The Press: Army's Terry

Milton Caniff is a youngish (34) comic strip artist whose Terry and the Pirates is popular (23,000,000 subscribing readers in some no civilian papers) partly because it is filled with lusciously sculptured ladies who move sensuously against a background of Oriental intrigue. In the early autumn Artist Caniff started drawing in spare time a special, once-a-week, superluscious Terry for Army newspapers. Said Artist Caniff: "I beamed it to the Army, in Army lingo. The boys like it sharp and lusty.""

Unlike the civilian Terry, the Army's version has had no continuity; each week's strip has been built around a separate gag and decorated with damsels as breasty and near nude as Caniff dared draw them. One strip had Caniff's famed, shapely "Burma" entertaining Yanks at a dinner at which food was hauled in by slave girls apparently unclad from the waist up. As bulge-eyed soldiers stared entranced, Burma asked: "Why don't you guys eat? Is something too spicy?" In another, soldiers staged a camp show, used cantaloupe to give feminine allure to their flat chests. In the last panel a tough Yank, spotting well-built Burma, yells: "Hey, you! Hurry it up. I gotta get all them melons back to th' mess hall!"

Soldiers who read the some 600 service papers in which the Army's Terry has appeared lapped it up, and yelled for more. But this week's strip may be the last. Unexpected trouble arose in December. The tabloid Miami Beach (Fla.) Tropics, a small daily civilian paper, was printing an Army sheet called "To Keep 'Em Flying" for the Miami Beach Air Force Schools. Somehow one of Milt Caniff's titillating Army strips got into the Tropics. The Miami Herald, which prints the civilian Terry in that area under an exclusive contract with the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, protested. The Herald had no objection to a Terry run in Army papers; it did object to having a Terry, especially a superspecial eye-filling Terry, as a civilian competitor. Upshot was the News Syndicate, mindful of its contracts, asked Artist Caniff to stop doing special Army strips until the muddle was untangled.