Roy Crane: Forever the “Cartoonists’ Cartoonist”?

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)