Wash Tubbs

Wash Tubbs was an American comic strip created by Roy Crane that ran from April 14, 1924 to January 10, 1988.

Initially titled Washington Tubbs II, it originally was a gag-a-day strip which focused on the mundane misadventures of the title character, a bespectacled bumbler who ran a store. However, Crane soon switched from gag-a-day to continuity storylines. He reinvented the strip after its 12th week to make it the first true action/adventure comic strip, initially by having Tubbs leave the store and join a circus. To research this, Crane spent many days with a circus, even incorporating characters in the strip based directly on the circus performers he knew personally.

On Sundays, Wash Tubbs appeared as a topper, or subsidiary strip, from 1927 to 1933 over J. R. Williams' Out Our Way with the Willets Sunday strip.

Wash was a girl-crazy zany, and his character never truly changed even as the strip changed around him. After a Polynesian treasure hunt in which Wash made and lost a fortune, adventures followed in which he fell afoul of his arch-enemy, Bull Dawson, who reappeared throughout the series. Since the short Wash was not a fighter, Crane tried out several scrappier sidekicks until May 6, 1929, when he introduced Captain Easy, a tough, taciturn Southerner with a mysterious past. Easy gradually took over the strip and became its lead character, getting his own Sunday page, Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune, in 1933. Wash continued to appear as a supporting character, but he became steadily less important during the 1940s.

The Tubbs and Easy characters were owned by the Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicate. Crane left that syndicate and abandoned the strips in 1943 to begin Buz Sawyer, a strip he would own outright. After Crane’s departure, control of the strips passed to Crane’s assistant, Leslie Turner, who had worked on Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune since 1937. With Tubbs an increasingly unimportant character, Turner officially renamed the daily and Sunday strips Captain Easy in 1949.

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