Reminder: Gasoline Alley Is A Great Strip About Fatherhood



I've thought a lot about Gasoline Alley this weekend, as a result of Ben Schwartz's New Yorker essay on the great strip, spotlighted below. I thought I'd provide several weeks for similar consideration by any of you so willing. It's a really great strip to read, although it took me seeing the strip in its pre-Skeezix incarnation for me to fully get what King was doing later on.

In a way, the comic strip is the best form for exploring things that happen to us day to day and primary relationships within one's family are one of those things. Life and serial-narrative comic strips are collections of moments, some profound and many incidental. There is a quiet deliberation and an almost invisible quality to their nature.

I wish for you the time and mood and mindset and resources to do a similar exploration of Frank King's work somewhere down the road. I'm very grateful for Gasoline Alley, and for all of those that have done some work of their own on its behalf. Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there, no matter when and where and for what audience they became one.

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* An Old Comic Strip About Modern Fatherhood, Ben Schwartz, The New Yorker, 2015.

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* A Bright, Well-Lit Alley, Andrew Arnold, Time.comix, 2005.
* A Poor Investment: Frank King's Gasoline Alley, Ng Suat Tong, Hooded Utilitarian, 2012.
* Growing Old In Gasoline Alley: 94 Years And Counting, RC Harvey, TCJ.com, 2013.
* Survey 1 Comic Strip Essays: Wade Simpson on Gasoline Alley aka Walt and Skeezix, Frank King, Center For Cartoon Studies Site, 2010.

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* Walt Before Skeezix by Frank King
* Walt and Skeezix 1921-1922: Volume 1 by Frank King
* Walt and Skeezix 1923-1924: Volume 2 by Frank King
* Walt and Skeezix 1925-1926: Volume 3 by Frank King
* Walt and Skeezix 1927-1928: Volume 4 by Frank King
* Walt and Skeezix 1929-1930: Volume 5 by Frank King
* Walt and Skeezix 1931-1932: Volume 6 by Frank King

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Here are some strips. In the old days this used to be a bad thing because you were "illustrating" your article with someone else's work, but I hope that these can be treated as destinations to visit. I'll take down any link asked. I'm also not 100 percent sure every page/strip is from King, as I'm not familiar with all the permutations of the strip. But this should give you an idea as to its offhand visual strength and its lovely pacing.

* 01
* 02
* 03
* 04
* 05
* 06
* 07
* 08
* 09
* 10
* 11
* 12
* 13
* 14
* 15

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