Wash Tubbs
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Wash Tubbs was a comic strip created by Roy Crane that ran from April 14, 1924 to 1988.
Initially titled Washington Tubbs II, Wash Tubbs was originally a comedy, or “Bigfoot,” strip focused on the misadventures of the title character, a jazz age bumbler who ran a store. However the strip’s creator, cartoonist Roy Crane, reinvented the strip after its 12th week to make it the first true action/adventure comic strip. On Sundays, Wash Tubbs appeared as a topper, or subsidiary strip, from 1927 to 1933 over J.R. Williams' Out Our Way Sunday strip.
Wash was a girl-crazy zany, and his character never truly changed even as the strip changed around him. After a Polynesian treasure hunt in which Wash made and lost a fortune, a series of adventures followed in which Wash fell afoul of his arch-enemy, Bull Dawson, who was to reappear throughout the series. The short, bespectacled Wash was not a fighter, and Crane tried out a couple of scrappier sidekicks until May 6, 1929, when he introduced Captain Easy, a tough, taciturn Southerner with a mysterious past. Easy gradually took over the strip and became its lead character, getting his own Sunday page, Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune, in 1933. In 1949 Wash Tubbs was officially renamed Captain Easy. Wash continued to appear as a supporting character but became steadily less important during the 1940s.
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 Crane’s assistant, Les Turner, who had worked on Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune since 1937. With Tubbs an increasingly unimportant character, Turner officially renamed the daily and Sunday strips Captain Easy in 1949.
Turner collaborated with a number of artists on the strip, including Walt Scott and Mel Graff. When Turner retired in 1969 control of the strips passed to his assistant, Bill Crooks. After more than 60 years in publication, the series was discontinued in 1988.
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. The entire 1924-1943 run of Crane’s strip was reprinted in Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, an 18-volume series with biographical and historical commentary by Bill Blackbeard. This series was published by NBM Publishing (Nantier, Beall, Minoustchine) on a quarterly schedule from 1987 to 1992.
