Collectors of original comics art cringe at a piece in this condition.
It’s got some issues. I keep staring at this memento mori, set in Gasoline Alley, trying to figure the exact nature of them.
Each of the four panels of this strip were drawn on separate pieces of art board, then pasted on thinner paper in a row to comprise that day’s continuity. As a result, the full piece feels slightly “scored” at each panel border. It wants to fold itself up in four. The shaded area seems to be a light blue watercolor. Is the brown stain rubber cement on the reverse side of the board asserting itself on the front, some shading film that’s fallen off and discolored the paper, or something else altogether?
Would it have troubled Frank King to see how the art materials of his heyday deteriorated his hard day’s work? I’d be foolish to say it wouldn’t annoy him or any proud craftsman. But check the trail in the rear view mirror: By the publication date of this strip, he would have been creating daily installments for about two and a half decades. If they were all returned to him, if he’d kept them all, his studio would be piled with -- ballpark -- over seven thousand of them. I imagine he’d want them, but it’s tough to visualize a stack of seven thousand of anything, or see how it would keep from impeding the manufacture of the next seven thousand. There was not an established secondary market for these. What’s happened to the artwork of his era’s cartoonists is the source of many a bad anecdote. It was given away for the asking, it was thrown away, it was lost, strayed, swiped, sent to fans or maybe traded to other cartoonists.
However, this is not a lecture on creators’ rights, nor the enlightened times we enjoy today, nor is it an essay on art conservation.
Cartoonists set great store by their work’s reproduction. Their art, handcrafted down to the lettering, was almost of secondary importance. No matter how proud one was of a strip, no matter how pretty it was on the drawing board, no matter how much filigree was in the linework, the goal was to have it roll off the press and stick to newsprint, a grade of paper specifically chosen for its cheapness. Chosen? It was the default option: publishers would buy worse paper, if only they could.
So slap on the Pro White, carve away with the X-Acto and daub on the Best Test as liberally as you like, since the condition of the original is not what matters, it’s all about the quality of its reproduction, and on porous paper that soaks up muddy ink like a ShamWow. Joe Morning Coffee doesn’t see the white-out over the smudgy fingerprints or smell the glue covering the dismal first draft, or know if you can swing a mean Windsor Newton brush, or care. Make him laugh or advance the story.
King’s aim was to provide another tiny advancement of the current story he was telling, as well as a much larger one built by accretion and sheer perseverance.
Gasoline Alley, as its title suggests, began when the automobile was still remarkable and novel. It was mostly devoted to camaraderie among car mechanics. But with the arrival of a foundling on the doorstep of the main protagonist, Walt, who named the baby boy Skeezix, the strip took a step closer to domestic comedy.
Yet King found a way to distinguish Gasoline Alley from the work of his contemporaries.
He set himself the challenge of allowing his characters to age. The Peanuts gang remained in elementary school from start to finish. Little Orphan Annie ran over 85 years without its nominal heroine becoming old enough to buy a brew or get a learner’s permit.
Moreover, no comic strip ever concerned itself with money the way Gasoline Alley did. Even a strip called “Tillie the Toiler” didn’t discuss the working week with the same vigor. Dagwood was a millionaire’s boy who threw it all away to marry chorus girl Blondie and spent the rest of his life slaving for Mr. Dithers, but that and other “workplace comedies” just didn’t have striving for the American Dream in its DNA.
In Gasoline Alley, much is made of earning a living, how to make a buck and keep it, and what needs to be done to stay afloat. Can it just be coincidence that Walt and Skeezix’s surname is Wallet?
Skeezix gets an office job and works on a newspaper for a time. His brother Corky opens a diner. Skeezix, no stranger to entrepreneurship, opens a new firm with his business partner, Wilmer Bobble. In a great Sunday episode from 1945, Wallet & Bobble discuss their work ethic and their aspirations. “We’ll work like heck with our heads and with our hands,” says Skeezix.
“Right you are,” replies Wilmer, “An’ no job will be too hard for us.”
Counters Skeezix, “We’ll live up to our motto – ‘We Tackle Anything.’”
They keep this up, actually living inside their fantasy of the firm growing more prosperous, expanding in size and staff, and its assignments becoming all the more outrageous, like figuring out how to get a locomotive out of the side of a building. They conjure up the eventuality of having to build a new plant, hire an office staff, and have so much work that they’ll have to take the wives and children they don’t yet have on vacations in Panama and Peru to get away from it all.
Finally, reality sets in. Surveying their tiny quarters, Skeezix rubs his chin the way people only do in comic strips and admits, “On second thought, Wilmer, it’s really a little dump we have here after all.”
John Dos Passos wrote the novels that comprise the U.S.A. Trilogy. Throughout their pages, he traces the beginnings of several young men and women, most of them from impoverished backgrounds. He picks up their narrative when they’ve just about had enough of their provincial small towns and farm communities (and when said towns have had just about enough of them in kind), when they’re ready to shove off and grow up, eager to see what the world has to offer them. They have plans or at least dreams of escaping the destinies of their birth circumstances, and that usually involves a train trip to New York or Washington, or a voyage abroad, voluntary or not. Dos Passos often takes inventory of their finances right down to the change in their pockets. The characters muse about whether it’s enough to get them breakfast, or just coffee, or a flop, of maybe a room at the Y. He often weaves these threads together, allowing his characters to cross paths as they embrace the future, become successful, grow in society’s esteem. Advancing one protagonist’s fortunes to a certain height, he will drop his or her story and begin anew in another locale. Not unlike a cartoonist who’s in it for the long haul.
Scarcely a conventional novelist, Dos Passos surrounds these chunks of story with biographies of the great (Edison, Bryan, Debs, Veblen) and what he terms “The Camera Eye” as well as “Newsreels.” They’re scattershot through the text, with snippets of song lyrics and slogans, clippings and headlines of news accounts to provide some context for his pilgrims’ progress.
Would I be torturing a metaphor to draw a parallel between this technique and the context a comic strip enjoys, surrounded and enveloped in the current events and editorials and advertising slogans of that day’s newspaper? Okay, maybe I am.
But as avant-garde as Dos Passos can be, his m.o. is perfectly traditional in an important respect: he knows what the future holds for his characters. The Great War looms ahead of them, and they’re all about to be pulled into the vortex of Nineteen Nineteen. The drumbeat of the marching band and the flag flying from every skyscraper window prove inexorable, as
small-town boys become soldiers and sailors, and hope for trysts with small-town girls who drive ambulances for the Red Cross. And if Dos Passos didn’t know this was going to transpire in these books, he wouldn’t have started writing.
When Frank King embarked on his open-ended domestic comedy, he couldn’t have known the stock market was going to crash. He couldn’t know when Prohibition would be repealed. He couldn’t know that The War to End All Wars would have a sequel.
I suspect he’d always planned to have Skeezix spend some time in uniform, or he might not have sent him to a military academy. But World War II would have been unfathomable from the hazy perspective of the Jazz Age.
Fans of the strip are impressed that the characters “age in real time.” More impressive is that it’s written in “real time.” Anything in the rest of the paper can throw the continuity a curve ball. Now Skeezix is in this man’s Army, stationed in Africa, anxiously awaiting mail call with the rest of the G.I.s.
Imagine you’ve sold your strip about the hilarious happenings of some endearing hipster twentysomethings at a downtown dotcom: how they work, how they play foosball, and how annoying they are to East Village bartenders. Then 9/11 happens. Then some other stuff happens. And keeps happening.
In a casual conversation sometime in the 80’s, I mentioned to comics historian John Benson how much I liked Gasoline Alley. “Yeah. And where would you be reading that?” was his somewhat bemused reply. Sheepishly, I had to admit I was basing my learned opinion on the half dozen Sunday strips reproduced in Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams’ tome, The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics.
If you were serious about reading Gasoline Alley at all, you would find other aficionados and buy, borrow or trade comic strips clipped from old newspapers, amassed in bulk or catch-as-catch-can; a process, in those pre-Internet days, that was every bit as convenient as it sounds. I didn’t imagine that I had either the resources or the stamina for that literal paper chase. Constructing a time machine sounded vaguely more practical.
But how else could it be read? Where had this fantastically long and elaborate narrative been collected? Where was it stored so that the new reader could get some sense of the backstory of what was becoming a family saga, the Great Forgotten American Novel?
Where? A handful of children’s books, published by Reilly & Lee, a few Whitman Big Little Books, which are illustrated prose adapted from the strip, scant and haphazard appearances in comic books which, if they were radioactive, would barely register on a Geiger counter, and that’s about all.
Prior to the most recent initiative that began to appear in 2007, there has been no prior sustained attempt to collect or reprint the bulk of Gasoline Alley, despite that enjoyment of the strip depends on a deep knowledge of the ever-maturing characters and their relationships.
So let’s review: that’s four drawn panels a day, for decades. The physical art itself is meaningless until printed for an audience that absorbs this continuity four panels at a time, then it is thrown away and never collected satisfactorily in the artist’s lifetime. You’re always involved in the Now, and you never think about the goings-on within it until confronted with it the next day.
Very Zen.
