The Sunday Funnies - Captain Easy 1938-1940!

With the third volume of Fantagraphic's Roy Crane's Captain Easy - Soldier of Fortune - The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips the nature of that weekly outing by artist Roy Crane and his assistant Leslie Turner changes quite significantly. For one thing in the last volume Easy was reunited with his longtime friend and ally Washington Tubbs. Wash Tubbs was the daily strip which ran concurrently with Captain Easy. That reunion added a steady diet of humor to the proceedings. While humor had always been an ingredient, it's clear that it swells in importance as the derring-do begins to diminish. While the duo still globe trot, they are doing so with less of a sense of actual danger, merely complications. 

The long adventures give way to shorter yarns that wrap up in two or three maybe four weeks. Some stories begin and end in a single strip. There are a few longer narratives tucked in and Easy does break away from Wash for an adventure or two, but mostly they are a doughty team that must confront dangerous folks like the addled gun-toting Papa Shalayli, the happy-go-lucky pirates of Paradise Island, the knife-throwing Little Bessie, the femme fatale spy Z-1, the deadly pair of Rufe and Pap Skint, the gangster Boss Ladronn, and the gun-running Mexican bandit Don Bovino. They make quite a few new friends, such as escape artist and safe cracker Lonnie Plunkett. There are lots of dames too, most all in danger and seeking rescue by Wash and Easy, such as Mona Milson, Imogene Twitchet, and the silver-haird Honey Darling. Easy and Wash spend their time doing good deeds, running from the law and heavies, and seeking sundry treasures. They take to hunting down villains for the bounties at one point even. Whenever they have cash they buy a plane, a plane which usually ends up crashed before very long in some foreign territory in the South Pacific or South America. The boys even take time help Santa run his rounds, at least that's what they claim. 

The one thing which ties many of the stories together though is the "Swinks". Captain Easy and Wash Tubbs end up on an island on which they looks for the treasure of the Swinks. The Swinks turn out to be ant-eating aardvark-like critters that prove quite helpful in many instances. Wash is so smitten with the Swinks that he takes one as a pet and names him "Bennie". Bennie tags along with our heroes for most of the two years this volume covers. He has an uncanny sense of smell and at different times is sent looking for gold and for oil with marginal success. When the story doesn't need him, he conveniently disappears for some weeks then turns up again as if he'd been there all along. The Swink disappears for good at the end 1939 with no mention of his having gone. 

The strip has lost the vigor which informed hits earliest years, the artwork being quite good, but not anything approaching spectacular. Mostly the stories don't demand the lush exotic images, but are somewhat staid light-hearted adventures. More's the pity. We wrap things up next time. 

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