Word: alleys
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Best known for the way its characters aged in real time, "Gasoline Alley," which continues to this day, was about as popular with the World War II generation as "Peanuts" would later be with their kids. Incredibly, it has never before been reprinted. Edited and designed by the meticulous cartoonist Chris Ware, who is also behind the George Herriman series, this is the first volume of a projected 20-years-long series that will reprint the strip in its entirety up through the early 1950s when King started turning over duties to assistants. Walt and Skeezix volume one begins with...
...King (1883 - 1969) studied art and spent his adult life in Chicago, and "Gasoline Alley" is ostensibly set there, though you would never know it. It takes the form of a small town comedy, based primarily on King's memories of Tomah, Wisconsin, where he grew up. Centered on an alley of garages and a core of auto buffs, the early years of the strip now read like a priceless snapshot of America's burgeoning car culture. The central group of four friends are constantly patching tires, cleaning spark plugs and trading in their old Lizzies for newer models...
...Great Depression, after which Skeezix will join the military and fight in the Second World War until he comes home and raises a family of his own during the 1950s. Based heavily on King's own life, as evidenced by the archival materials provided in the book, "Gasoline Alley" would essentially become an illustrated daily diary of an American family in the 20th century...
...Besides Walt and Skeezix, the cast of central characters includes Avery, the penny-pincher, Bill the affable mechanic, and Doc, "adviser to the alley both as to physical ailments and mechanical ills." Women, at least at first, have only minor roles, with two exceptions. Mrs. Blossom, an attractive young lady of mysterious background appears halfway through this first volume to create some tension with the determined bachelor Walt. These sorts of plot developments - another involves a phony oil futures huckster - give the strip a narrative drive that take it well beyond a mere joke a day about cars and kids...
...comics, pop culture, nostalgia or the American experience should miss Frank King's Walt and Skeezix. "Gasoline Alley," with its gently paced melodrama, its charming humor, its caricatures, its cars, its countryside and its cityscape, fairly overflows with American iconography. Ideally, it should be taken out on a back screen porch on a warm afternoon, with a glass of cool lemonade and an old Western Electric circulating fan to thrum back and forth. But even without these accouterments, you will be swept away to another, bygone world...