Roy Crane
Roy Crane | |
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Reuben Award Story Comic Strip Award, 1965New York Banshee Society Silver Lady award, 1961 | |
Spouse(s) | Christy |
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, Captain Easy and Buz Sawyer. He pioneered the adventure comic strip, 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."[1]
Biography
Born in
Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy
In 1924, Crane approached Charles N. Landon, an editor at the Newspaper Enterprise Association. Landon and Crane discussed a strip titled Washington Tubbs II about a diminutive goof employed at a grocery store. With the title shortened to Wash Tubbs, the strip debuted April 14, 1924. After four months, Crane tired of the gag-a-day 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 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.[3]
With the introduction in 1929 of the raffish soldier of fortune,
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 persuaded Crane to jump ship and create a more realistic comic strip, Buz Sawyer. He left Wash Tubbs in the hands of his assistant, Leslie Turner, a boyhood friend who had shared the hobo life with him.[1]
Crane, an excellent draftsman despite his deceptively cartoonish style, introduced more illustrative shading techniques to the daily comics page. He progressed from
Crane progressively relinquished his cartooning to assistants, and he died in Orlando, Florida 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, Crane had a relationship with the State Department and the Navy Department and used the Buz Sawyer strip for propaganda purposes in order to support American foreign policy aims during World War II, the Cold War as well as the Vietnam War.[5]
Awards
Crane was awarded the
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.[6]
References
- ^ a b c d Harvey, Robert C. The Art of the Funnies, "A Flourish of Trumpets: Roy Crane and the Adventure Strip". University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
- ^ Holtz, Allan. "Ethel Hays, Great Female Cartoonist," Hogan's Alley issue #13. Atlanta, Georgia: Bull Moose Publishing.
- ^ DeForest, Tim.Storytelling in the Pulps, Comics, and Radio: How Technology Changed Popular Fiction in America. McFarland, 2004.
- ^ Crane, Roy. "Roy Crane and Buz Sawyer", Cartoonist Profiles #3(Summer 1969), 10.
- ^ Heer, Jeet (October 2, 2015). "Pulp Propaganda: Roy Crane's Buz Sawyer comics were famous for adventurous battles against America's cold war foes. But no one knew that the U.S. government was behind it all". New Republic. Retrieved September 30, 2015.
- ^ The Alcalde, November, 1980.
Further reading
- Goulart, Ron. The Adventurous Decade. Arlington House, 1975. (Reprinted by Hermes Press, 2004.)
- Marschall, Richard. America's Great Comic-Strip Artists. New York: Abbeville Press, 1989.
- Captain Easy: Soldier of Fortune, Rick Norwood, ed. Fantagraphics Books, 2010. (Sunday Captain Easy strips in color.)
External links
- Roy Crane Papers 1908-1977 at Syracuse University (primary source material)
- Papers of R. C. Crane, Sr. (artist's father) in Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University