CA P TA I N E ASYWAS H T U B B SA N D

THE BEST + OF +

A N DO T H E R A DV E N T U R E S

the editor and publisher wish to thank the following for their invaluable help:Roy Crane Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries

Bill BlackbeardTerry Nantier

Germund von Wowern

Fantagraphics Books, 7563 Lake City Way NE, Seattle, Washington 98115 | Editor: Rick Norwood. Editorial Liaison: J. Michael Catron. Design: Tony Ong. Art Restoration: Paul Baresh and Preston White. Associate Publisher: Eric Reynolds. Publisher: Gary Groth | Hurricane Isle and Other Adventures: The Best of Captain Easy and Wash Tubbs copyright ©2015 Fantagraphics Books. All Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy strips copyright ©2015 United Feature Syndicate, Inc. “A History of Lickety Whop” ©2015 Ron Goulart. “Introduction” and “Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy Episode Guide” copyright ©2015 Rick Norwood. | Thanks to Terry Nantier for his permission to reprint art from Wash Tubbs & Captain Easy, published by NBM. | Some illustrations and photographs in this book were provided by Germund von Wowern and by the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. All rights reserved. Permission to reproduce material must be obtained from the publisher. | To receive a free color catalog of comics, graphic novels, prose novels, and many classic newspaper strips such as Peanuts, Popeye, Prince Valiant, Dennis the Menace, and Buz Sawyer, call 1-800-657-1100 or visit www.fantagraphics.com. | ISBN: 978-1-60699-809-0 | First Fantagraphics printing: March 2015 | Library

of Congress Control Number: 2014954770 | Printed in China by Forwards Group.

First Washington Tubbs II daily comic strip, 1924.

Next page: Undated early drawing of Wash Tubbs by Roy Crane.

CA P TA I N E ASYWAS H T U B B SA N D

THE BEST + OF +

A N DO T H E R A DV E N T U R E S

Edited by Rick Norwood

A History of Lickety Whop by Ron Goulart ..................................................vIntroduction by Rick Norwood ...................................................................viiHurricane Isle, February 23, 1928–June 6, 1928 ...........................................1Arabia, July 30, 1928–December 12, 1928..................................................33Kandelabra, April 11, 1929–July 6, 1929 ....................................................73Desert Island, February 6, 1930–June 7, 1930 ............................................99The Phantom King, June 9, 1930–October 29, 1930 ................................135Down on the Bayou, March 12, 1931–July 25, 1931 ................................177The Transalpina Express, August 13, 1931–November 21, 1931 ...............217Devil’s Island, June 9, 1932–August 3, 1932 .............................................247Whales, April 24, 1933–August 30, 1933..................................................264Okefenokee, June 13, 1935–July 24, 1935 ................................................302Captain Easy and Wash Tubbs Episode Guide by Rick Norwood ..............317An Afterword in Pictures ...........................................................................318About the Authors .....................................................................................322

CONTENTS

Bull Dawson, circa 1930.

When Roy Crane, age 23, began doing his Wash Tubbs strip in 1924, he had no notion that he was creating one of the major adventure strips of the 20th century. In fact, he once told me he wasn’t exactly certain what he was doing. Washington Tubbs II started as a gag-a-day strip about a short young go-getter who worked in a grocery store. Soon running out of usable gags, the young cartoonist thought he might add continuity. “The problem was what to do … ideas like DeBeck or The Gumps.”

Finally, he decided on converting to humorous adventure. For the next four years, he took his diminutive hero to romantic places around the globe. His drawing improved, as did his staging, and he taught himself to draw pretty women, which remained one of his lifelong talents. Crane was

influenced by the movies and, like the movies, he started adding sound — Pow! Plop! Wham! Lickety Whop!

But Crane was still vaguely dissatisfied. In a late 1928 sequence, Wash and his then-sidekick, Gozy, have to rescue Princess Jada from a desert kid-napping. Aided by a harem servant, they bring it off. Crane’s brother-in-law chided him — “He told me you shouldn’t have a eunuch save them.’’

In the spring of 1929, Crane introduced a tough, two-fisted hero in the person of Captain Easy. “Since this brother-in-law of mine suggested it, I used him as a model,’’ Crane said. In a relatively short time, Easy became the star of the daily and landed a full-page Sunday of his own, which Wash didn’t initially appear in at all.

A HISTORY OF LICKETY WHOPBY RON GOULART

An autobiographical article by Roy Crane from the Youngstown (OH) Telegram, May 10, 1927.

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In the sequences you’ll find in this compilation, you’ll learn about some of Wash’s pre-Easy adventures, learn why Captain Easy is a captain, and watch poor Wash assume his new and perennial role as a second banana.

In the early ’30s, many believed that World War I had made the world safe for democracy. There was, to be sure, the Depression to worry about, but the stage, the movies, and the comic strips often used light-opera set-tings. Crane said he loved the operetta locations he used in his strip. He visited Europe in 1937 and apparently overlooked Hitler and an impending Second World War. By the later 1930s, Easy was an FBI agent hunting down Nazi agents, and Wash was married to the boss’s daughter.

One of the many artists Crane influenced was Floyd Gottfredson, who drew the Mickey Mouse daily newspaper strip for several decades. Gottfred-son said he found the animated Mickey too bland. So he and his writer mod-eled the comic-strip Mickey after the adventurous and small Wash Tubbs. And for many years, Mickey was a sort of Wash with mouse ears.

Of the strips in this collection, Roy Crane did all the writing and draw-ing without benefit of assistants. That would come later.

Undated Roy Crane sketches.

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For 20 years, from 1924 to 1943, Roy Crane wrote and drew the daily Wash Tubbs comic strip. He then left to begin his second classic strip, Buz Sawyer. It was on this newsprint stage that Roy Crane invented adventure comics. When Steven Spielberg directed Raiders of the Lost Ark, he very consciously imitated the mix of excitement and humor pioneered by Roy Crane.

This book collects the very best of those adventures. Most are from the early 1930s. Before 1928, the funny papers featured the same pratfalls and ethnic humor as vaudeville. There were no adventure comics, and comic books hadn’t been invented.

The Wash Tubbs strip, like the later Sunday Captain Easy strip, was not broken down into discrete stories, but was a continuous narrative from be-ginning to end. For this collection, I’ve selected the most entertaining and dramatic adventures from the entire run, starting each where the real adven-ture begins, omitting the humorous interludes, and ending with a satisfying conclusion. Since these sequences weren’t originally named individually, I’ve invented descriptive titles for each, to help you find a particular adventure that you may have heard of or remember. The same is true of the titles in the accompanying episode guide.

With “Hurricane Isle,” the first story in this book, Crane tried some-thing entirely new. In the strips leading up to “Hurricane Isle,” Crane pro-duced a fairly typical comical sequence about con artists and a questionable treasure map. But in the first week we see here, none of the strips has a gag in the last panel. Instead, Crane introduces the first of many innovations — the use of authentic detail to make the story real.

“Hurricane Isle” also introduces the first non-comedic villain in com-ics. Bull Dawson is not like the Mickey Mouse villain Black Pete. Bull is more realistic, tough, and deadly. Comic strip villains had killed before, but always with a certain humorous intent, their victims sprawled on their backs, big feet in the air. Bull Dawson is cut from a different cloth.

“Arabia” is on almost everyone’s list of the best Wash Tubbs daily stories. It shows great use of authentic detail, as in the fact that much of the Arabian Desert is pebbles, not sand, and is a satisfying mix of humor and adventure. “Kandelabra” introduces Captain Easy to the strip, and “Desert Island” fea-tures the return of Bull Dawson.

INTRODUCTIONBY RICK NORWOOD

Undated photo of Roy Crane.

vii

In “The Phantom King,” the humorous buildup is inextricable from the violent conclusion, so you can see for yourself how Crane would transi-tion from gags to mayhem. In “Down on the Bayou,” we have a delightful sense of the setting and discover some of Captain Easy’s backstory.

“The Transalpina Express” is the only purely humorous story I’ve in-cluded. How could I leave out Crane’s delightful drawings of dinky trains? Contrast this Balkan war, played entirely for laughs, with the brutal battles of “The Phantom King.”

“Devil’s Island” is another carefully researched yarn. Wash and Easy wind up in the notorious island prison. In “Whales,” we see a snapshot of the last days of the old whaling ships, set side by side with the factory whalers that were turning the romance of whaling into a bloody business.

We return to the American South in the final tale in this volume, “Oke-fenokee.”

There are later Crane stories I love. “Mahogany” and “Return to Bara-taria” come to mind. But in the later part of Crane’s tenure on the strip, the pressure of producing a strip a day, 365 days a year (with an extra strip on leap years) took its toll, and Crane was forced to turn to assistants to meet the unforgiving deadlines. Crane did not sign the strips drawn by lesser art-ists. A best of Roy Crane collection should naturally focus on Crane.

Here, then, carefully restored for you to enjoy, are 10 of the greatest stories by one of the greatest comics writer/artists of all time.

Roy Crane original art. Thanks to Germund von Wowern.

1934 newspaper cartoon by Roy Crane.

viii

HURRICANE ISLEFEBRUARY 23, 1928–JUNE 6, 1928

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