The Last Book I Read

I have to admit with just a week to go before I head beack to work, I wanted to read something somewhat light and entertaining. I couldn't have made a beter choice than Volume 1 of Roy Crane's Captain Easy: Soldier of Fortune. Captain Easy was one of the greatest adventure strips in newspaper comics history, and although I've known its reputation for quite awhile, I've never seen more than a handful of the actual pages. This collection provides two years worth of stories. and they are fantastic. Crane, who would go on to create another classic with Buz Sawyer, was a master of the form, and although these strips are over 75 years old, they still deliver a great jolt of pure entertainment. Easy is, as the subtitle suggests, something of a free agent, wandering the four corners of the globe (mainly Asia in this volume) looking for fortune, adventure and romance. He is a character of immense physical and mental resources, and part of the fun here is watching the ways he outwits his adversaries over and over again. Crane is a fantastic draftsman, creating beautiful imaginary lands, populated with interesting characters. More to the point, his tales are filled with wit and humor, as well as action, not to mention a lot of pretty girls. Nowadays it's hard to find this kind of story-- action-adventures in the funnies, in movies, or on TV seem to revolve around the supernatural or are ripe with moral ambiguity. There's nothing wrong with that, but there's something deeply satisfying about watching a somewhat normal guy overcome great odds without the help of superpowers, or by giving in to his dark side. The pop culture comparison that seems most apt to me is actually contemporary to Easy, the classic radio drama I Love a Mystery, created by Carlton E. Morse. In fact, Easy seems to combine the key traits of that program's three protagonists: the brains of Jack Packard, the brawn of Reggie York, and the good humor and free-spiritedness of Doc Long. Maybe the world has become too complicated a place to sustain these kinds of idealistic images of heroism, but the fact that this book held me enthralled from beginning to end suggests that they still have some validity and even relevance n the modern world. I hope there's at least enough interest to insure that this is only the first of a long series of reprints collecting the rest of Easy's adventures.