Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips 1933-1935 (Vol. 1)  (Roy Crane's Captain Easy)
Debuting in 1924, Wash Tubbs was arguably the first adventure strip to hit the newspaper pages, several years before more renowned features like Tarzan and Buck Rogers. But it didn’t really take off until the diminutive titular hero got a macho sidekick, the soldier-of-fortune Captain Easy. The handsome Easy, with his rugged charm and southern drawl, proved so popular that in 1933 he was spun off into his own Sunday-only feature, in which he traveled the globe seeking adventure and romance. Freed from the tiny confines of the black-and-white daily strip, Crane brilliantly exploited the vastly larger canvas of the full newspaper page, wildly varying the sizes, shapes, and arrangement of the panels. His distinctive drawing style, an appealing blend of simplified realism and broad cartooniness, also set Easy apart. While not quite as large as the original newspaper broadsheets, this volume’s oversize pages fully convey the strip’s formidable visual impact. --Gordon Flagg