Customer Reviews

Sultry's Tiger (Buz Sawyer)

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Buz Sawyer is a bit of a puzzlement to review. I have seen much kudos for this strip and its art. I'm equivocal about the art, but the storylines keep us hooked even if they can be quite childish.

The art varies from very well-composed and rendered to surprisingly amateurish. While some faces are well drawn, though I'm no comic artist I can draw better faces than some of those in this strip. Crane's style remains true to its comic strip (as opposed to adventure strip) origins in Wash Tubbs, so the requirements he puts upon himself are not as stringent as for Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon series, which I have been reviewing. The comic strip approach allows Crane increased suspension of disbelief. It allows him to stray from realism and to use exaggerated gesture, thus conveying action, motion, urgency, emotion, and a number of other characteristics with his caricatural line. (It also 'inspires' some quite silly plots.) This gives considerable momentum to his storyline and that is why we find ourselves speeding through the whole book. A Steve Canyon plot is more involved, rigorous, ponderous and wordy, so that a year's worth of Steve Canyon takes about four times more time to read than does a Buz Sawyer (which omits the Sunday pages, which are not part of the continuity).

This book's landscape layout is more strip-friendly than is the Checker Book's Canyon series portrait (i.e. taller than wide) format, but the latter uses better paper and is better bound. My recommendation: this book is hard to get (I have a spare, btw), so if you have to choose between it and its near contemporary 1947 Steve Canyon, for reasons of cost, effort and quality, I recommend the latter, though the Buz Sawyer is very entertaining as well.

The second volume of Roy Crane's great strip to be reprinted by Manuscript Press. Better, in my opinion, than volume one, "War in the Pacific," which set the stage for this interesting and entertaining tale. Okay, this is isn't Steve Canyon, which was denser and more ponderous and better drawn, but personally, I fall asleep considering the many nuances of that strip and prefer this one.
Probably out of print by now, but highly recommended if you can find it! In my opinion, Buz Sawyer is one of the best adventure strips ever written, maybe not as good as Caniff's stuff, but still better than almost every other adventure strip of that era!