Captain Easy

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Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune was an action/adventure comic strip created by Roy Crane that started Sunday, June 11, 1933 and was discontinued in 1988.

Originally Captain Easy was a supporting character in the series Wash Tubbs, which focused on the adventures of the zany Washington Tubbs II. On May 6, 1929 Crane introduced taciturn toughguy Captain Easy, who soon took over the strip. In 1933 Crane created Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune as a Sunday page starring Easy.

Captain Easy was a chivalrous Southern adventurer in the classic adventure-hero mold. After a series of globe-trotting adventures Easy enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II, afterwards becoming a private detective.

The Sunday adventures were initially unconnected to those of the Wash Tubbs strip and dealt with Easy's adventures prior to meeting Tubbs. They are considered a tour-de-force by Crane, who crafted layouts intended to be seen as a coherent whole rather than a disparate collection of panels. Unfortunately in 1937 the Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicate, which employed Crane and owned the strip, introduced the modern policy which requires Sunday pages to be designed as panels that can be rearranged for different formats. Crane then turned the Sunday pages over to Les Turner, his assistant, to concentrate on the daily strip.

The Tubbs and Easy characters were owned by the Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicate and creator Roy Crane abandoned the strips in 1943 to begin Buz Sawyer, a strip he would own outright.

After Crane’s departure control of the strips passed to Turner, who turned the Sunday pages over to his assistant, Walt Scott. Easy was by that time in the U.S. Army and with Tubbs an increasingly unimportant character Turner officially renamed the daily and Sunday strips Captain Easy in 1949.

Scott drew Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune through the 1940s and 1950s. Mel Graff began ‘ghosting’ it in 1960. When Turner retired in 1969 control of the strips passed to his assistant, Bill Crooks, and Jim Lawrence. Mick Casale came aboard in 1982, and lasted until the series was discontinued in 1988.

Wash Tubbs also appeared as a topper, or subsidiary strip, from 1927 to 1933 over J.R. Williams's Sunday comic Out Our Way.

Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy were also featured in Big Little Books during the 1930s, and in a short run of Dell comic books during the 1940s.

[edit] References

• Strickler, Dave. Syndicated Comic Strips and Artists, 1924-1995: The Complete Index. Cambria, CA: Comics Access, 1995. ISBN 0-9700077-0-1.