Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune

Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips 1: 1933-1935

An epic title to match its importance, and mirroring the lavish nature of this big volume. It was the first major adventure strip, and hugely influential on that strand of newspaper comics and beyond – Easy himself can be seen as the prototype for an awful lot of comic book superheroes too.

It does nonetheless look a lot more dated than, say, Terry and the Pirates, which started in 1934: this is more reminiscent of H. Rider Haggard than Milton Caniff in its story style, with dangerous natives (thankfully a somewhat less uncomfortable depiction than a lot from this era), pirates, treasure and princesses. It’s transitory in the art style, too – most of it is closer to Segar’s Popeye than the later standard adventure look, largely indebted to Caniff and Sickles, but it has immense charm and likeability, and the bright, glossy colour and very big pages (the same size as the original newspaper pages?) make it look fabulous, and the whole strip is absolutely bursting with life and energy, in the writing as well as the art. I especially love his animals, solid, simple-minded and well-meaning, horses charging around with their tongues hanging out like enthusiastic but dumb dogs. Even his man-eating crocodiles sometimes look kind of cute. I mostly wanted to read this because of its vital place in comics’ history, but I enjoyed it a lot.