num_pages: 160
description: 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.
language: English
title: Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune, Vol. 1: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips, 1933-1935
publisher: Fantagraphics Books