Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Part 3

If there’s a drawback to Fantagraphic Books’s remarkable volume one of Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips, containing strips from 1933 through 1935, it would have to be Crane’s attitude toward what his characters invariably deem “savages.”

As with the Tintin books, read today we wince at the many superstitious, easily fooled and easily frightened island and jungle natives depicted in Captain Easy.

What also strikes me as equally as troubling is the wholesale slaughter of animals. Lots of animals. Pigs, cows, small dogs, horses and donkeys, fish, tigers and elephants are speared, shot and mutilated in almost every installment. Particularly pigs, for some reason. I don’t know what Crane had against pigs.

It’s especially problematic, it seems to me, because Crane also populates his strip with an abundance of smiling, cute creatures. More often than not, if we see a cow, donkey or a dog, it’s looking amused by the goings-on or sticking out its tongue in contentment.

But not for long ….

See my earlier, highly laudatory posts on this otherwise valuable book here, here and here. And you can get your hands on a copy by clicking on the cover’s image at the upper left of this post.

Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Part 2

I don’t know for a fact that the great Hugo Pratt ever saw Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs or Captain Easy from the 1930s and early ’40s, let alone do I have any idea what he might have thought of those newspaper strips.

Pratt did greatly admire, and even outright emulate, Milton Caniff’s trend-setting Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon, particularly in the use of chiaroscuro. (The two corresponded with each other, their careers overlapping.)

But looking over Fantagraphic Books’s wonderful new book, Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips, volume one, I have to say Pratt’s mature work for his own adventure strips looks a lot more like Easy and less like Terry.

For one thing, both Crane’s Easy and Pratt’s Corto Maltese were self-proclaimed “soldiers of fortune” — though Easy, a pilot, seemed always to place his hunt for loot ahead of his occasional heart of gold, while with Corto, a sailor, it was the other way around. That could be a sign of their times: Corto, whose tales were written from 1967 and into the late ’80s, was a child of the ’60s, and Easy a product of the Great Depression.

In terms of their art, Crane and Pratt could draw anything, and tapped their own real-life experiences for their exotic locales. But Crane’s characters as well as Pratt’s in his later work (from, say, 1980 on, becoming especially noticeable in The Golden House of Samarkand) had a cartoony style.

That look kept the adventures less grim and more … well, adventurous, as Easy and Corto fought desperate villains and powerful warlords around the world.

Oh, and the women? Always alluring. Real “bons bons,” as Wash Tubbs, Easy’s pal, often remarked. They sulked, they vamped, they carried guns. Even the ones with hearts of stone.

More to come. See my earlier posts on this book here and here.

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 Delayed. Again

Release of Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune has been held back once more.

Though Amazon.com lists a release date of today, the publisher, Fantagraphics Books, e-mailed me that “Amazon takes dates that we project at the first press release we have about an item. They have no way of knowing if an item has been delayed or canceled.”

Fantagraphics now projects a May publication date for the Roy Crane collection. The March 16 date was announced after a January date flew by.

No idea what’s causing the repeated delays. Maybe Fantagraphics will be more forthcoming.

Captain Easy Update

Amazon.com is now showing Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune won’t be released until March 13, not in January as Fantagraphics earlier had stated.

I couldn’t make head nor tails of Fantagraphics’s web site, so I don’t know if there actually has been a delay with the publisher. (Typing “Captain Easy” in the search box got me nowhere.)

More news as it develops ….

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.