Buz Sawyer
World War II rendered the comic-opera settings of Tubbs' adventures frivolous, and the strip took on a new tone. In 1943, an offer from Hearst's King Features Syndicate persuaded Crane to jump ship and create a more realistic comic strip, Buz Sawyer. He left Wash Tubbs in the hands of his assistant, Leslie Turner, a boyhood friend who had shared the hobo life with him.
Crane, an excellent draftsman despite his deceptively cartoonish style, introduced more illustrative shading techniques to the daily comics page. He progressed from line drawings with crosshatching to grease pencil on textured paper, then to Benday Dots and finally to Craftint doubletone paper. The Craftint paper, when brushed with chemical solutions, revealed either one or two layers of diagonal shading. Under Crane's brush, the technique yielded scenes of dramatic atmosphere, such as junglescapes fading into the misty distance. As he had done with Wash Tubbs, Crane traveled to various locations to research his plot lines and visuals. According to Crane: "In using benday, at first I thought in terms of blacks, grays, and white. Years of indifferent results and frustration followed. Gradually, black became less important. Today white is not just something to bring out the color of black... on the contrary, black is something to bring out the color of white".
Crane progressively relinquished his cartooning to assistants, and he died in Orlando, Florida in 1977.
Today, Buz Sawyer has been resurrected digitally as one of the vintage strips in King Features' emailed DailyINK subscription service.
Read more about this topic: Roy Crane
Famous quotes containing the word sawyer:
“But that’s always the way; it don’t make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person’s conscience ain’t got no sense, and just goes for him anyway.... It takes up more room than all the rest of a person’s insides, and yet ain’t no good, nohow. Tom Sawyer thinks the same.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)