Landon and Crane discussed a strip titled Washington Tubbs II about a diminutive goof employed at a grocery store.

After four months, Crane tired of the gag-a-day format and sent his pint-size hero hunting for a treasure buried somewhere on a South Pacific island.

The strip then evolved into a rollicking adventure yarn, with Crane introducing innovations in storytelling, sound effects and layouts, as noted by pop culture historian Tim DeForest: With the introduction in 1929 of the raffish soldier of fortune, Captain Easy, Crane heightened the spirit of adventure and later created a Sunday strip focusing on Captain Easy.

NBM Publishing's Flying Buttress Classics Library reprinted the complete run of Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy in a series of 18 volumes.

In 1943, an offer from Hearst's King Features Syndicate persuaded Crane to jump ship and create a more realistic comic strip, Buz Sawyer.

[2] Crane, an excellent draftsman despite his deceptively cartoonish style, introduced more illustrative shading techniques to the daily comics page.

Today, Buz Sawyer has been resurrected digitally as one of the vintage strips in King Features' emailed DailyINK subscription service.