Another school friend and cartoonist, Bill Dwyer, is in New York as well, and hires Caniff to assist him in the evenings drawing female characters for the strip Dumb Dora. He begins working full-time at the AP, and just six months after he starts, he inherits the illustration and writing chores on Mister Gilfeather, a single-panel strip the concept of which Caniff revised entirely in short order, dropping the title character, and renaming it The Gay Thirties. The strip runs only in New York, but within months, in July 1933, Caniff goes nationwide with a daily stip entitled Dickie Dare.

When Noel Sickles, now also in Gotham, takes over the strip Scorchy Smith upon the death of its artist and writer, John Terry in 1934, he and Caniff set up shop in a Manhattan studio. Little did he know at the time, that the biggest break of the 27-year-old cartoonist’s life was but five months away.

It came in the form of a summons to meet with Captain Joseph Patterson, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News and chief executive of the Tribune – Daily News syndicate, who proposes to him the concept of a daily and Sunday adventure strip set in a series of exotic locales, especially the Orient.

Caniff eagerly accepted the challenge, and Terry and the Pirates debuted on Monday, October 22. The first Sunday strip ran on December 9. As a pet project of Patterson’s, the strip had been pushed with gusto to syndicate-subscribing papers and publicized heavily,