Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune, Vol. 1: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips, 1933-1935

Captain Easy #1

by Roy Crane, Norwood Rick (Editor)

Roy Crane is one of America s greatest cartoonists and Fantagraphicsis embarking upon an ambitious reprinting of his best work, beginningwith his gorgeous adventure strip Captain Easy.Crane created the first American adventure strip before Hal Foster s Tarzan and Prince Valiant, before Milton Caniff s Terry and thePirates, before Alex Raymond s Flash Gordon and quickly establishedhimself as a master of the comic strip. Begun in 1924 under theeponymous title Wash Tubbs, within four months it moved from a gag-a-day strip about a girl-crazy young grocery store clerk to an adventurestrip when Wash Tubbs embarks on a treasure hunt. Captain Easy wasintroduced in 1929 and began starring in his own Sunday page in 1933, which begins our first volume of Captain Easy.The first of six volumes contains the earliest Sunday pages from 1933to 1935. In his first adventure, Captain Easy visits a lost city, battles pirates, dons a deep-sea diving suit to explore a sunken ruinin search of treasure, and everywhere he goes, he finds beautifulwomen a lost princess, a pirate queen, a savage woman in need of taming. A romantic adventurer from a less politically correct age, Captain Easy is a Soldier of Fortune whose bravery and daring areexceeded only by his Southern gallantry.Crane created the template for the adventure strip, combiningadventure and humor in a Bigfoot cartooning style that perfectlyconveyed the tongue-in-check tone and light-hearted thrills that keptreaders on the edge of their seats. As comics historian Brian Walkerput it, the artist s patented visual storytelling technique blendedhumor, drama, heroics, and pretty girls. Crane s Captain Easyinfluenced virtually every cartoonist who followed him from ChesterGould (Dick Tracy) to Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates) and evenHollywood s adventure movies starring the likes of Cary Grant or ErrolFlynn adopted Crane s tone of two-fisted, good-natured derring-do.Citing Crane s influence on comics, the artist Gil Kane once said, Superman was Captain Easy; Batman was Captain Easy. According tocomic strip historian Richard Marschall, Crane was a master not onlyof storytelling but of the art form, developing expressive techniquesand a whole dictionary of conventions and signs for future comic stripartists. The first volume of Captain Easy also features some of the best andrarest art that Roy Crane created for special occasions, as well asillustrations from the sketchbooks he draw when he traveled to exoticlocales to gather inspiration for Captain Easy s adventures, as well as biographical and critical introductions to Crane and hiswork.

Genres: Comics, Comic Strips, Fiction, Adventure, Graphic Novels, Action

160 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 2009

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't remember why I originally wanted to read this but I'm glad I did. Captain Easy is a soldier of fortune who goes from the frying pan to the fire so often his ass must look like Freddie Krueger's. This is a compilation of around two years of Sunday strips. Captain Easy visits exotic locales trying to make a buck. There are lost cities, plenty of airplanes, and more gun and swordplay than you can shake a stick at. Roy Crane's slick minimalist style is easy on the eyes and his dialog is wittier than I expected for an adventure strip. The stories remind me of Indiana Jones more than anything else. It took me most of the book to figure it out but Roy Crane had to be an influence on John Severin. I see echoes of Crane's style in Severin, even though Severin's style is more detailed.

Four out of five stars. I guess I'm getting the other three volumes now.

[Glen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of Sunday strip from the Captain Easy comic strip in the early 1930's. The art is great, and the stories are fun too. Too bad they never made a serial about him.

[Rick Norwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Captain Easy is one of the top 10 adventure strips of all time. Full disclosure, I edited this large size, full color reprint.

[Margeaux · Rating 5 out of 5]

Roy Crane's "Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy" is a huge influence on my own work, both in artistic style and in the kind of stories I write, and I've read the Sunday strips in this volume before, but in the 1980's NBM reprints, which were not only in black & white but cut and rearranged to fit a format the Sunday strips weren't designed for. Re-reading them in this new editon... large, in color, and displayed as Crane intended... is a revelation! It's like reading a different and much-better strip... and it was already great! Crane is sometimes credited as the father of the adventure strip, which later gave birth to comic books, so without his work I might not be drawing the comics of any sort I do today. And as I prepare to revive one of my own strips that was most-influenced by Crane when I created it nearly 30 years ago, I'm re-inspired by Crane and the wonderful, colorful (in more ways than one) adventures found here. I'm looking forward to re-reading the remaining Sundays in their new editions, too!

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of Roy Crane's full-page Sunday comic strips from 1933-35. I can't say I'd ever heard of it until stumbling across a reference to it in an article on Hal Foster (Prince Valiant, Tarzan). I kept it next to the bed and read a few pages every night for a few weeks. The characters are cliche and corny, very much of the era in which they were created. Interesting to see places like China, India, and the East Indies as topical locales for adventure. Also interesting to see how Crane manages to craft a full-blown continuing story in just a few panels and despite the corniness, the stories are very solid. There are lessons here to be learned by writers of all stripes. The book is a very large format--I felt like I was reading from an oversized restaurant menu. I was sorry to see this end, but Volume 2 comes out in June, 2011.

[Mike Short · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really nice book. The art and story telling is great

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

one of the most beautiful comics ever.

[Ronald · Rating 5 out of 5]

not sure when it was read. but since it came out in 2011...

[Dominick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The opening couple of years of the strip (1933-35) are nicely reproduced here and comprise amusing, beautifully-designed adventure stories about the usual lost cities, pirates, damsels in distress, and so on, in a rather looser and less realistic style than one tends to associate with adventure strips, but it's still fun stuff.

[Aharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Come for the crazy pictures, stay for the crazy 30s jingoism.