Roy Crane - Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy

Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy

In 1924, Crane approached Charles N. Landon, an editor at the Newspaper Enterprise Association. Landon and Crane discussed a strip titled Washington Tubbs II about a diminutive goof employed at a grocery store. With the title shortened to Wash Tubbs, the strip debuted April 21, 1924. After four months, Crane tired of the gag-a-day format and sent his pint-size hero hunting for a treasure buried somewhere on a South Pacific island. The strip then evolved into a rollicking adventure yarn, with Crane introducing innovations in storytelling, sound effects and layouts, as noted by pop culture historian Tim DeForest:

Though played mostly for laughs, the storyline contained a notable element of danger as well... Crane was developing strength as an artist that added to his already strong figure work. He had an eye for detail, paying close attention to background and to the overall layout of each panel. He was an innovator in the use of lettering, using bold type and exclamation points to enhance the emotions already expressed by his character design... It was Crane who pioneered the use of onomatopoeic sound effects in comics, adding "bam," "pow" and "wham" to what had previously been an almost entirely visual vocabulary. Crane had fun with this, tossing in an occasional "ker-splash" or "lickety-wop" along with what would become the more standard effects. Words as well as images became vehicles for carrying along his increasingly fast-paced storylines. Following Wash's initial adventure, the strip reverted to a dependence on gags for a time. But Wash had acquired a taste for travel and adventure.

With the introduction in 1929 of the raffish soldier of fortune, Captain Easy, Crane heightened the spirit of adventure and later created a Sunday strip focusing on Captain Easy. NBM's Flying Buttress Classics Library reprinted the complete run of Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy in a series of 18 volumes. Bill Blackbeard's introductions to these books contain biographical and critical material.