It's our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! This year, the theme is A Comic Strip Christmas! Each day will spotlight a notable comic strip, and at least three Christmas-themed comics from that strip. Today's comic is Captain Easy.
WHAT WAS CAPTAIN EASY?
First off, today's comic strip is a residual effect of Fred Van Lente Day, our annual celebration of comic book writer, Fred Van Lente. I asked Fred to pick today's comic strip, and he went with Captain Easy. So blame him!
Just yesterday, I talked about how comic strips, in particular, seemed to make dramatic changes in their format in a way that other serialized fiction typically didn't (with some notable exceptions, of course). Captain Easy is certainly one of the most notable examples of a strip going WAY differently than its original start. What became Captain Easy began in 1924 by Roy Crane as Wash Tubbs. The series starred a store owner named Washington "Wash" Tubbs, and it was originally a gag-a-day strip, but soon, even Crane got bored with the concept, and so he decided to have Tubbs join the circus (Crane even spent time with a circus to research the setup for the strip). This soon led to Tubbs going on all sorts of misadventures.
However, since Tubbs was such a tiny, weak fellow, Crane knew that he would need to introduce someone who could work as a sort of bodyguard/partner for Tubbs, and after trying out a few characters in the role, in 1929, Crane settled on Captain Easy, a sort of swashbuckling prototypical hero. Easy soon became the star of the strip, and things REALLY took off in the Sunday color strips, where Crane began to tell big, bold stories starring Captain Easy as a soldier of fortune, set in their own continuity, leaving much of the work on the dailies to his assistant, Leslie Turner, which focused more on Wash Tubbs' sillier stories. These Sunday adventures are gorgeous...
As is usually the way, however, bureaucracy got in the way, and in 1937, the Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicate, who syndicated the strip, informed Crane that all Sunday comic strips now had to be built in such a way that they could be broken down into different formats if need be, you know, side-by-side, up-and-down, etc. Crane could no longer use his bold panel usage, and so he just dropped the Sunday strip entirely, giving it to Turner, and spent his time on the dailies again.
The daily strips were still quite good under Crane, but he eventually grew tired of working on a strip that he had no control over (NEA owned the strip and the characters within it), so in 1943, he left the strip all together to launch his own strip, Buz Sawyer, which he worked on for decades until his failing health forced him to retire in the 1960s. Turner took over the strip from Crane, and drew the dailies while Turner's assistant, Walt Scott, did the Sunday strips. Eventually, Turner took over the Sunday strips, as well, doing both of them until the late 1960s, when he retired, as well. Captain Easy lasted until 1988, one year before Buz Sawyer took its final bow, as well.
HOW DID CAPTAIN EASY HANDLE CHRISTMAS IN HIS COMIC?
An extended sequence in the daily strips throughout 1936 was that Easy became the sheriff of a corrupt town. The town tried to get rid of him by enlisting recurring character, Lulu Belle (a homely woman who was very strong), to become the sheriff instead of Easy. Easy hated the job, so he was glad to be done with it, but the town was shocked to discover that Belle was surprisingly a very tough and fair sheriff. She even hired Easy and Tubbs as her deputies to help cut down on crime in the town, making things respectable again.
Things took a turn for the worse, though, when Belle was wooed by a con man named Wallis, who married Belle and soon began to treat the sheriff's office as shared marital property, slowly bringing his dimwitted sons to town to become her new deputies (he also drove Easy and Tubbs away). Eventually, Belle was so distracted (and her stepsons so useless) that she was recalled as sheriff. She got a job digging ditches to support her family. Her husband and stepsons criticize her at Christmastime for not doing more around the house, but then decide not to push it too much, as it IS Christmas, after all. That's some biting humor by Crane.
On Christmas Day itself, they give her her present...a new shovel!
It's a funny gag, but boy, an awfully dark one, as well.
In 1939, Wash's uncle Lincoln found himself engaged to a woman who was only after his money. They successfully tricked her into dumping him by pretending that he was secretly penniless, but not before Lincoln first purchased a skeleton to hide in his closet as part of an ill-conceived plot to make the woman believe that he was a Bluebeard who had killed all of his previous wives. Once she broke it off with him, he was now stuck with a skeleton, and people believe they saw him with it, so now he has to find a way to dispose of it without getting caught by the cops.
Wash has a plot that involves having Lincoln deliver a present to Wash's girlfriend, Carol...
When people accost Lincoln, the box is actually REAL presents for Carol....
Wash then goes back home and puts the skeleton into the box and heads off to bury it, figuring people won't follow them again. He's wrong. They're arrested, but luckily, it turns out that the bones were gorilla bones, so Lincoln is cleared of any suspicion of murdering his past wives.
In 1940, Easy is looped into an assignment with intrepid reporter, Vicki Sheridan...
They spend Christmas dinner at a diner...
A year later, they revisit the diner, and talk about the fact that Wash is now married, and how they're in such a different place in their lives...
Easy is then called on a mission on Christmas...
Their only presents are candy, which messes up Easy's tooth!
Crane left the strip soon after, and I'm not interested in post-Crane Captain Easy.
Happy Fred Van Lente Day, everyone!
In any event, as noted, every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day's Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened, and you can see what the "treat" for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries.
The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Santa Claus giving out presents to comic strip kids (although instead of a present for Charlie Brown, his dog, Snoopy, gets a present instead), is by Nick Perks.
Day 5 is now opened (once opened, the door will feature an image from the featured comic strip)...
You can see Captain Easy throwing punches!