Captain Easy Series by Roy Crane

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... moreRoy 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. less

This second of four volumes reprints in full color the rare Captain Easy Sundaypages from the 1930s. Roy Crane's Soldier of Fortune, Captain Easy, fights forgold in the frozen north, is mistaken for a bandit, protects a formula for artificial diamonds, is stranded on a desert island, visits the tiny Balkan country ofKleptomania, and faces a firing squad. Captain Easy hobnobs with millionairesand bums and beautiful girls (of course), and winds up in the middle of a fullscale war... moreThis second of four volumes reprints in full color the rare Captain Easy Sundaypages from the 1930s. Roy Crane's Soldier of Fortune, Captain Easy, fights forgold in the frozen north, is mistaken for a bandit, protects a formula for artificial diamonds, is stranded on a desert island, visits the tiny Balkan country ofKleptomania, and faces a firing squad. Captain Easy hobnobs with millionairesand bums and beautiful girls (of course), and winds up in the middle of a fullscale war. In short, it's another rousing series of adventure and humor encapsulatingthe gallantry, derring-do, and rough-and-tumble innocence of a bygoneera and a bygone genre, written and drawn with panache, and practically paintedin a vibrant spectrum of colors that you have to see to believe.Long before the first superhero, Roy Crane's courageous, indomitable, andcliff-ganging rough guy served as the template for characters that later definedcomic books, and set the aesthetic standards for the newspaper strip. Crane'smastery is why Peanuts creator Charles Schulz said of him (circa 1989): "Atreasure. There is still no one around who draws any better." less

The third volume in Fantagraphics ongoing reprint of Roy Crane 's legendary comedy-action series features what many consider the absolute peak of the series: Temple of the Swinks, in which Wash and Easy discover an ancient temple with statues of an unknown animal called a swink.. moreThe third volume in Fantagraphics ongoing reprint of Roy Crane 's legendary comedy-action series features what many consider the absolute peak of the series: Temple of the Swinks, in which Wash and Easy discover an ancient temple with statues of an unknown animal called a swink... a real-life specimen of which shows upIn other stories, Wash and Easy sail for Singapore aboard a dhow with a cargo of wild animals, crash land a plane on an island inhabited by (inevitably) pirates and (just as inevitably) beautiful women, and sail the South Seas in a schooner whose villainous captain plans to rob them. When they return to America, Wash Tubbs pet swink draws huge crowds and a reputation for being worth a million dollars. Then Wash and Easy travel to Peru to rescue an American lost in the jungle and, in the cover-featured story, Easy goes deep sea diving in search of a beautiful girl 's lost diamond. less

In the fourth volume of Fantagraphics' Captain Easy series, our eponymous hero and his loyal sidekick Wash Tubbs answer a newspaper ad that they don't know is years out of date, and wind up stranded in Guatemala with a busted landing gear and only five dollars to their name. Whoops! They need all their wits and ingenuity to get them out of this fix. Which they manage to do by the skin of their teeth, only to stumble onto a lost city in the jungle... moreIn the fourth volume of Fantagraphics' Captain Easy series, our eponymous hero and his loyal sidekick Wash Tubbs answer a newspaper ad that they don't know is years out of date, and wind up stranded in Guatemala with a busted landing gear and only five dollars to their name. Whoops! They need all their wits and ingenuity to get them out of this fix. Which they manage to do by the skin of their teeth, only to stumble onto a lost city in the jungle. Lost cities in the jungle are never good news, and so it is with our two boisterous heroes. Against all odds, they extricate themselves from this dastardly peril and head for home on a ship carrying tigers (Roy Crane loved to draw tigers). They're out of danger, right? Wrong! What kind of a Captain Easy adventure would this be without our boys getting stranded on a desert island and encountering the beautiful but savage Wolf Girl (Crane loved to draw Wolf Girls!)? Don't miss the last volume of Fantagraphics' glorious reprint of Roy Crane's full color Captain Easy Sunday pages. less