Royston Campbell Crane (November 22, 1901 – July 7, 1977), who signed his work Roy Crane, was an American cartoonist who created the comic strip characters

Wash Tubbs ''Wash Tubbs'' is an American daily comic strip created by Roy Crane that ran from April 14, 1924 to 1949, when it merged into Crane's related Sunday page, ''Captain Easy''. Crane left both strips in 1943 to begin ''Buz Sawyer'', but a series of ...

Captain Easy '' Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune '' is an American action/adventure comic strip created by Roy Crane that was syndicated by Newspaper Enterprise Association beginning on Sunday, July 30, 1933. The strip ran for more than five decades until it ...

and

Buz Sawyer ''Buz Sawyer'' is a comic strip created by Roy Crane.Ron Goulart, ''The Funnies : 100 Years of American Comic Strips''. Holbrook, Mass. : Adams Pub, 1995. (pp. 149-50) Distributed by King Features Syndicate, it had a run from November 1, 1943 to ...

. He pioneered the adventure

comic strip A comic strip is a Comics, sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often Serial (literature), serialized, with text in Speech balloon, balloons and Glossary of comics ter ...

, establishing the conventions and artistic approach of that genre. Comics historian R. C. Harvey wrote, "Many of those who drew the earliest adventure strips were inspired and influenced by his work."Harvey, Robert C. ''The Art of the Funnies'', "A Flourish of Trumpets: Roy Crane and the Adventure Strip". University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
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Biography

Born in

Abilene, Texas Abilene ( ) is a city in Taylor and Jones Counties in Texas, United States. Its population was 125,182 at the 2020 census, making it the 27th-most populous city in the state of Texas. It is the principal city of the Abilene metropolitan st ...

, Crane grew up in nearby Sweetwater. When he was 14, he took the

Charles N. Landon Charles Nelson Landon (December 19, 1878 – May 17, 1937) was an illustrator for ''The Cleveland Press'', art director for the Newspaper Enterprise Association and art editor of ''Cosmopolitan''. He is most notable as the founder of the Landon ...

correspondence course in cartooning. He initially attended college at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene and later the

University of Texas The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

, where he was a member of

Phi Kappa Psi Phi Kappa Psi (), commonly known as Phi Psi, is an American collegiate social fraternity that was founded by William Henry Letterman and Charles Page Thomas Moore in Widow Letterman's home on the campus of Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pen ...

fraternity. At 19, he studied for six months at the Academy of Fine Arts in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...

. His early work history was a checkered one, including pitching tents for a

Chautauqua Chautauqua ( ) was an adult education and social movement in the United States, highly popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chautauqua assemblies expanded and spread throughout rural America until the mid-1920s. The Chautauqua br ...

, a seaman's berth and a stint riding the rails. In 1922, he began his newspaper cartooning career on the ''

New York World The ''New York World'' was a newspaper published in New York City from 1860 until 1931. The paper played a major role in the history of American newspapers. It was a leading national voice of the Democratic Party. From 1883 to 1911 under pub ...

'', where he assisted

H. T. Webster Harold Tucker Webster (September 21, 1885 – September 22, 1952) was an American cartoonist known for '' The Timid Soul'', ''Bridge'', ''Life's Darkest Moments'' and others in his syndicated series which ran from the 1920s into the 1950s. Because ...

. Crane was also influenced by the work of cartoonist Ethel Hays, especially in the drawing of women.

Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy

In 1924, Crane approached

, an editor at the

Newspaper Enterprise Association The Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) is an editorial column and comic strip newspaper syndication service based in the United States and established in 1902. The oldest syndicate still in operation, the NEA was originally a secondary news ...

. Landon and Crane discussed a strip titled ''Washington Tubbs II'' about a diminutive goof employed at a grocery store. With the title shortened to ''

'', the strip debuted April 21, 1924. After four months, Crane tired of the

gag-a-day A gag-a-day comic strip is the style of writing comic cartoons such that every installment of a strip delivers a complete joke or some other kind of artistic statement. It is opposed to story or continuity strips, which rely on the development of ...

format and sent his pint-size hero hunting for a treasure buried somewhere on a South Pacific island. The strip then evolved into a rollicking adventure yarn, with Crane introducing innovations in storytelling, sound effects and layouts, as noted by pop culture historian Tim DeForest: :Though played mostly for laughs, the storyline contained a notable element of danger as well... Crane was developing strength as an artist that added to his already strong figure work. He had an eye for detail, paying close attention to background and to the overall layout of each panel. He was an innovator in the use of lettering, using bold type and exclamation points to enhance the emotions already expressed by his character design... It was Crane who pioneered the use of

onomatopoeic Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as ''oink'', ''m ...

sound effects in comics, adding "bam," "pow" and "wham" to what had previously been an almost entirely visual vocabulary. Crane had fun with this, tossing in an occasional "ker-splash" or "lickety-wop" along with what would become the more standard effects. Words as well as images became vehicles for carrying along his increasingly fast-paced storylines. Following Wash's initial adventure, the strip reverted to a dependence on gags for a time. But Wash had acquired a taste for travel and adventure. With the introduction in 1929 of the raffish soldier of fortune,

, Crane heightened the spirit of adventure and later created a

Sunday strip The Sunday comics or Sunday strip is the comic strip section carried in most western newspapers, almost always in color. Many newspaper readers called this section the Sunday funnies, the funny papers or simply the funnies. The first US newspap ...

focusing on Captain Easy. NBM Publishing's Flying Buttress Classics Library reprinted the complete run of ''Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy'' in a series of 18 volumes.

Bill Blackbeard William Elsworth Blackbeard (April 28, 1926 – March 10, 2011), better known as Bill Blackbeard, was a writer-editor and the founder-director of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, a comprehensive collection of comic strips and cartoon art fr ...

's introductions to these books contain biographical and critical material.

Buz Sawyer

World War II rendered the comic-opera settings of Tubbs' adventures frivolous, and the strip took on a new tone. In 1943, an offer from Hearst's

King Features Syndicate King Features Syndicate, Inc. is a American content distribution and animation studio, consumer product licensing and print syndication company owned by Hearst Communications that distributes about 150 comic strips, newspaper columns, editori ...

persuaded Crane to jump ship and create a more realistic comic strip, ''

''. He left ''Wash Tubbs'' in the hands of his assistant, Leslie Turner, a boyhood friend who had shared the hobo life with him. Crane, an excellent draftsman despite his deceptively cartoonish style, introduced more illustrative shading techniques to the daily comics page. He progressed from line drawings with

crosshatching Hatching (french: hachure) is an artistic technique used to create tonal or shading effects by drawing (or painting or scribing) closely spaced parallel lines. (It is also used in monochromatic representations of heraldry to indicate what the ...

to grease pencil on textured paper, then to

Benday Dots The Ben Day process is a printing and photoengraving technique for producing areas of grey or (with four-colour printing) various colours by using fine patterns of ink on the paper. It was developed in 1879 by illustrator and printer Benjamin ...

and finally to Craftint Doubletone Paper. The Craftint paper, when brushed with chemical solutions, revealed either one or two layers of diagonal shading. Under Crane's brush, the technique yielded scenes of dramatic atmosphere, such as junglescapes fading into the misty distance. As he had done with ''Wash Tubbs'', Crane traveled to various locations to research his plot lines and visuals. According to Crane: "In using benday, at first I thought in terms of blacks, grays, and white. Years of indifferent results and frustration followed. Gradually, black became less important. Today white is not just something to bring out the color of black... on the contrary, black is something to bring out the color of white". Crane progressively relinquished his cartooning to assistants, and he died in

Orlando, Florida Orlando () is a city in the U.S. state of Florida and is the county seat of Orange County. In Central Florida, it is the center of the Orlando metropolitan area, which had a population of 2,509,831, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures re ...

in 1977. Today, ''Buz Sawyer'' has been resurrected digitally as one of the vintage strips in King Features' emailed DailyINK subscription service. According to comics historian

Jeet Heer Jeet Heer is a Canadian author, comics critic, literary critic and journalist. He is a national affairs correspondent for '' The Nation'' magazine and a former staff writer at '' The New Republic''. As of 2014, he was writing a doctoral thesis at ...

, Crane had a relationship with the

State Department The United States Department of State (DOS), or State Department, is an executive department of the U.S. federal government responsible for the country's foreign policy and relations. Equivalent to the ministry of foreign affairs of other na ...

and the Navy Department and used the ''Buz Sawyer'' strip for

propaganda Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded ...

purposes in order to support American foreign policy aims during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

, the

Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because t ...

as well as the

Vietnam War The Vietnam War (also known by #Names, other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vie ...

Awards

Crane was awarded the

National Cartoonists Society The National Cartoonists Society (NCS) is an organization of professional cartoonists in the United States. It presents the National Cartoonists Society Awards. The Society was born in 1946 when groups of cartoonists got together to entertain the ...

's Billy DeBeck Memorial Award, later renamed the

Reuben Award The National Cartoonists Society (NCS) is an organization of professional cartoonists in the United States. It presents the National Cartoonists Society Awards. The Society was born in 1946 when groups of cartoonists got together to entertain the ...

, for Cartoonist of the Year in 1950, and their Story Comic Strip Award in 1965, both for ''Buz Sawyer''. In 1961 he was awarded the Silver Lady by the New York Banshee Society. He was named a Distinguished Alumnus of the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

in 1969. In 1965, he established the Roy Crane Award in the Arts at the University of Texas to encourage excellence and creativity in the arts among undergraduate and graduate students. In 1980, this award was given to

Berkeley Breathed Guy Berkeley "Berke" Breathed (; born June 21, 1957) is an American cartoonist, children's book author, director, and screenwriter, known for his comic strips ''Bloom County'', '' Outland'', and '' Opus''. ''Bloom County'' earned Breathed the Pu ...

.''The Alcalde'', November, 1980.
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References

External links