Gasoline Alley (1918-1951) by Frank King
REVIEW BY R.C. HARVEY:
Fondly niched as the strip in which the characters aged, Gasoline Alley was created by Frank King (1883-1969) in 1918 at the behest of Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick, who wanted a feature that would appeal to people just learning how to take care of the automobiles, which, thanks to Henry Ford, were becoming widely available to a middle class public. Set in the alley where men met to inspect and discuss their vehicular passions, Gasoline Alley debuted November 24, joining several other panel cartoons that King boxed together on a black-and-whte Sunday page called "The Rectangle". On Monday, August 25, 1919, Gasoline Alley began running weekdays and soon appeared regularly in strip not panel cartoon form. To attract female readership, King was directed to put a baby into the strip, and since his main character, Walt Wallet, was a bachelor, the baby appeared rather unconventionally - in a basket on Walt's front doorstep on Valentine's Day 1921.
With the baby Skeezix preoccupying Walt, the strip took on familial overtones and developed a stronger thread of continuity. As Skeezix green up, the strip's other characters quite naturally also aged. Walt finally married and had other children while King traced Skeezix's life - through grade school, high school, graduation, his first job (on a newspaper), the army in World War II, and then, upon discharge, a job in the local gas station. Skeezix married his childhood sweetheart, and they had children - who, naturally, grow older. Usually drawing in a pedestrian but throughly competent manner, King experimented wildly in the 1930s on his Sunday page, playing with both the form of the strip and the style of rendering it. The strip remained determinedly small town America, and what the Wallet family experienced, every American family experienced, a tradition continued by King's successors - Dick Moores (from the late 1950s) and Jim Scancarelli (1896-present).
REVIEW BY CHRIS WARE:
...It was in Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams' Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics that I first saw, studied and spilled ink upon samples of King's work in my clunky attempts to understand his quiet genius, though this Smithsonian book only reproduced a few of the Gasoline Alley pages, so I eventually went out in search of surviving original newsprint examples, which in the days before eBay was not an easy task. Eventually, however, I assembled a small collection of King's large, colorful works, and it was living with these that cemented for me his unquestionable, unpretentious greatness as an artist. I purchased protective mylar sleeves that were more expensive than the original pages themselves, because just as the leaves that Walt and Skeezix walked through every autumn turned yellow and then brown, the woody paper they were printed on also rapidly darkened, as had all of the samples I'd hung up above my drawing table.
...the engine that kept Gasoline Alley running smoothly for almost fifty years under King's kind guidance was not an attempt to trace or impose a thread of meaning on his characters' lives any more than one can impose a course or meaning on one's own.
For lack of a better analogy, some writers tell stories and other writers write -- that is, they try to capture the texture and feeling of life within the limited means of their literary tools, and the story lives somewhere within. To my mind, King was really the first real "writer" in the comics, and its in these vista-filling sunday pages that he allows himself to write most eloquently. How many other cartoonists would dare make the colors of autumn the subject of their work? How lucky were the readers who received these temporary observations of life on their doorsteps every week; it seems almost inconceivable now that strips trading on such tenderness appeared in common newspapers...
FURTHER READING:
