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Golden Age Collection
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Started by BangZoom,

18,204 posts in this topic

adamstrange

adamstrange

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Roy Crane was an absolute master of craftint to add texture and depth to his drawings!

 

captaineasy3.jpg

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seank

seank

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I don't remember the story but I thought that the guys hanging over the sharks were Chinese. If I remember correctly, the Japanese invaded the mainland during WWII and were in control of the country until the Allies defeated them and liberated the country. Brief freedom before the communist take over. I will go back and check the story one of these days.

bb

 

 

Yes. Japan invaded China in the 1930s and perpetuated many atrocities upon the Chinese. China was on the side of the allies during the war and America fought to liberate the Chinese. JG Ballard's "Empire of the Sun" is about his family being captured by the Japanese at the start of the war and being forced to live in a prison camp. IIRC, his father was a British diplomat.

 

 

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BB-Gun

BB-Gun

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Roy Crane was an absolute master of craftint to add texture and depth to his drawings!

 

captaineasy3.jpg

 

I had forgotten the history of the strip but found an article by R.C.Harvey which described Crane's technique and his relationship with Leslie Turner who took over the strip. Crane was an innovator and could tell a good story. I have a years worth of daily and sunday pages (no color) but I think they are after the story done in Cap Easy 13. Most of that series was probably from an earier adventure in the 1930's. Can anyone date this more exactly? Below is a portion of Harvey's article describing the shading technique which was used so effectively by Crane and Turner.

 

[Towards the end of the 1930s, Crane added two new arrows to his creative quiver — Craftint doubletone illustration board and a full-time assistant. Both figure importantly in the history of the medium; both can be seen as Crane contributions to the art of the comic strip.

 

As we have noticed, Crane had been experimenting for years with ways of giving his pictures different textures and tones. Late in 1936, he chanced upon Craftint doubletone, and within six months, he had adopted exclusively this method of achieving tonal effects. Doubletone illustration board is a chemically treated drawing paper. By applying a foul-smelling liquid developer with a brush or pen, an artist can make fine lines or tiny dots appear. The lines Crane brought out created two patterns: parallel diagonal lines or cross-hatching. In reproduction, the diagonal lines gave a drawing a light gray tone; the cross-hatched lines, a dark gray tone.

 

Crane had dabbled briefly with the use of Ben Day shading as early as the spring of 1936. Ben Day shading, a gray tone of tiny dots created mechanically in the photographic stage of reproduction, produced a single, uniform gray tone. Crane used it sometimes alone, sometimes augmented by hayey cross-hatching with a pen. During 1936, he would deploy every method he could think of for creating variety in texture and tone — grease crayon, splattered ink, Ben Day, and cross-hatching and shading with a pen. He was searching. And once he found Craftint doubletone, the quest was over. With twice the gray-tone capability of Ben Day, Craftint was clearly the superior product.

 

By April 1937, Crane was using doubletone on a daily basis. Grease crayon and all the other textural effects were abandoned for good. With Craftint doubletone, Crane created some of the most beautiful scenes in comics. With solid black as a third "tone" — progressively, the darkest of the three — he produced pictures with photographic gradations of gray, giving his strip a visual depth no other strip on the funnies pages had. He is noted for the exquisite delicacy of shade and tone in his outdoor scenes. Distant objects, he rendered in the lightest gray tone; closer to the camera, he added the dark gray. With doubletone, he could give the backgrounds against which he played out his stories a photographic realism — dramatic seascapes, moody wind-swept swamps, majestic mountain ranges, brooding jungles festooned with foliage and vines and mysterious shadowy somethings. As always, the realism of the settings added an aura of actuality to the otherwise sometimes fantastic events.

 

Just about the time he had mastered doubletone, Crane acquired a full-time assistant. Apparently, Crane lost his most trusted bullpen assistant because NEA assigned that individual to other chores. Whatever the case, sometime in the summer or early fall of 1937, Crane wrote to a friend of his youth, Leslie Turner, and asked for help. The two had reconnected briefly in 1923 when Turner came to New York to pursue a career in illustration. Then Crane went to Cleveland in 1924 to do Wash Tubbs out of the NEA offices, and Turner stayed on in the Big Apple.

 

Turner was an established illustrator by 1929 when a medical condition forced him to seek a warmer climate. He tried ranching on his father-in-law's sheep ranch in southeastern Colorado for several years but returned to New York and magazine illustration in 1933. By 1935, he was re-established as an illustrator. Then in 1937, he got the letter from his old chum Crane.

 

Crane had been doing the strip for nearly fourteen years without a break. It was a grueling pace — albeit no different than that endured by every syndicated newspaper cartoonist. The only way a syndicated cartoonist got a vacation was by working twice as hard: if a cartoonist drew two weeks' worth of strips in one week, he could take the next week as vacation. By 1937, Crane needed a rest. He wanted to escape the deadline-meeting ordeal for an extended period — say, six weeks — without having to double his rate of production. He could do it if he had an assistant who could draw enough like him to sustain the strip. His old friend Turner was his choice.

 

Before leaving for his European vacation, Crane finished writing the story he was in the middle of. Then he left, and Turner drew the strip. Turner's work was published from October 17 through December 1, 1937. When Crane returned, Turner stayed on as his assistant, and the two moved to Florida, the first of the NEA stable to escape the, er, stable in Cleveland. "This new field appealed to me," Turner once wrote, "and I stayed on as his assistant for nearly six years [until Crane left the strip]. And he taught me all I know about the writing and drawing of the continuity strip. During those years we worked together harmoniously, with never an unpleasant episode that I can recall."

 

Crane described the way he and Turner divided the production chores: "We each had our specialties. I did the writing, drew all of the Sunday, all water and action on the daily, while he drew girls, aircraft, etc. The strip sprang back to life." In the early days, it wasn't quite that clean-cut a division of labor: Turner recalled times when, pressed to meet a deadline, they'd work together on the same strip, cut in half, each doing two panels.]

bb

 

 

 

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BangZoom

BangZoom

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weirdtales2.jpg

 

The July 1925 Weird Tales contains Robert E. Howard's first published story, "Spear and Fang."

 

Howard's second published story, "In the Forest of Villefere," appears in the August issue.

 

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