<!-- Deleted image removed: left|thumb|200px|Foreign reprint of 1925–26 Wash Tubbs strips -->
Wash Tubbs is an American daily comic strip created by Roy Crane that ran from April 14, 1924 to 1949, when it merged into Crane's related Sunday page, Captain Easy. Crane left both strips in 1943 to begin Buz Sawyer, but a series of assistants, beginning with Leslie Turner, kept the combined Captain Easy daily and Sunday strips going until October 1, 1988.
History
Initially titled Washington Tubbs II, it originally was a gag-a-day daily 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.
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, starting July 30, 1933. Wash continued to appear as a supporting character, but he became steadily less important during the 1940s.
After Crane’s departure, control of the strip then passed to Crane’s assistant, Leslie Turner, who had ghosted on the daily strip since 1937. and 1937 (Wash Tubbs, as early as The Comics #1, March 1937 cover date) into the 1940s.
— co-assembled by Jim Ivey with Gordon Campbell and featuring a foreword by Charles M. Schulz
The entire 1924–43 run of Crane’s strip was reprinted in Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, an 18-volume series with biographical and historical commentary by Bill Blackbeard and design by Bhob Stewart. This series was published by NBM Publishing on a quarterly schedule from 1987 to 1992.