Leslie H. Turner (1899-1988) was an American cartoonist. He was Roy Crane's assistant and eventual successor on the long-running newspaper comic strip Captain Easy .
Turner was born in Cisco, Texas in December of 1899. He served for a short time in the U.S. Army at the tail end of World War I and later attended Southern Methodist University, where he received his degree in 1922. Turner spent his early career doing freelance magazine illustration work in New York, placing his art in the top magazines of the time- Judge, the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home Journal and Boys' Life . In 1937, Turner was hired to assist on Roy Crane's popular newspaper adventure strip Wash Tubbs/Captain Easy *. Crane was content to leave the Sunday Captain Easy feature entirely to Turner, focusing his energy on the daily Wash Tubbs strips. In 1943, Crane signed on to produce a new strip for King Features Syndicate, Buz Sawyer . Turner inherited the daily and went on to draw both strips for many years, finally retiring at the end of the 1960s. His last Captain Easy strip appeared in January of 1970. Captain Easy continued its run until 1988.
*Crane's original daily feature was called "Wash Tubbs", but soon the popular Captain Easy character was spun-off to his own Sunday feature. After running separately for many years, the two strips both began to carry the title "Captain Easy" around 1949.
From the guide to the Leslie Turner Cartoons, 1966-1967, (Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries)
