A-Whale Huntin' We Will Go!

Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy was the first adventure-themed comic strip. Written and drawn by Roy Crane, it actually began life in 1924 as a humor strip. But Crane was soon bored with coming up with gags every day and he gradually morphed his creation into an adventure story, albeit one that never lost its initial sense of humor. The main character--Washington Tubbs III--was soon joined by rough-and-tumble soldier-of-fortune Captain Easy. Together, the two bummed around the world, getting into one scrap after another.

In fact, even when they weren't looking for trouble, trouble would find them. In a 1933 story arc, the two are drugged and shanghaied aboard a whaling ship. Easy raises an objection to this, but the brutal first mate Mr. Slugg forces him to sign the articles.

So Wash and Easy become sailors. Their ship is not a happy one, though. The elderly captain is sick, allowing the sadistic mate Slugg to run things his way. His way isn't very nice.

Eventually, the ship does encounter whales, allowing our heroes to learn just how dangerous their new profession can be.

Things continue to get worse. Slugg eventually murders the captain. Wash is a witness to this, so Slugg takes the little guy ashore on a remote island and tosses him in a well. Easy rescues Wash and the two of them decide it's a good time for a mutiny.

By now there's a pretty girl involved in the adventure--because in the world of Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy it is quite impossible to go ashore on a remote island without practically tripping over a pretty girl. So after a pitched battle or two and some captures, escapes and recaptures, Wash, Easy and the girl find themselves tied up in a cabin while the ship burns around them. Fortunately Easy has good teeth, allowing him to engineer their escape and have a final showdown with Mr. Slugg.


Wash Tubbs was  a fantastic strip on so many levels. Crane was a great artist--his style on Wash Tubbs never lost an element of cartoony-ness left over from its humor-oriented beginnings, but that proved to be a strength once he began to tell adventure stories. Crane's tales were violent and often full of death and brutality. But the art style, though it was realistic enough to
generate a real sense of danger, also kept it from becoming unpleasantly graphic. No matter what, the yarns Crane spun were always full of pure fun.

And then there's his skill at composition--designing each individual panel so that every detail looked just right. He was a pioneer in the use of onomatopoeia sound effects. He used blacks and gray tones effectively to heighten drama. He choreographed action scenes as skillfully as did later artists such as Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko.

The whale hunting story arc is one of my favorites, not just because it's a typically well-told adventure story, but because it shows off Crane's skill as a visual storyteller. The whale hunting sequences, for instance, are particularly awesome. Watch the video below--one of a 5-part series I made for the library at which I work--for a better sense of just how skilled an artist Roy Crane was.

Roy Crane and the first ever adventure comic strip--The Final Chapter

Here's the last of the videos about Roy Crane I've been making at work.

Roy Crane and the first ever adventure comic strip--part 4

Here's part 4 of the video series I'm producing for work:

Roy Crane and the first ever adventure comic strip--part 3

Sorry I keep inundating you all with my limited narration skill, but as I said in a previous post: if I gotta make these things, SOMEONE is going to have to suffer through them.

Roy Crane and the first ever adventure comic strip--part 2

Here's the second part of the video series on Roy Crane that I'm producing at work:

Roy Crane and the first ever adventure comic strip.

There's no escaping videos from me this week.

Here's one I made at work. My idea was that staff members at the library could make videos about art-related subjects about which they are knowledgeable, then post them at the library's website so that they are available for students doing research.

Since it was my idea, I got to do the first one. I picked Roy Crane because I've always been insufferably proud of the fact that I'm quoted at length in his Wikipedia entry.

Here's the video:

Action Sequences the way they should be done: Comic Strips

Prior to the 1940s, newspaper comic strips were big. On Sundays, the average comic page had 8 pages of full-page comics (that is--one strip took up an entire page) and 8 pages of half-page strips. And the pages themselves were a bit bigger than what we usually see today as well.



On weekdays, the daily strips were printed larger as well


With that much room to work with, artists could add however much visual detail and dialogue they needed to tell exciting and involving stories. It was, consequently, the heyday of the adventure strip, combining complex plots, great characterizations and well-presented action scenes. A post from a few weeks ago about Terry and the Pirates showed the best example of an adventure strip from that era, but there were lots other.


Today, though, we'll look at another wonderful strip from the 1930s. Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy was created by Roy Crane in 1924. Originally, it was a humor strip, featuring the nerdy misadventures of a store clerk named Washington Tubbs III.


But the strip evolved as Wash made an effort to actually live a life of adventure. He went off on a search for lost treasure and ran afoul with some villianous sailors. Soon, his travels took him to obscure countries, where he often got involved in civil wars and court inrigues while inevitably falling in love with just about every pretty girl he met.


In 1929, Wash teamed up with two-fisted mercenary Captain Easy, who soon became the lead character in the strip.


Wash and Easy is a wonderful strip in many ways--its sense of fun and adventure, its humor, its likable protagonists--but for the sake of this post we will again unjustly ignore everything except how good Crane was at laying out a fight scene.




Take a look at this series of six daily strips. (Sorry I can't give you a bigger, better-quality image. I hope you can see this well enough to follow what I'll be talking about.)

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Even taken out of context with the rest of the story, you can easily follow the flow of the action. Wash and Easy are fighting for a rebel force in a civil war against a tyrant, battling government troops aboard a small ship. While Easy mans a machine gun (and then a cannon) in a desperate last stand against a superior force, Wash gets mixed up in his own side battle below deck.

It's a great sequence, allowing us to easily follow the action and understand what is happening as the battle progresses to the point where the entire ship is getting blown apart. Crane's cartoony visuual style meant he could really rack up the body count and still have it all seem like good fun, but he also makes sure the battle unfolds in a logical manner. Crane realized that a good action scene isn't just a series of panels showing us random chaos, but rather a series of panels that still maintain viability in telling an actual story. And this, in turn, makes the battle that much more exciting and involving.