Right Back In the Alley with Skeezix
I’ve been hooked on the Gasoline Alley comic strip since I was a kid, probably because it was one of the cartoons that my dad used to read to me out of the Daily News when I sat on his lap. Today, sadly, I read it mostly out of habit…only mildly amusing on its best days, it is – pardon the awful pun – mostly running on fumes.
Under the deft hand of its creator, Frank O. King, however, Gasoline Alley was – at its early 20th Century start – truly sublime. King’s strip dealt with real stuff in real ways…men’s relationships with their male pals, guys’ fear and lack of understanding of women, the bonds between fathers and sons, and the wanderlust that the advent of automobiles made it possible for the first time in human history for the average Joe to satisfy in a big way. (It was also about the complicated emotions and agendas related to foster care and adoption…but that’s the subject for another post…).
At the time, King’s most heralded breakthrough was that the strip’s characters aged (and have today grown old). From today’s standpoint, in the midst of comics like Doonesbury and For Better or For Worse – both fine strips, by the way – this might not seem like much of an innovation.
But in an era when the Yellow Kid never grew a full head of hair, and Ignatz and Krazy remained their ageless, sexually indeterminate selves, readers were charmed to follow Skeezix from that basket on the doorstep to adulthood. This innovation however, was merely a backdrop against which the characters’ emotions and personalities could grow, become more complex and more genuine, and become subtly more compelling.
Jeet Heer, Chris Oliveros, and Chris Ware have assembled the daily Gasoline Alley strips – not from the very start in 1918, but from when it caught its stride in 1921, the year that foundling Skeezix was mysteriously deposited at ‘Uncle’ Walt’s threshold. They’re publishing the comics, two years at a time, one volume a year – two have been issued so far.
Through the good graces of Frank King’s granddaughter Drewanna, they’ve been granted access to the family archives, which has enabled them to preface each of the books with biographical information that reveals how the personalities and events of the strip paralleled those in King’s own life – the birth of his Robert (three years after a stillborn child), his fascination with cars and cross-country road trips, and his real life friends and family upon whom he based Gasoline Alley’s characters. The collection – as was the original strip, itself – is an act of meticulous love.
Says Ware: “I am convinced that after all these books are published, Gasoline Alley will stand as one of the most individual, hum, and genuinely great works in the history of comics.†Read them, and you’ll be convinced, as well.
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