Captain Easy

Exotic high adventure, humor & romance from a comic strip legend.

The third volume in Fantagraphics’ ongoing reprint of Roy Crane’s legendary comedy-action series features what many consider the absolute peak of the series: “Temple of the Swinks,” in which Wash and Easy discover an ancient temple with statues of an unknown animal called a swink... a real-life specimen of which shows up!

In other stories, Wash and Easy sail for Singapore aboard a dhow with a cargo of wild animals, crash land a plane on an island inhabited by (inevitably) pirates and (just as inevitably) beautiful women, and sail the South Seas in a schooner whose villainous captain plans to rob them. When they return to America, Wash Tubbs’ pet swink draws huge crowds and a reputation for being worth a million dollars. Then Wash and Easy travel to Peru to rescue an American lost in the jungle and, in the cover-featured story, Easy goes deep sea diving in search of a beautiful girl’s lost diamond.

Royston Campbell Crane (1901-1977), who signed his work Roy Crane, created the comic-strip characters Wash Tubbs, Captain Easy, and Buz Sawyer. His work continues to inspire cartoonists today.

Rick Norwood (b. 1942) is a comics historian, writer, mathematician, and professor. He wrote underground comics, founded the newspaper strip reprint publisher Manuscript Press in the 1970s, and is the editor of the magazine Comics Revue. He lives in Johnson City, Tennessee.