Word: skeezix
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...have begun catering heavily to this market with such complete reprint series as Fantagraphics' Krazy and Ignatz, reprinting George Herriman's "Krazy Cat," and their best-selling Complete Peanuts line of hardcovers. Now, Montreal's Drawn & Quarterly has joined in with perhaps the most nostalgic reprint yet, Walt and Skeezix (400 pages; $30), the first volume of the complete daily strips of Frank King's "Gasoline Alley." Wonderfully warm and humane, the book should come with a warning not to mix it with alcohol or old-timey music lest you lapse into irreversible reverie...
...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 the full 1921 and 1922 run, excluding color Sunday strips, the period when "Gasoline Alley" had just started to appear as a four panel strip after beginning in 1919 as a series of single gag panels. Gorgeously designed and printed on heavy, off-white paper Walt and Skeezix...
...Skeezix' arrival on Valentine...
This arrival, named Skeezix, instantly changed the nature of the strip from a boys-only car-centered daily to a domestic comedy that reflected America's collective self-image. For the first time ever, Americans could watch a set of characters growing up just as they did. Not until the advent of television would there be any equivalent mass media experience. The Wallets will go through the boom of the 20s, struggle through the Great Depression, after which Skeezix will join the military and fight in the Second World War until he comes home and raises a family...
...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...