Number 801

Continuing Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy...

We're showing Wash Tubbs Dell Four Color #53, from 1944, reprinting 1939 and 1940 comic strips. This is part 2 of our story...if you haven't done so yet, go back to Wednesday's posting to start from the beginning.

During the 1980s there was a resurgence of interest in cartoonist Roy Crane. NBM published 18 volumes of his collected dailies and Sundays, and Dragon Lady Press out of Toronto did some really fine-looking compilations in several saddle-stitched magazines. There was interest because it was recognized, even 50 or 60 years after the original Crane Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy strips had appeared, that these were great stories, told by a master. Thanks to the people who put their money where their mouths were, Crane's classic work was introduced to a new generation.

In the heyday of the comic strips people bought a newspaper every day so they wouldn't miss an episode of their favorite continuity strip. Roy Crane was one of the forefathers of modern comic books. He started that move toward adventure comic strips, which in turn were reprinted in comic books, and when that supply ran short spawned an industry doing original stories using original characters.

Number 800

Wash Tubbs and Roy Crane

Cartoonist Roy Crane created the comic strip, Wash Tubbs, in 1924. Within a short period he transformed it into one of the very first continuity comic strips. Crane added Captain Easy to the cast in 1929 and the strip became a true classic.

Crane never worked for comic books, although his work was pasted up for several issues of Dell's Four Color series. This particular issue is #53, published in 1944, which reprinted Wash Tubbs strips from 1939 and '40. In this pre-War sequence Wash and Easy travel to a tropical island for the "secret of beauty." They find beauty, and they find the secret, and a few villains and fistfights along the way.

This is part 1; come back Friday for part 2.

Continued Friday...