Gasoline Alley has been around forever. It was old when I was a wee lad. It shows the difference between modern one-shot gag strips today and the leisurely pace of illustration in the early 20th century.
Here is a contribution from Joyville:
WADE
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There!
I’m just getting out from these latest crazy weeks crammed with work (of that kind one has to do to live decently), particular obsessions (what would Life be without them?) and a lightning visit to Paris (where I had the pleasure to meet nice and very talented women: Mathyld, Lili Scratchy, Chamo, Delphine Durand: thanks so much for sharing with us a piece of your time).
Luckily, a comic lover always get any time to taste the fruits of the noble art of cartooning. As for me, I gave it completely to reread Frank King’s Gasoline Alley (a little part of King’s vast volume of work, of course). And it worked like a motherly hug, as it couldn’t be any other way!
To tell the truth, the strip was practically a mystery to me before D+Q decided to reprint it. Yes, I had seen before some scraps here and there, but naturally nothing to draw my own conclusions. So here goes my deeply thanks to Jet Heer, Chris Oliveros and Chris Ware, the editors of this gem, because Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.
Otherwise, one can’t help feeling a lively sensation of being a witness to a medium establishing its form and conventions while reading Gasoline Alley nowadays. Frank King amongst other masters had the privilege (and cleverness) to lay comics foundations in order to Cartooning was regarded as a real mass medium: an art with its own, not transferable language.
Comic is necessary elliptical, a “space” where the reader has to fill up the gaps, and so panels (and the gutter between them) turn into the most significant tools in comics. And I was surprised how was King conscious about this matter. Look these comic strips from the early years:
King used to make use of a thin stroke as a gutter to divide the action. The strips were full of chats and trivial episodes such as heating the milk for the baby’s bottle, a walk in the mountains or going for a drive, or just changing a tired wheel in the garage, where King enjoyed squeezing all their contents:
When the action took place at night or in a darker spot, King -in a design choice- could change the thin stroke to leave a blank between borders of different panels, and so avoiding black masses overlapped:
But when the action in the strip meant a substantial time warp -less usual than it appears in the series, King could use this separation as well as to make quite clear that time is space in comics:
That was really unusual in these early Gasoline Alley works, but, in a way, it might show us how King was worried for comics form and the way to distribute time into space to tell a story and that comics in 1921 was an art still in the making. So often the tools of an art fall into stereotypes because of time and certain laxity. The recovery of these old gems can help us to remember their real functions, I think.
But if the dailies are a total pleasure to taste trustingly, the sundays are just stunning – and perhaps the only ones which color work dares to rival Little Nemos’. A long while ago Sunday Press run a beautifully-produced edition of Gasoline Alley Sundays collection and, since it’s one of the books from my library I love best, whenever I can I recommend it earnestly -mostly bearing in mind it’s currently lower . These samples below taken from Heritage are three fine examples of what I mean:
In case you want to see more of these lovely boards, you just have to follow this link to Roger Clark Art site. (Please, check out Perry sundays too, it’s worth it as for the color!)
That’s all folks! Time has come to get back to some of my left-out-for-a-long-time favorite blogs now…
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