Word: walts
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...their old Lizzies for newer models. One clever strip has an entire conversation in car-related numbers: "34 x 4 1/2?" "95 x 5" "Do 70?" "Do 80!" "3,000!" "Offer 2250!" But the real heart of the strip began beating on February 14, 1921 when the central character, Walt Wallet, a rotund confirmed bachelor with a sharp cowlick of hair sticking out the top of his oval head, opened his door to discover a baby left on his doorstep...
...Walt wakes up to feed Skeezix during a trip to Yellowstone...
...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...
These very early strips in Walt and Skeezix set the charming, humane tone of the series to come. Much of the humor derives from Walt's application of car mechanics to the raising of a baby. In one amusing strip, he tricks out the baby carriage with, "a bumper, windshield wings, spotlight that reels out?an awning and a set of snubbers to take the rebound out the springs." The scenes with Walt and Skeezix together are filled with genuine warmth that seems almost totally absent from many of today's family entertainments. King would even occasionally sacrifice...
...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...