The Complete Terry and the Pirates (2007)

Milton Caniff's run, 1934 to 1946, in IDW's six-volume Complete Terry and the Pirates A boy and his two-fisted mentor Pat Ryan go hunting a lost gold mine in China, and the Dragon Lady's pirates are waiting. This is the adventure strip as smoky, grown-up melodrama, full of double-crosses, dangerous women and some of the moodiest inking ever printed in a newspaper. Caniff's drawing leaps forward within the first couple of years, so push past the stiff opening months. IDW's set prints the Sunday pages in color alongside the dailies. Two warnings: the early strips lean on crude stereotypes, including Connie's pidgin English, and once America enters the war the strip becomes almost entirely a World War II story.