Walt & Skeezix. 1923 & 1924. by frank king

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

gasoline alley strips: 1923-24, not inclusive of sundays.
interesting perspective of life from that time period and the type of characters. i get into the story sometimes and sometimes laugh and sometimes groan and sometimes get taken aback around racial considerations--then i consider the time from which it was written and it is better included than censored, as some works are. it is good in the way of consistent characters, and ongoing stories.

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leighton9999

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

I've dipped in and out of Gasoline Alley over the past 10+ years. I really wish I had just started at the start and went through it.

This is probably the most fun I've had with the series. Perhaps now that I'm a bit older it's more relevant to my life.

It was so heartwarming to see Walt adopt Skeezix. Walt goes on a car race across country against the cheapskate Avery. Later someone kidnaps Skeezix, but Walt thankfully gets him back and goes off the grid for a few weeks. He ends up funding a goldminer but loses the (worthless) contract to Avery in a footrace. Later the goldminer comes to town... he actually found gold! But now it all goes to Avery.

I wasn't as big a fan of the Phyllis Blossom storyline. Walt after he loses the car race has to propose to her, but she rejects him because she had heard about the bet. But its pretty obvious they need to get together! Anytime Walt hears about the negatives of a relationship (such as when he see the receipts to Blossom's new dress and hat) he states "Oh Boy! I'll say I known when I'm well off!". It must have been a monthly thing here.

Rachel who lives with Walt is a good character. Her relationship with Skeezix is adorable. The depiction of black people... very racist caricatures is unfortunate.

The artwork throughout is absolutely a gold-standard for comic strips. It has a perfect balance between cartoon and realism. It's always precise and polished.

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CommanderSheep

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

Note on the edition: I like reading old comics in their original four-panel layout, but it makes for a really crappy physical reading experience. This book seemed brand new when I got it and now the rear spine is separating at the hinge. I'm not even a careless reader; I'm a librarian, for pity's sake! It would be nice if the publisher would reinforce the binding to support the extra weight of the portrait layout.

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Zheng56

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

I'd always been interested in Gasoline Alley - I'd seen some of Dick Moore's continuities from the late '70 & early '80s but never any runs of Frank King's original work. These volumes are a delight, collecting 2 years' worth of strips in each volume - like Fantagraphics' Complete Peanuts series. Gasoline Alley is rare among strips in that the characters age in more-or-less "real time". (The only modern strip I know of that has done this is the recently concluded For Better or For Worse.) By this reckoning, Dick Tracy, Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead and so many others would be long dead by now or very, very old.

Anyway, I guess the syndicate wouldnt allow the use of the Gasline Alley trademark, so these public-domain (1920s) strips are collected under the names of Walt Wallet and his adopted son Skeezix.

This volume contains the 3rd & 4th years of the strip with Skeezix as a baby (the pre-Skeezix material, a couple of years, have not been collected), with the primary focus being Walt's struggles with the adoption process of the abandoned infant.

I started reading this shortly after reading Steve Martin's The Pleasure of My Company, and anyone who knows me knows how I dote on my nieces and nephews when I can, especially my "adopted" nephew Antonio (the only one geographically "local" to his Unky these days). I really relate to the affection Walt shows for his young ward/son, and the view of impoverished life in the 1920s - in the decade before the Great Depression - is interesting, as is the views of America as it was at the time (including some of the racial caricatures sadly in vogue then), politically, philosophically and physically.

Also included in each volume are essays on creater Fran King and on the world around him at the time he created these wonderful cartoons.

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masakar

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

The mid-twenties are when we really see Frank King find his voice and style, and back away from the traditional gag structure of classic comic strips. The unfolding of these characters' lives in real time is satisfying and poignant, and we get to spend quiet and tumultuous times with characters whose quirks are as familiar as they are distinctive. King's almost lapidary sense of detail in each panel gives the ephemeral passage of days a compelling solidity in the living world, and the series works like a kind of universal time capsule in which everything is always already faded, nostalgic, and precious.

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Cherryblamer

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

This is the second book in this remarkable series collecting the years 1923 and 1924. Despite the title, this is actually the long-running and highly acclaimed Gasoline Alley strip, but reframed through its lead character, Walt, and his adopted son, Skeezix, whom he discovers abandoned on his doorstep at the beginning of the previous book.

This volume covers the actual adoption, and plays out the mystery of the mother who has given him up. There are several moments of high drama, not least a kidnapping, and all this in a humour strip! But it’s not all about Walt and Skeezix’s relationship. The strip began as a celebration of the motor car and those that liked to tinker with them, and all that remains. We even have a race, from New York to San Fransico, between Walt and his friend Avery in his antiquated vehicle.

Most striking about the strip is that what you’re reading is 100 years old, and yet the characters are completely relatable, from Walt’s bumbling affection of Blossom to Avery’s penny-pinching ways.
Unlike Peanuts and most other strips, where characters never age, Walt & Skeezix plays out in real time. We see Skeezix develop, his speech become more accomplished, and his actions become the centre of many a gag. This creates a changing dynamic that the characters can react to in a way absent from almost all other strips.

Naturally, there are some elements of the strip, not least the depiction of Walt’s housemaid Rachel, that most certainly have not stood the test of time. However, bearing in mind this is ten decades old, there’s still so much to enjoy in this genuinely classic strip.

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