For a while, King focused exclusively on the car talk of his regular cast (Walt, Doc, Avery, and Bill), and then in 1921, Colonel McCormick’s cousin, partner and head of the Tribune-Daily News syndicate, Captain Joseph Patterson, decided that the cartoon would be even more popular if something in it appealed to women. "Get a baby into the story fast," he commanded the flabbergasted King, who protested that Walt, the main character, was a bachelor. It was then decided to have Walt find a baby in a basket on his doorstep—which he did on Valentine's Day, 1921.I was thinking about "Gasoline Alley" this morning because I saw this in my Twitter feed...
With the arrival of the baby, the strip developed a stronger storyline. For instance, Walt took several days just to get the neighborhood's approval of the name he had chosen for the infant boy. “Skeezix” was Walt’s first choice, a slang term of endearment for a small child (akin to “squirt” or, even, “tyke”). Eventually, the boy was formally christened Allison: Alley-son, a son of the Alley.
Subsequently, almost accidentally, the strip evolved its most unique feature: its characters aged. The children grew up, and the adults grew older. To King, this innovative aspect of his strip was simply logical. "You have a one-week old baby, but he can't stay one week old forever. He had to grow." By logical extension, so did everyone else in the strip... This attribute of Gasoline Alley added a dimension of real life to the strip, and King went on to convert everyday concerns about automobiles into a larger reflection of American life in a small town.
More obsolete communications technology: Following up on our discussion of faxes and pdfs ("Obsolete communications technology", 7/13/2020), an even older textual transmission method is featured in the punch line of today's Doonesbury: I think that… https://t.co/gryXWgyjXS pic.twitter.com/G3WeZZmNhR— Language Log (@LanguageLog) July 19, 2020
... and — as someone who's never been a reader of "Doonesbury" other than when it's pushed in my face — looking at the pictures before reading the text, I said, "Is 'Doonesbury' one of those comics where the characters grow old?"
I knew "Gasoline Alley" was the first comic that had its characters age, and I got completely sidetracked into reading about 'Gasoline Alley.'" So pleased to get to a Comics Journal article! Click over to that and see some of the great drawings. I read that comic strip in the 1950s and 60s when I was growing up, and I remember it being a favorite of my parents (who specifically liked that the characters grew up and grew old). I brought up "Gasoline Alley" here in real space, and Meade said it was his favorite comic — "no other competition... There were many days when I only read that and nothing else... go to the comics page, read 'Gasoline Alley' and that was it."
And here's Rod:
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35 comments:
Doonesbury had several characters die, IIRC.
The purple ink was something you got with a spirit duplicator, not mimeo.
Years ago my family adopted a stray cat that we named Allie Khan.
I liked Terry & the Pirates and Prince Valiant. Steve Caniff and Hal Foster were closer to illustrators than to comic book artists. Lil Abner was, in its day, the most successful comic of all time. In his later years, Al Capp lost it and started molesting women and making fun of Democrats. Back then it was okay to molest women, but attacking Democrats got him cancelled.....I read Doonesbury regularly back in the eighties. He killed off one of the recurring characters. I don't think that had ever been done before. It was haunting to find mortality embedded in a comic strip character....I have never followed Gasoline Alley. Does the writer guide the characters to a final resting place. Perhaps, then the characters could continue in Heaven and there would no longer be any need to age them....Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side were the best. What is it about drawing cartoons that causes great cartoonists to burn out and go away?
The image becomes transformed, distorted through close inspection.
I read most of the comics which appeared in our daily paper when I was a kid and I remember the name, Gasoline Alley, so it must have been one of the ones which appeared. There were three categories of comics. Ones I didn't read, like Mary Worth, ones I looked forward to, because they were funny or clever to one degree or another, Lil Abner, Pogo, The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, Tumbleweeds, Bloom County, Shoe and Herman. And then there were ones I read, but didn't really expect much out of them, like, Nancy, Little Orphan Annie, Cathy, The Wizard of ID, BC, The Family Circus, Dennis The Menace, Funky Winkerbean, and yes, Gasoline Alley.
I think I was always drawn more to the Old Weird America cartoons. Earliest memories are of Major Hoople. Dick Tracy just got better and better, as Gould became obsessed with the Power of Magnetism is the Future! And as I got into my early adolescence, I was drawn more and more into lingering over the deeper meaning of Dogpatch's feminine side..
My all-time favorite was Pogo.
Comedy has to be true and universal to work effectively, therefore all material comes from daily life. That's why there is no such thing as abstract expressionism comedy.
I'm an Alley Oop and Get Fuzzy guy.
I've always read the comics. As a kid in Indianapolis, we had 'Uncle Windy Wally Narling' who read the Sunday comics on the radio every week. If the Plain Dealer cuts the comics, I'll stop getting the paper. Calvin and Hobbs and Pogo were long time favorites. Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft and Baby Blues are great. as is Dilbert - in nearly every strip I see things I saw in my working days. Right now, Pearls before Swine and Frazz are the top of the list.
I got to read Gasoline Alley only occasionally. Friends of my parents subscribed to the Chicago Tribune and that strip, Terry and the Pirates and Dick Tracy were in that paper but not in any of the THREE Indianapolis papers.
Times have changed.
Few actually aspire to being cartoon characters. And yet we have so many here who do! Drago. Pants, Achilles, Fled, Birkel, many more.
The mining of two mother lodes for comedy that will NEVER be permitted,
Islam
Democrats
Yes, the purple page handouts were 'Ditto', and they smelled wonderful. I was the class nerd who knew how to work the ditto machine (and thread the projector for that matter) so I had access to the special equipment room at the edge of the stage of the elementary school 'cafetorium'. Good days.
The problem with aging comic strip characters in real time is that we only see a few minutes of their life every day. It's not uncommon to spend all week at a restaurant or whatever, and kind of not fair to have that age the characters a week.
Of the classic era (pre 1960) strips, I have only really found Pogo & Thimble Theater (aka Popeye) hold up for me. Seger managed to make Thimble Theater both an adventure strip and a humor strip, and "Plunder Island" remains one of the greatest adventure continuities. (Modesty Blaise is perhaps the greatest 'straight' adventure strip).
I read every comic in the Green Bay Press-Gazette and most of the ones in the Chicago Tribune and they were the last things (other than stupid Packer news) I regularly read before I dropped print news. Just started reading my favorites on-line; Frank & Ernest, Calvin & Hobbes, Dilbert, and a half dozen others. But what I really want is a complete Steve Canyon.
There used to be a phenomenon known as Sunday afternoon boredom. It was an extreme kind of boredom based on too much sleep and nothing to do. The Sunday papers got you through the morning. The NY Journal American, the first Hearst newspaper I believe, was not bought for its news coverage but rather for its magnificent cartoon spread and additional Sunday supplement features. It got you through the morning, but time paused and finally stopped in the afternoon.....Well, all that's over. There are no Sunday papers laid out on the rug and bored kids rereading them and wondering what to do next on a rainy Sunday afternoon. I'm not completely nostalgic about all aspects of childhood. The Sunday comics were, at best, only a palliative remedy for the Sunday blahs. Video games are much more effective.
Hey blogger!
Your HTML cannot be accepted: Must be at most 4,096 characters.
That's BS. My commment was 3871 characters the first time you kicked it back. By the last time, it was several hundred characters less!
My all-time favorite was Pogo.
I learned to read from Pogo books. Lately I've been thinking a lot about how Howland Owl explained to Churchy, by counting on his fingers, that July 4th was coming up and Howland asked what comes after July 3rd, and Churchy exclaimed "Finger four day!"
Why does every Doonesbury character have their mouth in that same slack open position?
They all always look like they’re feeling bored, tired, and jaded.
Looks like the open mouth indicates that they’re speaking.
"Steve Canyon" had characters that aged, but slowly.
I don't really remember Gaoline Alley. With the exception of Peanuts, I usually thought of comics boring. I don't know why. As for Doonesbury, I liked him even though Trudeau wrote from a liberal/left POV, but i enjoyed the attacks on George Will and George Bush (the first).
Years ago, i had the chance to buy all the Doonesbury comic books (I think there were 5) for $10. So I bought them. I flipped through them over a couple days. They didn't hold up - very dated - and I donated them back to the library. I still have Gary larson, Peanuts, and Calvin and Hobbes.
Blogger Ann Althouse said...
Why does every Doonesbury character have their mouth in that same slack open position?
They all always look like they’re feeling bored, tired, and jaded.
Much more so the eyes. Except for the mom in this one, they all (it is so in almost all panels that I remember) have "bored, tired, jaded" eyes.
To me it bespeaks a hatred, for his own characters and therefore for all mankind. (Why is the mom different? Is she one of the few "good guys," or is she just on speed?)
I read Dondi for about six months when I was around 10 years of age. He was always losing stuff, and then finding it.
I always figured he needed a better set of eyes.
"You have a one-week old baby, but he can't stay one week old forever. He had to grow." By logical extension, so did everyone else in the strip...
Peanuts is the counterexample. When Shultz wanted to introduce a new character in the strip, they frequently appeared as babies or kids whose families had just moved into the neighborhood. Then they would age fairly rapidly until reaching some stable point.
First appearance of Linus:
https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1952/09/19
Thanks, Ann, for the link to a beautiful article about one of my favorite strips. Gasoline Alley, Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbes, For Better or Worse, and Shoe are my top five.
Dondi grew up to become Senator Marco Rubio.
I don't remember "Gasoline Alley" at all. As a child, my favorite cartoon was "Priscilla's Pop" because I too desperately wanted a horse - something my blue-collar parents did not have the money or space to provide. I questioned "Nancy" - why did she live with Aunt Fitzi and why did Aunt Fitzi have such a weird name and look like one of the Andrews sisters? What happened to Sluggo's hair? For that matter, what happened to Nancy's hair? Why did a little white kid have an Afro? I didn't really pick up on Al Capp's politics when I was a kid. I liked the Schmoos and the granny.
As a teen and young adult, I liked "Bloom County," "Shoe" and "The Far Side." "Doonesbury" always struck me as too self-consciously hip, even when I agreed with Trudeau's politics.
It was a shock when we learned Trudeau hadn't drawn his comic for years. Early elite incompetence and cheating exposed.
The WaPoo had 4 pages of daily comics in the 70's. Then the pictures got small.
Some of the comic strips from back in the day are much more impressive in book form.
Lynn Johnston's saga of the life of a small suburban family in Canada - which was presented with fairly honest time frames - is one of them. The subtleties of the drawing are much more impressive when printed with care than they were back in the day on the smudgy pages of the Albany Times-Union.
Then there is Rose is Rose which is very special to me because my one and only fiancee (not counting non-sober interludes) looked an awful lot like Rose, and actually had quite a lot of her - unique, to say the least - personality.
I recommend Ignatz and Krazy Kat, too.
Well, if you are looking for real lightning in a bottle in the history of newspaper comic strips, you can always check out the run of genius that was Peanuts circa 1950-65.
Many of Doonesbury's characters were thinly veiled versions of real people. When they died, he killed off their avatar because would be bad form to keep making fun of a dead person. I think he kept Hunter S.Thompson's Uncle Duke character alive because he deserved to be made fun of, but he was killed off eventually.
I read Gasoline Alley from time to time, but didn't follow it closely. I read Dondi from the start, but the kid just didn't seem to learn, so I moved on. According to Wiki, Nancy was an ancillary character, the niece of Fritzi Ritz, the daffy (but loveable!) flapper. Nancy was meant to be a short lived character, but according to the author/artist, Ernie Bushmiller, "the little dickens was soon stealing the show."
I pretended to like Nancy,but that was just an excuse to see Aunt Fritzi. I kept hoping AF would forget herself for a moment, and I could maybe see her walk around the house in her underwear. Never happened though. What a babe!
Thanks for the Rod Stewart video. I hadn't seen that one before. I wasn't much of a fan of his when I was a kid, but I've really come to appreciate him and his career.
My older sister has been carrying a torch for him since around 1972.
By the time I started reading newspaper comics, "Gasoline Alley" was a run-of-the-mill comic left over from the previous generation, welded in place on the page because the old readers would complain if it disappeared. The early work is different in style and tone - it began as one of the many car-themed strips that grew out of 20s auto culture, and turned into something with great heart and humor when the baby came along. What's really surprising are the Sunday entries - King used the whole page in a way few other comic artists had, and they're ingenious.
https://images.app.goo.gl/qt4dDKamhxGH45Uc7
I like "Little Orphan Annie". I particularly enjoy the character of Daddy Warbucks, a vastly wealthy and powerful munitions manufacturer who employs at least two personal assassins of which I am aware - a character who in any other comic strip would almost certainly be the archvillain - but who in "Annie" is her benevolent friend and protector.
"Why does every Doonesbury character have their mouth in that same slack open position?
"They all always look like they’re feeling bored, tired, and jaded."
Because Trudeau can't can't draw very well, and he couldn't draw at all when he first began the strip.
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