Roy Crane’s Captain Easy is another Fantagraphics endeavor in which Sunday strips are published at a suitably larger dimension, 10x15-inch pages. Using color scans of Sunday pages as published in newspapers, these books duplicate with startling effect the riotous hues of the strip’s first appearance. The action is footloose and rollicking, the freewheeling sort that inspired a generation of syndicated cartoonists in the 1930s, and Crane skillfully deployed the resources of the spacious Sunday strip format, varying layouts to give visual emphasis to the action.
Beginning with the first Captain Easy strip, July 30, 1933, the book concludes with the Sunday for December 1, 1935 and includes many engaging lagniappes and revealing sidebars along the way.
Crane’s first foray into the Sunday paper was one-tier gag version of Wash Tubbs (which we saw first in NBM’s 18-volume reprint series that started in 1987 and ended in 1992), but, as Jeet Heer tells us in his Introduction, Crane grew weary of the antics of his pint-sized Harold Lloyd hero and concocted the Sunday Captain Easy, focusing on the footloose soldier of fortune that Wash had met in a comic opera prison on May 6, 1929. By 1933, Crane was committed to telling rip-roaring adventure stories, and the Sunday Captain Easy would be the exclusive province of that sort of enterprise.
Easy inspired a host of imitations in both his appearance and his modus operandi, in effect setting the pace for adventure strip heroes. When Joe Shuster drew Slam Bradley, he was pretty clearly inspired by Easy’s rugged physiognomy; ditto, Shuster’s Clark Kent/Superman, who looks like Slam Bradley/Captain Easy. Before Easy, there weren’t any other strictly speaking “adventure” comic strips; after Easy, there were a lots.
Incidentally, if starved for more about Crane and his successor on Wash Tubbs/Captain Easy, the undeservedly ignored Leslie Turner, you can find more at the Usual Place in Harv’s Hindsight for July 2002 and October 2004, respectively.
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