By Roy Crane with Leslie Turner (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-677-5
Last Minute Christmas Treat: For anyone who loves the magic of comics…10/10
Just in time to be this year’s ultimate Christmas extravaganza, the fourth and final collection of Roy Crane’s groundbreaking, trailblazing Sunday strip completes a quartet of comics compilations no lover of high adventure, action comedy and visual narrative excellence should be without.
Our industry evolved from the monolithic popular newspaper strips of the first four decades of the 20th century: incredibly powerful circulation-boosting features which could, until relatively recently, dictate success or failure in America’s cutthroat newspaper business.
The daily cartoon stories were immensely addictive for readers and thus regarded as invaluable by publishers who used them as a powerful sales weapon to ensure consumer loyalty, increase sales and maximise profits. Many a pen-pushing scribbler became a millionaire thanks to their ability to draw pictures and spin a yarn…
With hundreds of 24 hour channels of TV, games, apps and streamed entertainment available now, it’s impossible for us to grasp the overwhelming allure of the comic strip in America and the wider world.
From the Great Depression to the end of World War II, with no domestic television, radio coverage far from comprehensive and movie-shows a weekly treat at best for most people, domestic entertainment was generally garnered from the ubiquitous comic sections of newspapers whose Funny Pages became a universally shared, communal recreation for millions of people. Entire families were well-served by an astounding variety of features of spectacular graphic and narrative quality.
From the outset humour was paramount – that’s why they’re called “Comics†– but eventually the anarchic baggy-pants clowning, cruelly raucous, racially stereotyped accent humour and gag-&-stunt cartoons palled, evolving into a thoroughly unique entertainment hybrid that was all about the dynamics of panels and pages.
At the forefront of the transformation was Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs which utilised a blend of silent movie slapstick, outrageous movie serial antics, fabulous fantasy and old fashioned vaudeville shtick, but also added compellingly witty and authentically true dialogue and a breathtaking sense of day-to-day progression – in short, serial continuity.
What separated him from his contemporaries and competitors – who were making similar advancements in the new art form – was that Crane was blending the fun with stirring, contemporary rollercoaster, implausible heroic action …
Washington Tubbs II began as a typical gag-a-day strip on April 21st 1924, bearing marked similarities to confirmed family favourite Harold Teen (by Crane’s friend and contemporary Carl Ed). Young Wash was a short, feisty and ambitious shop clerk permanently on the lookout for fortune and fame, but cursed with an eye to the ladies.
Gradually his peripatetic wanderings moved from embarrassing gaffes towards mock-heroics, into full-blown – but light-hearted – action and even rip-roaring, decidedly dangerous hazardous trials, ordeals and exploits.
This graphic evolution eventually demanded the introduction of a he-man sidekick to handle the fights the kid was getting into but seldom won. Thus enter moody, swashbuckling heroic prototype Captain Easy in the landmark episode for May 6th 1929…
Slap-bang in the middle of a European war, fast-talking, garrulous Tubbs saved a taciturn, down-on-his-luck, enigmatic fellow American from a cell and a perfect partnership was formed. They became inseparable: comrades-in-arms, roving the globe in search of treasure, fighting thugs and rescuing a stunning procession of lovely ladies in assorted modes of distress…
The edgily capable, utterly dependable “Southern Gen’leman†was something previously unseen in the Funnies: a raw, square-jawed hunk played dead straight rather than as the mock-heroic buffoon and music hall foil who cluttered strips like Hairsbreadth Harry or Desperate Desmond.
Moreover Crane’s seductively simple blend of cartoon exuberance combining faux-straight illustration with “bigfoot†cartooning (here carefully mimicked and even surpassed by his assistant and creative successor Leslie Turner) was a far more accessible and powerful medium for fast-paced adventure story-telling than the beautiful but stagy style favoured by artists like Hal Foster on Tarzan or Prince Valiant and Alex Raymond with Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim.
Tubbs & Easy were much closer to the surreal, absurdly action-packed Popeye or V. T. Hamlin’s comedy Caveman Alley Oop: full of vim, vigour and vinegar and never sombre or serious for long…
The overall effect was electrifying – and a host of young cartoonists used the strip as their bellwether: Floyd Gottfredson, Milton Caniff, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner and especially an impressionably admiring Joe Shuster…
After several abortive attempts at a Sunday feature starring his little warrior, Crane eventually settled on the burly sidekick as the potential star and Captain Easy launched on July 30th 1933. The content was unflinching exotic action: blistering two-fisted yarns set before the two buddies’ first meeting.
This fourth and final fabulous volume covers December 22nd 1940 to July 11th 1943, bringing to a close Crane’s association with the strip.
He had abandoned the feature to NEA, joining William Randolph Hearst’s King Features to produce Buz Sawyer – a strip he would own and have creative control over. Turner would now continue both the daily Wash Tubbs and Sunday Captain Easy (with his own assistants) until his retirement in 1969.
This blockbuster collection opens with an Introduction from Michael H. Price tracing potential candidates for the surly Southerner in ‘Roy Crane and the Man Who was Easy’ before the increasingly eccentric and comedic final pages, a goodly proportion of which were produced during the critical period just before America finally entered WWII.
The material is significant for one salient point – Tubbs and especially Easy are scarcely seen after hostilities commenced. The reason was obvious: all true patriots wanted to defend their country and the heroes enlisted…
The hilarious action begins with the reintroduction of comedy foil Lulu Belle: a homely, cigar-chomping hillbilly lady who had been a circus strongwoman and undisputed Female boxing champion for fifteen years.
She had married serial bigamist and all-round bounder C. Hollis Wallis before going home heartbroken to her family, but as they just saw her as meal ticket too she was overjoyed when Tubbs and Easy wandered by the old homestead.
Soon she was accompanying them to Guatemala following an out-of-date advert for workers at a wildcat oil field. Arriving eight years too late the trio are tricked into joining a bandit gang run by the savage and sultry Teresa Grande; a Latin spitfire who’s the most dangerous killer in the country.
She, however, is smitten with Easy’s manly charms, and redeems herself at terrible cost when her gang try to steal sacred relics from a remote village and its ancient temple. Homeless and broke as usual, the plucky Americans then walk to the coast and find passage on a ship run an eccentric who keeps pet tigers. The voyage goes as you’d expect and the trio end up shipwrecked somewhere off Cuba only to be stalked by a wild Wolf Girl: a lost child marooned and grown wild as she matured in the jungle…
After numerous close shaves and hilarious escapades, Easy captures and partially tames the bestial lass, entrusting her to the care of a vacationing American psychologist, whilst Lulu Belle secures a job as cook in a dingy waterfront dive. It’s there that she meets and is romanced by Easy’s brutal arch-enemy Bull Dawson, and inadvertently lures Wash and the Captain aboard the rogue’s ship.
Brokering a tenuous peace, she convinces her friend to work on the “reformed†Dawson’s new job: a jungle reclamation project near the Panama Canal. It’s all a big con, though. The traitorous pirate is actually building a secret landing-field for agents of a certain foreign power and when Wash and Easy uncover the truth the fists and fireworks fly…
Returned to the USA, the heartbroken and lovelorn Lulu is taken in by the ambitious schemes of a millionaire who somehow finds the unprepossessing lady irresistible. Of course Akron O. Spratly also has plans to extract much-needed rubber for the war-effort from frogs…
After much outrageous flummery and hilarious misadventure Lulu is left even sadder, if no wiser, just as the now partially civilised Wolf Girl returns. She has escaped her collegiate captors and is running wild in the big city: her immense physical strength and speed causing much unladylike chaos in Gentlemen’s clubs, the circus, sports fields and the Zoo. She also displays an amazing talent for acquiring pretty sparkly items like watches and jewellery…
A very different type of girl appears next as obnoxious ten-time married billionaire Horatio Boardman swears off women again and hires Easy to make sure the pledge sticks. Unfortunately, local mobsters are determined to introduce the World’s Eighth Richest Man to Baby Doll, a sexily appealing ingénue with the rapacious heart of a viper…
That screwball set-up was good for three months worth of laughs before Lulu again takes centre stage as a boastful beautician is suckered into a bet that he can make any woman so lovely that she will be photographed in the newspapers…
Reduced to simple straight man by Lulu, Easy soon took third place as the boxing lady accidentally acquired a manic and capacious ostrich named Lucille. The big bird’s astounding appetite led to Lulu becoming the indentured slave of a shady farmer who first had her work off the giant’s gannet’s destructive binges and then sold his guilt-wracked toiler on to other men in need of fields ploughed, clothes washed and chores done… until the outraged Easy came back…
Stony broke but free again, Lulu then roped Easy in to a culinary affair as she opened a diner in the worst place possible, just as her ne’er-do-well family palmed off a young cousin onto her. Augustus Mervin Gasby was a locust in human form, and his astonishing appetite seemed fit to bust the desperate pair until the former-soldier-of-fortune found something that the shambling oaf could do really well…
A panoply of ludicrous sporting endeavours eventually lead Gus into the Navy whilst on the Home Front Easy and Lulu went fishing and subsequently exposed a huge dope-smuggling ring in one of the last rousing adventure episodes, after which the tone switched back to screwball comedy with the re-emergence of C. Hollis Wallis who weaselled into town in search of another woman to marry and fleece.
He wasn’t particularly picky and despite Lulu keeping a weather eye – and occasionally a couple of clenched fists – on him he breezed through a few options before settling upon one eminent prospect who lived in a mansion with many oil-wells attached…
He had no idea she was only the cook…
A secondary lot began mid-stream as a Zoot-suit gangster William “Trigger Boy†Scramooch got out of the State Pen and moved into Lulu’s boarding house. Ever prey to poor judgement she took a shine to him whereas for Easy it was disgust at first sight…
Horning in on Wallis’ potential windfall, Trigger Boy planned a kidnap and tricked Lulu into doing his dirty work. Big mistake…
More single page gags followed including a clever patriotic sequence where Lulu buys a big gas-guzzling automobile and leads the nation by her sacrificial example after which Easy makes his last appearance (28th February 1943) serving to reintroduce another old pal.
Magician, ventriloquist and escapologist Lonny “the Great†Plunkett pops up again, pranking the cops and again becoming the target of some crooks in dire need of illicit safecracking expertise. Lulu is a natural partner for the sharp guy and together they scotch the hoods’ plan, after which romance blooms again when 600-pound gorilla Roy Boy decides only she can be his ideal mate. When he’s frustrated in his amorous endeavours he smashes out of his cage and rampages like a hairy tornado through town…
The comic capers conclude on a high humour note with a return to C. Hollis Wallis’ ongoing marital scam, which escalates into brilliant farce before the loathsome little Lothario gets what’s coming to him…
Ending this final titanic (with pages 380mm high x 270mm wide) luxury hardback tome is a full-colour correction from volume 3, another hand-painted colour-guide strip by Crane and ‘Transition’ by Rick Norwood: an illustrated article explaining just where Tubbs and Easy went when the faded from the pages of Turner’s Sunday pages…
Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips is a magnificent undertaking: collecting in a wonderfully accessible form one of the most impressive, funny, exciting and influential comic strips of all time in books that cannot help but inspire awe and affection.
Captain Easy is perhaps the most unsung of all great pulp heroes and his spectacular, rip-snorting, pulse-pounding, exotically racy adventures should be just as familiar to lovers of classic adventure as Tintin, Doc Savage, H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, Carl Bark’s Scrooge McDuck (Tales) or (yes kids) even Indiana Jones.
These astounding masterpieces are quite unforgettable: fanciful, entertaining and utterly irresistible. How can you possibly resist a chance to experience the stories that inspired the giants of action adventure?
Captain Easy strips © 2013 United Feature Syndicate, Inc. This edition © 2013 Fantagraphics Books, all other material © the respective copyright holders. All rights reserved.