In 1929, Roy Crane introduced Captain Easy into his Wash Tubbs daily strip. By the following year, he was ready to do a Sunday page. But it wasn't Captain Easy. Instead, it was Frank Battle, an adventure in a Treasure Island vein. The Sunday Captain Easy didn't come along until 1933. Frank Battle was created as a sample and submitted to NEA in 1930 with an attached note indicating that a second page might exist. Has anyone ever seen it?
What a nice piece of art! I'm a devoted Crane fan but has never seen this one. The artwork is clean and as focused as ever, but I can't help but feel that Crane throws himself into the action a little too fast. The strength (or at least one strength) of Wash Tubbs/Captain Easy was that he took it slow; Wash had plenty of time to evolve as a character both in the early humor dailies and late 20s adventures with sidekicks other than Easy. Then, when Easy is introduced, we get to know him very slowly (if ever at all!) and that works not because Crane throws Wash and Easy into the current adventure but because we've already established a relationship with Wash and that keeps the human interest in the strip. It's immensely more difficult to start up a Sunday with new characters like this and already in this first sample page I feel that Crane throws himself into the action too fast. I'm simply not very interested in what happens to Frank, or in his motivations, because I don't know him or what makes him tick. Sure, his parents were killed by pirates and he wants revenge, but ... so what? That's not very original, or charming for that matter. I'm certain Crane planned to let his readers get to know Frank in subsequent Sundays, but if you don't engage your readers with more human interest in the first page, it will be difficult to make them follow the story to learn more. However, an initial sequence with Frank in his home environment, in which we got to know him as a person, may not have been sufficient to please an editor, so perhaps going straight for the action was Crane's only hope of receiving an OK (which he apparently did not get anyway). I don't know, I'm just not convinced. But art sure is beautiful!
ReplyDeleteGood analysis. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteThe fistfight seems a bit unprovoked and over the top. Sidekick comes across as the more interesting character!
Hi Bhob,
ReplyDeleteI wrote the introduction to the new Captain Easy collection from Fantagraphics. In the intro we reprint a Frank Battle page and I talk about why the strip didn't take off. Jeet Heer
Jeet:
ReplyDeleteThanks. I added some info on the book.