A few weeks ago I was listening to author/comics historian Glenn Fleishman discussing his new (and amazing) book on the history of comics printing technology, How Comics Were Made, on the podcast Blockhead, and heard this exchange about the use of Craftint:

(at 43:45)

Geoff: I’m just wondering about Roy Crane.. I was actually surprised you didn’t mention Roy Crane.

Glenn: Tell me about Roy Crane…

What caught my ear about this exchange is how, whenever the topic of Craftint comes up, cartoonists–particularly cartoonists of the craft/process-obsessed variety–will immediately bring up Roy Crane… and yet in most contexts other than this, Roy Crane seems to be treated more as a footnote in comics history.

Compared to the voluminous writing about his peers and contemporaries like Milt Caniff, Alex Raymond, Noel Sickles, or even Frank Robbins, there’s relatively little writing about Crane–and much of the writing that does exist is distributed scattershot online in various articles in the comics press, personal blogs, etc. So, one might ask:

Why isn’t Crane better-known and more often discussed?

I’ll posit a few theories:

Genre: neither fish nor fowl – Crane’s most important strip, Wash Tubbs/Captain Easy, ran during some of the most formative years of early 20th century newspaper comics’ development, beginning in 1924 and ending in 1949. The whole art form was formally in flux at the time–finding its feet as far as drawing style, genre, etc. went–and Wash Tubbs was no exception.

At the beginning, the strip was a goofy, largely gag-a-day affair staring the titular character, Wash Tubbs. As the strip ran, though, it slowly morphed into what would become known as an “adventure strip” (Crane is an important figure for this alone–he established the blueprint for this entire genre of comic), with the character Captain Easy–introduced as a secondary character–eventually taking over the strip, getting his own Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune full-page Sunday strip, and sidelining Washington Tubbs who all but disappeared by the time Crane handed the strip over to his assistant Leslie Turner in 1943.

Art: also neither fish nor fowl – Not only does the genre of Wash Tubbs/Captain Easy fluctuate during its run, but Crane’s drawing style changes as well–and changes in a way that’s often not as straightforward as the strip’s measured drift from gag-a-day to adventure. The early strips are very much of the “big foot” cartooning style that was omnipresent in the 1920’s when the strip began. As the strip moves towards more of an action/adventure angle the cartooning and character designs start to change to reflect this… but the transition is never fully complete nor completely linear. Often you’ll see realistically-drawn characters that would feel at home visually in something like Terry and the Pirates interacting with a goofy, cartoony horse that’s straight out of E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theater. This is one of the things I personally love about the strip: it’s a work that was being made while the visual language of popular comics was very much in flux–the art form was still finding its feet as Crane was crafting the strip.

It’s never been reprinted well – This is the big one, in my opinion. As per the very beginning of this post, what Crane is known for visually as a cartoonist is his mastery of Craftint technique–which he employed only for the daily (not Sunday) strips and only after about 1937. This run of Crane’s work has never been reprinted in a way that showcases his incredible–and to this day unmatched–skill with Craftint.

There have been efforts to reprint his work. Most recently, Fantagraphics did a “best of” collection called, Hurricane Isle and Other Adventures: The Best of Captain Easy and Wash Tubbs. While beautifully produced, the latest story included is from 1932, well before Crane was employing Craftint. The equally beautiful Captain Easy Fantagraphics collections are must-buys, but are obviously the Sunday strips–which also didn’t utilize Craftint.

Prior to that, in the late 1980’s NBM’s Flying Buttress Classics Library did an 18-volume complete reprinting of the dailies. Unfortunately, these are long out of print and extremely expensive (if you can even find them). More to the point re. Craftint, though, they’re printed at about 75% of their original size and the print quality–while good for the time–is pretty iffy in a lot of spots and really doesn’t adequately showcase Crane’s craft.

Here’s a “best case scenario” showing a 1941 panel scanned from an original newspaper clipping (L) vs. the NBM reprint (R):

The NBM books were presumably sourced from newspaper clippings (Bill Blackbeard was the series editor), but as you can see here, some sort of 80’s-era contrast/threshold-type manipulation–or perhaps the reproduction/photostat process itself–has increased the richness of the solid blacks at the expense of the Craftint effects.

And, to make matters worse, the quality varies widely, with much of the work looking more like this:

Unfortunately, a new version of the full run of the strip is unlikely. The appeal is just to selective at this point (not to mention the ubiquitous-for-the-era racial visual stereotyping of Asian characters scattered throughout).

On Craftint

You can find tons of information online about what Craftint is (was?), but in reference to Roy Crane in particular, here’re some specifics of what this tool/technique is and why Crane is still the go-to example of what can be achieved with it.

Crane’s embrace of Craftint had a marked change on the quality of his cartooning, particularly in his ability to set up images with a distinct foreground, midground, and background–and specifically, his use of Craftint to emulate atmospheric perspective.

Backing up slightly, here’s a good close-up example of a Crane original utilizing standard black India ink in conjunction with the two hatching patterns created by Craftint:

(A) here shows use of single line hatching and (B) shows the addition of a second set of parallel hatching lines at 90 degrees from the first. These patterns emerge via the application of two different fluids to the Craftint board.

The Crane image of the plane above shows a fairly standard use of Craftint that numerous artists employed, as seen here in these Angelo Torres panels from MAD Magazine:

Here, the artist has drawn what’s essentially a complete image for each panel in India ink, then afterwards has used the Craftitnt effects to indicate local color/value (as with the sky and road in the first panel and the clothing and motorcycle parts, etc. in the second) and suggest a light source (the right side of the diner entrance in the first panel and the right side of the truck in the second).

The addition of Craftint is an aesthetic improvement over just a black and white image–and it helps define objects, indicate light source, and indicate local color. That said, these images would also function as complete illustrative images without the addition of the Craftint. Crane sometimes–particularly with “talking head” panels–used Craftint in this fairly straightforward manner, as below, and similar to the Torres images above, the later Craftint-era panels have a more polished look to them than just black and white line art of the pre-Craftint Crane panels:

As with the Torres panels, though, the Crane panels on the right are complete black and white images even without the addition of Craftint–and would function with or without it. The Craftint here is simply an aesthetic addition.

Where Crane’s use of Craftint becomes truly remarkable, though, is when he employs it as an integral part of the illustration–usually as a way to establish environments with distinct foreground/midground/background elements via emulating atmospheric perspective. Here’s that stunning example from a few paragraphs back, but a bit larger:

Notice how Crane’s using black linework and spot blacks for the foreground elements (house, fence, trees, figures, curb) but using solely Caftint for the midground houses and the sky behind them–single hatching pattern for the latter/crosshatch pattern for the former. Unlike the former examples of Craftint, in this Crane panel–and in his best Craftint work–the Craftint effect is integral to the image: remove the Craftint effect and you lose visual information. The background would disappear entirely without the Craftint.

Here’s another striking example of Crane using the same technique, but in this case also perhaps suggesting fog:

As seen in panel three of the strip at the very top of this post, Crane would often employ just a spot black silhouette as a foreground and a single pass of Craftint as a background, a Toth-like paring down of an image to its most elegant components. Here’s another such example:

Crane would also exploit the painterly aspect of Craftint. Unlike the more commonly-seen Zip-a-Tone/screen-tone, in which a dot pattern is printed on an adhesive sheet that’s then cut out with a razor and applied to paper, the two Craftint patterns appear via an activating fluid that’s applied with a brush–hence, the ability to get paint-like effects from it. Here’s a beautiful example with the two Craftint patterns creating the reflections in the water:

Roy Crane created a detailed “scrapbook” called How to Draw Buz Sawyer (his later newspaper strip) that had an extensive section on his Craftint technique. Unfortunately, the only way to get a complete copy of this scrapbook is to request a copy in person from the Syracuse University Manuscript Collection, where he donated his effects, including letters, the scrapbook, etc. You can, though, see excerpts from it over at Mike Lynch’s blog.

More reading on Roy Crane?

As mentioned, there’s unfortunately not a wealth of easily attainable information out there about Crane. Here, though, are a few resources.

• From the scrapbook – How to Draw Women
• From the scrapbook –  Roy Crane’s Mexico Sketchbook
• Jeet Heer on the U.S. Government role in Crane’s Buz Sawyer 
• The Comics Journal #302 – Interview with Roy Crane/How to Draw Buz Sawyer
• Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips (out of print)
• NBM/Flying Buttress – Complete Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy (out of print)

A few years ago I was a guest at a con I won’t name… because it was an entirely dismal affair sales-wise. Needless to say, I was bored to tears after a couple of hours sitting behind a table with zero happening. So, I began wandering around the floor trying to enterntain myself. Thankfully, there were tons of longboxes on the floor and one such $2 bin had a handful of old Comics Interview magazines from the 90’s in it–and among them was this gem, the September 1995 “Manga and Anime” issue:

There’s a ton of interesting stuff in here. It’s a fascinating time capsule of where the “mainstream” comics industry was at the time vis-a-vis manga. For context, 1995 was seven years after Epic starting publishing Akira as flipped, colored, individual comic book issues, but two years before Tokyopop woud start publishing unflipped manga in tankōbon format. So, we’re at a point here where manga is about to become a huge cultural force in comics, but it hasn’t quite happened yet. Hence, some now-hilarious-seeming articles in the magazine like “What is anime and why is everyone talking about it?” (And, as you can see on the cover, the term “Japanimation” is still in use!)

One of the longer articles is one of the most intersting: a big interview with a group of western cartoonists who took a Tezuka Studios-sponsored trip to Japan to hang out with Japanese comics artists and animators. Here’s the group. Not pictured is Will Eisner and foundational manga translator Frederick L. Schodt, who were also present. 

The real gem of bunch, though, article-wise is a reprinting of a 1987 Frank Miller interview with Lone Wolf and Cub’s Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima! Frank Miller was obviously hugely influenced by Lone Wolf and Cub–most evidently in Ronin–and championed the English language publication of the series at First Comics, even providing cover art for a lot of the issues.  

I posted a picture of one page of the interview on Twitter back when I first bought the magazine and read the interview but then pretty much forgot about it… until I was recently emailed pretty much out of the blue by an associate of cartoonist Paul Smith’s wondering if I could send them scans of the whole interview–which I did.  Given that I now have nice scans of the whole interview, I figured I’d post them for general consumption! So, here you go–JPGs below and a PDF down at the bottom:

Frank Miller interviewing Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima [PDF] 

As I’ve been doing for the last few years, here’s a list of comics and comics-related things that I read in the past year–with some scattered commentary as I see fit!

Catwoman: Lonely City – Cliff Chiang

I mentioned this book in a “so, what are you reading?” conversation with a friend at one point and I got a “I didn’t know you were down with superhero stuff” reply. I guess, looking over the rest of this year’s list, that I shouldn’t really be surprised by that perception of my comics taste… but, for what it’s worth, I used to read plenty of superhero stuff. The reason I don’t so much these days isn’t that I’m some artsy-comics snob, but rather that I just don’t have the time and energy to keep up with continuing, serialized, monthly books. And that’s why, when something like Catwoman: Lonely City comes out–a self-contained superhero book with a beginning, middle, and end by a good artist–I’m usually game to check it out. 

Catwoman: Lonely City is Cliff Chiang’s “one last heist” Catwoman story and it’s thoroughly enjoyable. It wears its influences on its sleeve–Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier and Catwoman, Batman: Year One,  and The Dark Knight Returns most notably,  Chiang is an incredible draftsperson and he’s too precise and exacting to pull of the Mazzucchelli “dumb line” look that some of this material seems to consciously reference–but that’s fine; if I want Mazzucchelli, I’ll read Mazzucchelli.  If there were more superhero stories like these–done by top-notch cartoonists with a singular, distinctive aesthetic, and consumable as a stand-alone story, I’d read a lot more “capes and tights” stuff.

Asadora vol 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 – Naoki Urasawa

As I type this, I have Volume 7 of this most recent Naoki Urasawa series on hold at the library–so, maybe I’ll squeeze in one more volume of this in 2023! 

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb in saying that Naoki Urasawa is one of–if not the–most revered manga-ka working today… which is why I’m kind of surprised that there’s not more buzz about this book in comics and manga circles, You’d think Naoki Urasawa doing a (spolier alert!) kaiju story would be a hell of a lot bigger deal! The story’s a bit of a slow build and very occasionally elements involving the title character border on saccharine, but I was 100% sold after the first volume. It should go without saying, but Urasawa’s artwork is gobsmackingly-great. In this one you get plenty of hardware (including some flashbacks featuring WWII planes and warships) as well as his always-stunning mastery of character design and facial expressions. Get onboard, y’all!  

Fusion – Moebius

Judge Dredd Brian Bolland Apex Edition – Brian Bolland

Witch Hat Atelier vol 5, 6 – Kamome Shirahama

Scribbles – Kaoru Mori

The History of Hentai Manga: an Expressionist Examination of Eromanga – Kimi Rito

If you’ve been waiting patiently for a 400+ page scholarly (you can tell it’s scholarly because there’s the obligatory colon in the title) volume that examines, analyzes, and catalogs phenomena specifically related to hentai–AKA Japanese porn comics–then your wait is over! This volume is divided into six initial chapters that examine formal and/or drawing techniques that are specific to hentai (“The Spread of the Nipple Afterimage,” “Reinventing the Tentacle,” etc.), then two chapters on historical issues related to hentai publication and production (censorship, translation), then a final catch-all chapter for any other formal/drawing stuff that didn’t merit a full chapter at the beginning. 

While I may sound a little glib (I mean, given the subject matter…) this is actually a very interesting and thorough look at a subset of comics that we in the west don’t get a ton of exposure to–and I’m always fascinated by areas of comics that develop their own unique formal visual language. In the case of hentai examined here, it’s particularly interesting since much of this formal language has arisen as a way to circumvent Japan’s sometimes stringent/sometimes less-so (but always in flux) censorship laws.

Batman Year One Absolute Edition – Frank Miller, David Mazzuccheli, Richmond Lewis

King-Cat Comix & Stories #82 – John Porcellino

Malgré tout (FR) – Jordi Lafebre

Thankfully now out in English as Always Never via Dark Horse, Malgré Tout was hands-down one of my favorite books of 2023. If you follow me on any social media (or have read my past yearly “what I read in…” posts) you know I think Jordi Lafebre is one of the very, very best working cartoonists right now. His pure cartooning chops–especially his mastery of pose, gesture, and facial expressions–are pretty much unmatched by anyone currently in the field.  (Hey, here’s a baller move: a cover that’s an illustration of your story’s main characters’ upside-down reflection in a rain puddle.)

This book is, I think, the first I’ve read with Lafebre as the writer and artist, and it’s a banger: a beautifully-drawn (literally and figuratively) story of a couple who have been madly in love for years, but whose lives went on radically different trajectories. The narrative is brilliantly-structured in reverse chronology. As the book progresses, we move farther back in each character’s life, seeing how they’ve somehow missed each other at various key points, then, finally to their initial meeting and falling in love. It’s not, though, a story of regret and missed opportunities, but rather, a beautiful, brilliant meditation on fate and persistence. 

Les Cahiers de la BD #21 (FR) – ed. Vincent Bernière

Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics – Frederik L. Schodt

Marvel Comics in the 1970s – Eliot Borenstein

Bubbles #1, 3, 11, 12 – ed. Brian Baynes

Boys Run the Riot vol 1 – Keito Gaku

One Beautiful Spring Day – Jim Woodring

The Other 1980s: Reframing Comics’ Crucial Decade – ed. Brannon Costello & Brian Cremins

If–like me–your formative comics reading took place in the 1980’s, but was not focused mainly on superhero comics, and specifically not on the oft-cited “comics aren’t just for kids anymore” trio of Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and MAUS, you’ll most certainly find plenty of interest in this collection of essays. The editors here assemble a strong slate of material focusing on some of the lesser-discussed, but arguably just as important, comics works from the 80’s. My favorites were, predictably, those essays that discussed work that was formative for me during this period: The Flaming Carrot, Neil the Horse,  The ‘ Nam, Shuriken, etc. The latter half of the book focuses more on retroactively examining 80’s comics through the lens of modern understandings of social issues rather than sticking largely to comics history as in the first half–but that’s to be expected, given that most of the authors are academics. I’d love to see a similar collection of essays that picks up where this one leaves off: examining small press and off-the-beaten-path comics from the early ’90s. 

The Bulidings are Barking: Diane Noomin in Memormiam – Bill Griffith

Popeye (Giant Comic Album) – Bud Sagendorf

The Forgotten Velvet – Luke Geddis

I’m a sucker for Chick Tract homages/parodies and I’m also a sucker for comics about music–so this little Chick Tract format comic about later-era Velvet Underground memeber Doug Yule was 100% my jam. Often people who do tract-format comics just borrow the trim size and cover design, but don’t do much in the way of matching Chick’s (or Fred Carter’s) art style. And very few even attempt to craft a Chick-style proselytizing narrative. The Forgotten Velvet does all of the above–and does it well! Bonus: I was “converted” by the track’s argument. I was remided that my favorite VU records–The Velvet Underground and Loaded–are both Yule joints. 

Dwellings #1 – Jay Stephens

Tiki: A Very Ruff Year by David Azencot and Fred Leclerc

Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created Nancy – Bill Griffith

All Tomorrow’s Parties: The Velvet Underground Story- Koren Shadmi

Monica – Dan Clowes

The highest compliment I can pay a book is this–which is absolutely the case with Monica: The minute I was done reading it I wanted to re-read it. This is not a book that one can evaluate on a single reading, but I’m pretty confident in saying that this is the best thing he’s done since Ice Haven. A deep dive re-read is definitely in my future.

Les Sauvages Animaux (FR) – Johan De Moor and Stephen Desberg

As mentioned re. The Forgotten Velvet, I love comics about music. I’m also interested in “funny animal” comics–and currently working on a music-related funny animal comic myself, In the Weeds. So, when I saw this French-language comic with animal characters that was about Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant, I had to pick it up. 

It’s… not exactly what you’d expect from the cover. Somewhat oddly, the only characters in the story who are anthropomorphic animals are Grant and the band; everyone else is human. Even more oddly (or maybe not?) they are animals in-world. Meaning: the human characters often comment on/refer to their being animals, Grant is addicted to honey rather than alcohol, etc. That said, once you get past this odd formal setup it’s a really fun ride. It’s beautifully-drawn and if you’re an afficianado of classic rock, you can spot a lot of deliberate homages to well-known photos of the band.

Dédales – Vols 1,2,3 (FR) – Charles Burns

Frustratingly, Charles Burns’s new series, Dédales, has not had an English release at all and has, instead, been coming out as a series of three album format books in French (and other languages). Supposedly, Abrams Comics Art has an English version in the works now that the French version has completed. I’m a huge Charles Burns fan, though, and there’s no way I was going to wait around for this thing go get translated, so I slogged through all three of them in French.

First off–as with Clowes/Monica–it’s increadibly heartening and impressive to see a mature cartoonist at this point in his carreer doing his absolute best work! It’s also amazing to see that he’s continuing to grow and expand with his drawing techniques. He’s doing a lot of interesting stuff here  that I’ve never seen before–in particular experimenting with color holds and also using 0/0/0/100 blacks (rather than “rich blacks”) to differentiate between the main narrative and  in-world films.

This is Burns’s most down-to-earth long story. Sure, there’s a lot of dream imagery, etc., but no one’s got a mouth growing on their neck, etc. It’s mostly a very personal story about a bunch of twenty-something kids and their personal and creative dynamic.