George Wunder - Terry and The Pirates

In 1946, when Milton Caniff left Terry and the Pirates, there were about 100 artists who applied for the job, according to Caniff. Wunder submitted samples, and the Tribune-News Syndicate chose Wunder as Caniff's replacement (with former Caniff assistant Lee Elias a close runner-up). Wunder's first Terry and the Pirates appeared in newspapers on December 30, 1946, launching the story "Trouble in Tibet". Comics historian Don Markstein noted the transition:

Terry was left in the hands of George Wunder, a skilled cartoonist who maintained a high level of quality. But Caniff was a unique talent, and nobody could ever truly replace him. Terry Lee had joined the U.S. Air Force during World War II. Wunder left him there, and let him mature fully as an Air Force officer. During the Vietnam Era, military-oriented entertainment declined in popularity. The strip was discontinued in 1973. By that time, Wunder, too, had stopped doing it — although it still bore his byline, it was ghosted by Al Plastino, better known for his work on Superman. (Plastino was also handling the pantomime strip Ferd'nand, and later became Ernie Bushmiller's assistant on Nancy.)

Initially, Wunder drew the strip so it was similar to that of Caniff and Sickles, but he soon developed his own distinctive style. Hotshot Charlie, for example, was drawn in a more openly humorous manner than before. In 1953, Canada Dry offered a "premium giveaway" with a case of its ginger ale — one minibook in a trilogy series of Terry and the Pirates strips by Wunder, printed by Harvey Comics. Throughout the 1950s, the Sunday pages used color for psychological effect. One Wunder panel from that period has no blue or green shadows as one might expect; the panel was colored only with orange, red and yellow. In another, Terry is colored green in front, and his back is a yellow-orange. Wunder drew dramatic and highly detailed pictures, but comics historian Maurice Horn claimed it was difficult to tell one character from another and wrote that Wunder's stories lacked Caniff's essential humor. At the end of the 1950s, Hotshot Charlie was dropped from the strip, which was drawn and colored in a more sedate manner with careful attention to the airplanes flown by Terry Lee and his friends.

Writer-artist Bill Pearson noted that Wunder spent "decades producing a very solid adventure strip. He drew ugly people, even young women, which was certainly a curious trait, but he was one of the very best inkers in the business. His technique was flawless." With his clean and precise inking style, Wunder filled his panels with numerous foreground and background details, as landscape painter Bob Foster observed:

I read Wunder's Terry when I was a kid and even then was impressed by all the work he put into it. Every single panel was fully loaded with detailed backgrounds and detailed wrinkles, costumes and hairs, even on all the characters in the background, all the woodgrain in all the wood, and all those black shadows that lent an air of foreboding to each panel. I could never get over his 3/4 rear view of a character's eyeball straining to see something behind him. And all those overly bridged noses on both guys and gals all crying out for rhinoplasty. For many years I resented the overloaded panels and decided I didn't like Wunder's rendering of Terry and the Pirates. It was only in the last few years that I came to appreciate Wunder's work on Terry. One day I realized that he never cheated. He gave us everything in infinite detail in every panel and never deprived us of any wrinkles, bricks, tiles, leaves, woodgrain, fingernails, hairs, cloth patterns or buttons. Yeah, the look-alike facial features of all his characters in the later years of Terry was stylistic and bothersome, but he never cheated.