Captain Easy Volume 3: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips 1938-1940: 03 (Roy Crane's Captain Easy) - Hardcover

Freed from the tiny confines of the black-and-white daily strip, Crane brilliantly exploited the vastly larger canvas of the full newspaper page, wildly varying the sizes, shapes, and arrangement of the panels. His distinctive drawing style, an appealing blend of simplified realism and broad cartooniness, also set Easy apart ...this volume's oversize pages fully convey the strip's formidable visual impact.

Crane's work is sheer energy. It's somewhere between Crane and E.C. Segarthat (Carl Barks' beloved) Donald Duck got forged; the kind of ruddy-cheeked adventurousness that underlies the content is certainly the same work that moves Donald and his nephews through their stories.--Art Spiegelman

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.