George Wunder

George Wunder, (1912–1987) was a cartoonist who continued "Terry and the Pirates" after Milton Caniff left it in 1946. As a young man he worked as a humorous cartoonist and assistant to Caniff's studiomate Noel Sickles. A brief biographical blurb published in the 1960's identified him as a big-foot (humorous) cartoonist who had worked in Military Intelligence during World War II.

His work on the strip began in a style which was somewhat similar to Caniff's (and Sickles's). A sidekick, Charles C. "Hotshot Charlie" Charles, was drawn in a more openly humorous manner than before. Throughout the 1950s the Sunday pages were unexpected riots of colors used for purely psychological effect. Two famous Wunder panels from this period (which were reprinted in Couperie, Horn et als. "History of The Comic Strip" (New York, Crown Publishing, 1968)) feature in one a superior officer telling our hero, "Colonel, stay away from Cockatoo," which in the original page looks reasonable until you realize that there are no blues or greens such as you would expect in the shadows. He colored the whole panel with only shades of orange, red and yellow. In the other Terry is on the phone, with his whole front side colored green and his backside a yellow orange.

Wunder did draw highly-detailed pictures, but some critics, notably Maurice Horn, claimed that it was sometimes difficult to tell one character from another and his work lacked Caniff's essential humour.

At the end of the fifties Hotshot Charlie dropped out of the strip and it was drawn and colored in a more sedate manner with careful attention to the airplanes that Terry Lee and his friends flew. Reportedly many of these were drawn by George Evans.