japanese War. And his patriotic acts involving creating special Terry and the Pirates strips for the US Military, and when legal complications arose, a completely separate strip, Male Call.

You just don’t get it – This point is remarkably frustrating because it is designed to make you feel crazy. That’s what much of Canwell’s essay feels like. Since it occurs at the very end of the last volume of the collection (more on that later), it doesn’t address how the reader has just (theoretically) taken in a huge amount of racist material, and it isn’t framed in terms of discussing the people who are affected by these issues today. The essay suggests that readers who were upset – not hurt, not harmed, not pushed away, offended or angry, but upset – were simply ill-informed. 

A great deal of the essay is based on statistics without context, or comparisons that outright make no sense. For example, Canwell mentions the census that listed very few Chinese people in the US at the time the comic was written; he had also mentioned this in our interview. It fails to address the idea of paper sons, the Chinese Exclusion Act(s), passing, people who dodged the census so they weren’t deported or to simply to avoid becoming a target of white people by way of mass murder. Presented without the context, the census population at the time is meaningless. However, it’s difficult to argue against what people consider hard data (“Numbers don’t lie” is one of the biggest lies ever told) despite the evidence that contextualizes that data.

And sometimes “you just don’t get it” becomes a tangent where, if you choose to argue against it, you end up so far away from the main point you’re trying to discredit that you’re just spinning your wheels. I have no idea why Canwell compared Caniff’s China to Star Trek, even after he explained it. When I tried writing about it, I realized I’d fallen into the same trap and deleted the section – which is all you can really do in a situation like this.

Comics should just tell stories – As the second half of “comics shouldn’t be political,” they say that “comics should just tell stories,” arguing that a story should just be some good old-fashioned fun. 

This argument is probably the most tiresome, because it’s not true and shifts the goalposts incessantly. Pogo specifically went after McCarthy as part of its story, and when Walt Kelly was told that he’d better not have the character show his face in the strip again, he put a bag on the character’s head and just kept the story going. Captain America punched Hitler in the face on the first cover of his comic. One of most beloved Iron Man stories, David Micheline and Bob Layton’s Demon in a Bottle is about alcoholism ruining someone’s life, a point that Kurt Busiek and George Perez revisited during their time on the Avengers decades later. Jim Lee, poster child for poster art in the 1990s, was part of maintaining the X-Men as a loudly and vehemently anti-racist comic. And by his very existence, Miles Morales is a defiant, purposeful statement, even within the context of the greater narrative of Ultimate Spider-Man – and one of the greatest examples of creating a story that meant something real to people by moving on from old habits. Stan Lee said it himself, “Anyone can wear the mask.”

In Comicsgate arguments, while the story being about Good vs. Evil is generally considered fair game, listing the specifics of Evil and bringing attention to the real world and its problems is not.

This often crosses over into trolling behavior, which usually comes out as  “People just can’t take a joke anymore” or “people are just too sensitive nowadays.” You usually hear this after someone says something that would get them punched out in a bar.

I’m getting a little off topic here. Canwell was a very kind, generous, thoughtful person over the course of the interview. His answers were earnest, and I wouldn’t accuse him of trolling for a second. However, his writing did cross into Comicsgate talking points. I don’t care whether or not he’d consider himself part of that group (to my knowledge he’s not on an form of social media.) I am addressing the beliefs that he is expressing in this essay. They’re symptomatic of an exclusionary, thoughtless system that hurts real people, and one which we should not tolerate. And if this is new information to you, to him, whomever, or it feels like a personal attack when that’s not who you think you are – then I suggest you ask yourself why you feel like that, and think about how to be the kind of person that you think you are and want to be.

Terry and the Pirates is racist. It’s still a good comic, but it’s not like there’s a blip or a single slur, or that it’s just a little uncomfortable to read. No one would be able to say in good faith “They only call the Black guy a [slur], [other slur], or [way more offensive slur] sometimes, and they mostly phased it out later. And by then his fried chicken and watermelon habit was so tightly associated with his character that it was impossible to change.” But that’s exactly what Canwell tries to do — just discussing a Chinese character rather than a Black one.

Content warnings

Content warnings are not specifically a thing meant to help people manage PTSD, sexual assault trauma, or panic attacks. They’re meant to help facilitate informed decisions on the part of the reader. For example, I don’t watch TV shows or movies where animal cruelty is shown on screen. I’m capable of watching fictional material with gore in it, but not a lot and not every day, so a warning that it’s going to take place in whatever I’m watching lets me brace myself or choose not to engage in it at all. There are other, personal issues that I appreciate similar warnings for. Sometimes it’s a friend, sometimes it’s the ratings box, sometimes it’s word of mouth – but I am actually able to engage with more media by understanding and preparing myself mentally to deal with something that, in the real world, is difficult for me.

Warning people about racism, misogyny, homophobia, bisexual erasure, transphobia, suicide and self-harm, child abuse, spousal abuse, alcoholism, drug addition, eating disorders, gore, and a whole host of other material serves the same purpose – it allows people to make informed decisions so they can mitigate the harm that they could experience by wittingly or unwittingly subjecting themselves to those images or texts.

I’m using the word harm rather than offense on purpose. Because yes, material in Terry and the Pirates is offensive to me, but I’m not hurt by it – I’ll never have a racial slur thrown my way. But it is harmful to real, living people who are affected by racism in their day-to-day life. This is bad for comics in three ways. First, it turns people off from comics. Just like when women face nothing but balloon-boob characters wearing thong-kinis to fights, there is a sense of “if this is what it’s like, why should I even be here?” This is bad for publishers in an obvious, practical, financial way. And third, on the most base level, it’s bad because it disregards the humanity of the people who read it.

Historical context is important, sure, but that’s quite literally academic. This is about someone who just wants to read a comic they heard was incredible, just like they might hear about Calvin and Hobbes.

When I started working on this article, I didn’t actually realize there was a content warning on this book. It’s buried as 1/8^th of the page in the legal/copyright section, and is printed directly next to two blank pages that were used for fill-in space. It reads as follows:

Publisher’s note: These comic strips were created in an earlier time and include offensive language and racial stereotypes. We present these archival comics with the understanding that they reflect a bygone era, and refer readers to the addendum “Terry in Context: Viewing the 20th Century Through 21st Century Eyes” in Volume 13 of this series.

Terry and the Pirates Master Collection Volume 1

The writing here is weak and unclear. Racist towards who? What stereotypes? Nothing in this paragraph conveys why someone would need to consider whether or not they want to read it, or prepare themselves for what’s in the book.

I’m not the person you want writing the content warning about racist material; for Terry and the Pirates I’d ask that job be given to a Chinese person living in the U.S., the comic’s country of origin. But I can tell you what is not in this: a clear acknowledgment of the existence of racial slurs, visual caricatures, racist stereotypes, and the fact that it was harmful at the time Terry was originally being written and harmful today. And, most critically, there is no acknowledgment of it being wrong, because Milton Caniff was wrong to include racist material.

I don’t know why anyone would be interested in arguing on behalf of a guy who died the year I was born, because Caniff has nothing new to add to the conversation and doesn’t need defending as a person, because he is dead. But Canwell worked hard to defend Caniff as a person in our interview and his essay, which is so far removed from the point as to be completely irrelevant. What actually needs to be discussed is how to handle what is in front of the reader, on the page, in this exact moment today.

A question

Earlier, I discussed the idea of transposing material from Terry and the Pirates to Black people, and how indefensible that would be. I certainly don’t see anyone complaining that Ebony White wasn’t true to the original Will Eisner comics when Darwyn Cooke relaunched The Spirit. But that’s not where people seem to go when it comes to the same racist material in Terry. And the question, boiled down to its simplest form, is… why?

Why is racism against Asian people not considered as obvious and worthy of the same intensity in discussing it?

It’s possible you read that and thought “That is a shockingly white question.” This is a good point and I agree completely. It is being asked by a 33 year old white dude who was never subjected to anything like this in my life. It’s why I don’t have an answer. I have misinformed conjecture, I have guesses, but I don’t have the personal experience or academic knowledge to answer it. My ill-informed thoughts about racism aren’t going to provide the kind of clarity people are looking for.

What I do know is that when we talk about great American crimes, Japanese internment camps are rarely discussed. Bruce Canwell’s essay goes into great detail about the relationship between China and Japan in the lead-up to World War II – yet stops literally one thought shy of even mentioning those internment camps. This is shameful, because there is no one on this earth who deserves to have their humanity ignored, mocked, or stripped away, and admitting this is a moral necessity. Every way that Canwell handled this topic bothers me.

And it bothers me that I didn’t think of this earlier. It bothers me that I can’t more accurately articulate the problem, because even the question is off-base somehow. And it bothers me that this hasn’t been part of the conversation since the beginning, and without the same intensity.

If only a comics historian, informed by social sciences and the ability to perform academic research, had decided to center that question and provide an answer in the works he’d published. That might have provided some much needed insight. Even better, solicit the opinion of a Chinese American scholar on the topic. Center the voice of someone affected instead of the musings of yet another old white guy.

What do I actually want?

After serious consideration, I have some thoughts as to what could make both the Master Collection and other publications better moving forward. 

1 – A straightforward content warning inside the book, online solicits, and back of the cover (the comics are usually sealed in cellophane, so a warning that’s only visible after purchasing the book isn’t helpful) It should be clear and visible for people for the sake of transparency. And it should not be written by a white person. This type of content warning should be in every book, not just the Library of American Comics’ publications, as a blanket policy. I may love Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse, but the story An Education for Thursday should not be handwaved as ‘uncomfortable reading’, which is the language Terry has excused with by the publisher.

2 – A foreword in each volume that discusses why keeping something as originally presented, despite its racist nature, is important for the sake of historical preservation. For me personally, knowing that the material is racist, but without malicious and hateful racism, is something that would help me feel comfortable reading Milton Caniff’s work.

3 – For the essay at the back of Volume 13 to be at the beginning of the first book, and for it to be focused on how to be a responsible reader when looking at material with a bunch of slurs, caricatures and racist attitudes in a fictional work. Additionally, I want it to discuss the historical effects the comic had on the American perception of Chinese people, with the context of Americans’ perceptions of Chinese people at that time. Not as a defense, but to provide insight and information that a casual reader or someone not versed in this type of history wouldn’t have.

What’s next?

I was, and still am, angry about every step of this process. I don’t think anyone got what they were looking for out of it. Near as I can tell, Bruce Canwell wants more people to read something he loves, and to enjoy themselves in the process. Not only that, the essay he wrote seems to be intended to help make that happen.

I want more people to read Terry and the Pirates, but also to know that there are things in it that make it difficult or potentially untenable to read. The idea of comics being a more open and inclusive place is critical to me. Absolutely none of that was accomplished in either our interview or his essay.

I did my level best to open things towards that inclusivity, without the intent to remove the comic from circulation or deride its historical or artistic value. I gave a benefit of the doubt which does not appear warranted, and made me look like I was platforming racism – and that Bruce Canwell, and by extension Clover Press and the Library of American Comics, endorse racist material. I’ve given my thoughts on how they can be better. They’re the ones with the resources, contacts, experience, and to that can take any suggestion I have, talk to the experts, talk to the people who are affected by this, and listen to them. They are the ones who can make it clear what they stand for and what they believe.

Consider that, because there’s a point that I don’t want anyone to miss: this is an opportunity to be leaders in how readers are treated by comic book publishers. They could be an example, particularly due to the sensitive nature that is part and parcel of reprinting older and historically significant material, of how to respect their readers. They could be a standard-bearer for modeling behaviors and the moral fortitude that improve the discourse of comics, a company that brings in new readers, rather than one that pushes people away by brushing them aside.

I can’t think of a reason in the world why you would do anything less.