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Roy
Crane and Captain Easyby
Clay Coppedge | |
That
Roy Crane would end up in the funny papers did not seem pre-ordained when he was
a boy growing up in Sweetwater.
He might have been pegged as a whiz kid with an artistic soul who would contributes
to the art world in some way, but comic strips hardly existed when Crane was born
in 1901. He would be one of the people who would help create a crucial part of
that art form, if you’re willing to call it that.
His full name was Royston
C. Crane, Jr. His father was the son of William C. Crane, who presided over Baylor
University when that school was located in Independence. Roy Jr’s dad was a prominent
lawyer, judge, newspaperman, civic leader and historian in the Rotan and Sweetwater
areas.
As a boy, Crane took Charles N. Landon’s correspondence course
in and later tried his hand at college, first at Hardin-Simmons University and
then at the University of Texas. He also attended the Academy of Fine Arts in
Chicago where he met fellow Texan Leslie Turner.
Something about the academic
life must have rubbed Crane the wrong way because he didn’t stay at any of the
schools longer than a year. He rode the rails as a hobo for a while and worked
briefly for the Austin American newspaper as a reporter. After another futile
stab at college, he shipped off to Europe on a freighter. When the ship docked
back in New York he went looking for work and found it as a cartoonist for the
New York World.
Crane tried syndicating his own strip to United Features
but was turned down when only two papers offered to carry it. He submitted the
strip to the Newspaper Enterprise Association in Cleveland where the art director
was none other than his old mail-order instructor, Charles Landon. Crane recalled
years later that Landon seemed to like his work well enough at first but it grew
on him after Crane told him he was an ex student. Later, Crane noticed that Landon
liked to tout his former students’ successes when advertising his correspondence
course. |
| The
strip became “Wash Tubbs,” which enjoyed fair to middlin’ success until Crane
introduced a swashbuckling soldier of fortune named Captain Easy to the cast of
characters. Captain Easy was sort of an Indiana Jones-type character but without
the college degree. Easy eventually took over the strip and the strip became known
as “Captain Easy – Soldier of Fortune.” |
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Crane cranked out
the strips practically without a break for 14 years. In 1937, he called on his
old Texas buddy, Leslie Turner, to join him as an assistant. The two Texans worked
as a team for the next six years, until Crane left to draw “Buz Sawyer”
for the Hearst Syndicate. Turner continued the Captain Easy strip for NEA. By
the time he took on the Buz Sawyer strip, Crane was recognized as one of the comic
strip genre’s finest artists and innovators, bringing new degrees of shading and
technical flourishes to the strip and inspiring subsequent generations of adventure
cartoonists, mostly notably “Steve Canyon” creator Milton Caniff.
In “The
Art of the Funnies,” R.C. Harvey writes of Crane: “Roy Crane is undoubtedly the
most unsung of the cartoonists who shaped the medium. His historic achievement
was to set the pace for adventure strips in the thirties by showing the way in
the twenties. Many of those who drew the earliest adventure strips were inspired
and influenced by his work.”
© Clay
Coppedge
"Letters from
Central Texas"
July 30, 2009 Column
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