And here’s why

© Michael Chevy Castranova 2016

 When I started “Slipped” in 2008, I was still living in southwest Michigan, land of snow due to its proximity to Lake Michigan. I created the strip simply because I wanted to — using as inspiration the newspaper comic strips I enjoyed reading: the adventures strips of the 1930s and ’40s such as “Terry and the Pirates,” “Scorchy Smith,” “Wash Tubbs” and “Little Orphan Annie.” Ongoing tales in which one adventure dovetailed into the next that focused on a few main characters, and with other foes and allies coming and going and then reappearing possibly years later.

And I did it online because it was free.

I’ve moved a few times since then, but I’ve managed to keep the strip alive. I’m not claiming “Slipped” is great art — nowhere near the skill of Caniff or Sickles or Crane —  but for me it’s still fun.

At first I plotted out the stories some chapters in advance. But I learned the Scarlet Sparrow has her own ideas of what should happen next. So I don’t try to get too far ahead in the narrative. (To be accurate, Tyler Wilson is the daughter of the original Scarlet Sparrow, but she has taken his mask and gloves, so she, too, gets to carry that name, I guess.)

She’s also not terribly fond of other female characters hogging the spotlight for any excessive amount of time — that might be why Cartier Tour appears to exiting the main action. We’ll see if she stays gone for long. We — Tyler and me — might have need of her again.

So thank you for reading.

And please, take a look at the latest chapter. The Scarlet Sparrow is about to return to center stage …

Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Part 1

Roy Crane invented the adventure comic strip with Wash Tubbs. With Wash’s buddy, Captain Easy, he perfected it.

Volume one of Fantagraphic Books’s new collection, Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips, covers 1933-1935, and, wow, is Easy busy.

In the April 8, 1934, strip for example — the image area in the colorful Fantagraphics book is nine and a half by 12 and three-quarters inches, to replicate the original Sunday page — our hero hurls his out-of-ammo machine gun at a boat of blood-thirsty pirates, knocking them all overboard; sword fights with another boat full of angry pirates; falls into the sea; swims under a third boat and tips it over; then scrambles back on shore to do battle with yet another pirate, who’s captured the winsome Rose Petal — all in one day’s installment.

“Ha-ya,” Easy yells as he does battle. “Look! Look! Take that, you buzzards!”

Make no mistake. This is great stuff. (Volume two is expected in November.)

More to come.

Captain Easy Returns

It seemed inevitable someone would get around to republishing Roy Crane’s Captain Easy strips from the 1930s, and Fantagraphics will begin doing so, over six volumes, come January.

In its winter catalog, Fantagraphics calls Captain Easy “arguably the comics page’s first and all-time greatest adventure strip.” We can debate the “greatest” part, but as for the “first,” Easy himself debuted in 1929 as a sidekick in the already popular Wash Tubbs. G. Washington Tubbs II, who started out in 1924, has a much better claim to being the “first.”

The five-foot-something Tubbs, drawn in a whimsical cartoon-like style, traveled the world, getting caught up with everything from European revolutions and Mexican bandits to medicine shows (“Yo ho! Yo ho! Gather ’round and see the marvelous feats of magic …!”) and murderous villains (“Whack! Bam!”). It was while he was in the kingdom of Kandelabra that Tubbs rescued Easy from imprisonment in its dungeons by handing him a crowbar.

“American, aren’t you?” Tubbs asks.

“Well, yes and no,” Easy replies, with a Southern-gentleman’s drawl. “Started out that way. Hang my hat on any old flagpole now. Like a flea, I reckon ….”

Easy, with his mysterious past, most likely was the “first” solider-of-fortune in what was to become a long line of foot-loose adventurers. But, as Ron Goulart points out in his The Adventurous Decade, Easy’s name at first was something else. As Crane told Goulart, the cartoonist had another moniker in mind, but then he forgot it when it came time to name his character. It wasn’t until later he recalled he wanted to call him Early. Maybe.