By Paul Carrier
Every fan of early comic strips is familiar with Gasoline Alley, which Frank King created in 1918. King is long gone, but his pen has been passed on to various successors since he relinquished the Sunday strip in 1951 and the daily in 1959. Gasoline Alley continues to this day, making it the second-longest-running comic strip in the country.
At the outset, Gasoline Alley was true to its name. It starred four friends — Walt, Bill, Avery and Doc — who spent an inordinate amount of time hanging out in a back alley talking cars and tinkering. Their wives (Walt was the lone bachelor) made appearances as well, often grumbling about the amount of time their husbands devoted to their jalopies.
Then in February 1921, Gasoline Alley took a dramatic turn. That’s when someone left a newborn boy on Walt doorstep. He adopted the infant (named Skeezix) and raised him on his own until he married Phyllis Blossom in 1926. Walt’s clan grew from generation to generation, thanks to King’s radical notion that comic-strip characters should age in real time.
Jim Scancarelli, who has drawn the strip since 1986, killed off Phyllis in 2004, but Walt (now well over 100 years old) and Skeezix live on. The strip has a devoted following among aficionados, and is widely viewed as one of the greatest comic strips of all time. To satisfy that addiction, Drawn and Quarterly, a Montreal company, has been publishing an ongoing series of handsome hardcover reprints which, so far, cover strips from 1921 through 1930.
That Walt and Skeezix set, the sixth volume of which is due next year for 1931 and 1932, began with the strips immediately preceding Skeezix’s birth in 1921. But wait a minute. King launched Gasoline Alley in 1918. So, what has become of those pre-Skeezix strips, which focused on the camaraderie of Walt and his pals more than the domestic motif of the later years?
Once again, Drawn and Quarterly has come to the rescue, this time with the aptly titled Walt Before Skeezix, which was released this year. In addition to reproducing comics that ran from Nov. 24, 1918 through Dec. 31, 1920 — both single panels and, later, sequential strips — Walt Before Skeezix features a thoughtful introduction by Canadian journalist and comics scholar Jeet Heer. The subject of the early strips is “male fellowship,” Heer notes, “the way a shared interest in cars becomes an occasion for affectionate and mutual mockery.”
Artist and cartoonist Chris Ware penned the preface to this handsome, thick and hefty volume, which is similar in size and format to the Walt and Skeezix series. Period photographs, sketches and other ancillary items provide context, as do helpful endnotes by Tim Samuelson explaining many of the topical references in the cartoons. Walt Before Skeezix even includes King’s diary entries from 1915 and 1916.
As Heer points out, the first Gasoline Alley strips are filled with “false starts, failed experiments and erratic gropings.” But King found his legs over time. By 1920, his style had matured, with a cleaner, crisper line and a smaller, more stable cast of characters.
Human nature doesn’t really change very much over time — certainly not in the last 100 years or so — and the antics and attitudes that fill these early strips will not be foreign to 21st-century readers. The guys in the alley always are on the lookout for dubious ways to cut costs by investing in untested gimmicks, such as the “jigger” Avery buys for his car because it supposedly will “save 20 percent on gas.”
There are other recurring themes as well, including Walt’s insistence that he’s better off as a bachelor because his married pals are henpecked, Avery’s obsessive penny-pinching and the gang’s repeated attempts to get Doc to prescribe medicinal alcohol once Prohibition takes effect.
But if the stories King tells are recognizable, the lingo of the era is pleasingly exotic to our ear. These alley cats prattle on about such things as a bus (car); a bird (man); drag (political influence); and coin, beans and simoleons (money). A license plate is a number, a cheap car is a flivver, a friend is an old top and a car’s acceleration speed is its getaway.
Like the Gasoline Alley of the ensuing decades, the earliest strips in Walt Before Skeezix find gentle humor in middle-class normalcy and the quotidian details of 20th-century life. It’s a bygone era worth visiting, if you have Frank King as a guide.
At the outset, Gasoline Alley was true to its name. It starred four friends — Walt, Bill, Avery and Doc — who spent an inordinate amount of time hanging out in a back alley talking cars and tinkering. Their wives (Walt was the lone bachelor) made appearances as well, often grumbling about the amount of time their husbands devoted to their jalopies.
Then in February 1921, Gasoline Alley took a dramatic turn. That’s when someone left a newborn boy on Walt doorstep. He adopted the infant (named Skeezix) and raised him on his own until he married Phyllis Blossom in 1926. Walt’s clan grew from generation to generation, thanks to King’s radical notion that comic-strip characters should age in real time.
Jim Scancarelli, who has drawn the strip since 1986, killed off Phyllis in 2004, but Walt (now well over 100 years old) and Skeezix live on. The strip has a devoted following among aficionados, and is widely viewed as one of the greatest comic strips of all time. To satisfy that addiction, Drawn and Quarterly, a Montreal company, has been publishing an ongoing series of handsome hardcover reprints which, so far, cover strips from 1921 through 1930.
That Walt and Skeezix set, the sixth volume of which is due next year for 1931 and 1932, began with the strips immediately preceding Skeezix’s birth in 1921. But wait a minute. King launched Gasoline Alley in 1918. So, what has become of those pre-Skeezix strips, which focused on the camaraderie of Walt and his pals more than the domestic motif of the later years?
Once again, Drawn and Quarterly has come to the rescue, this time with the aptly titled Walt Before Skeezix, which was released this year. In addition to reproducing comics that ran from Nov. 24, 1918 through Dec. 31, 1920 — both single panels and, later, sequential strips — Walt Before Skeezix features a thoughtful introduction by Canadian journalist and comics scholar Jeet Heer. The subject of the early strips is “male fellowship,” Heer notes, “the way a shared interest in cars becomes an occasion for affectionate and mutual mockery.”
Artist and cartoonist Chris Ware penned the preface to this handsome, thick and hefty volume, which is similar in size and format to the Walt and Skeezix series. Period photographs, sketches and other ancillary items provide context, as do helpful endnotes by Tim Samuelson explaining many of the topical references in the cartoons. Walt Before Skeezix even includes King’s diary entries from 1915 and 1916.
As Heer points out, the first Gasoline Alley strips are filled with “false starts, failed experiments and erratic gropings.” But King found his legs over time. By 1920, his style had matured, with a cleaner, crisper line and a smaller, more stable cast of characters.
Human nature doesn’t really change very much over time — certainly not in the last 100 years or so — and the antics and attitudes that fill these early strips will not be foreign to 21st-century readers. The guys in the alley always are on the lookout for dubious ways to cut costs by investing in untested gimmicks, such as the “jigger” Avery buys for his car because it supposedly will “save 20 percent on gas.”
There are other recurring themes as well, including Walt’s insistence that he’s better off as a bachelor because his married pals are henpecked, Avery’s obsessive penny-pinching and the gang’s repeated attempts to get Doc to prescribe medicinal alcohol once Prohibition takes effect.
But if the stories King tells are recognizable, the lingo of the era is pleasingly exotic to our ear. These alley cats prattle on about such things as a bus (car); a bird (man); drag (political influence); and coin, beans and simoleons (money). A license plate is a number, a cheap car is a flivver, a friend is an old top and a car’s acceleration speed is its getaway.
Like the Gasoline Alley of the ensuing decades, the earliest strips in Walt Before Skeezix find gentle humor in middle-class normalcy and the quotidian details of 20th-century life. It’s a bygone era worth visiting, if you have Frank King as a guide.
