Showing posts with label Gasoline Alley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gasoline Alley. Show all posts

Friday, September 25, 2020

A Crowded Life in Comics –

When Frank Was King.

by Rick Marschall. 

Two reasons had my “mind” returning to Gasoline Alley and its creator Frank King this week. From my friend Germund Von Wowern, the Maharajah of Malmö, I received some memorabilia of Tomah, the small Wisconsin town where King was born.

Also, I participated in the Theodore Roosevelt Center Symposium at Dickinson State University in North Dakota. I am Cartoon Archivist for the Center – all digital and internet work, as was this conference. All three days by Zoom. Complicated for the organizers, but actually efficient and accessible, and almost more intimate than the in-person event.

I mention the Roosevelt Symposium because this very week last year, while driving to North Dakota, I passed by a highway exit for Tomah, and was tempted to visit. Some day.

It surely is a place more interesting than most cartoonists’ heimat… home place, wellspring, inspiration. That is because Frank King invented his neighborhoods, whether Chicago houses’ garages, or the suburbs of later years of Walt and Skeezix, Phyllis and Nina. King had a superb sense of place; his environments were not stage-backdrops but, virtually, characters as vivid as the people with names.

So Tomah went with Frank wherever he moved, and whatever setting he chose for his characters.

After he retired from the northern Chicago suburbs, Frank King moved to the Winter Park suburb outside Orlando, Florida. I had written him fan letters when I was young and – well, I was still young – but every year our family vacationed in Florida. The Orlando area was a cartoonists’ colony, and my father encouraged me to write to my hero / pen-pals and see if we could visit.

So for many years, before returning to New Jersey and by gracious pre-arrangement, the last one or two days of “our” vacation would be a detour to Orlando (I use quotation-marks because I bless my father’s memory for this, but my mother and sisters were not thrilled) and see cartoonists. I have mentioned this here before, but almost every year Roy Crane and Frank King would be on the list, and then there were visits to Leslie Turner, Mel Graff, Dick Hodgins Sr., Lank Leonard, Zack Mosely, Jim Ivey, Fred Lasswell (some on the east and west coasts of the state).

By the time I started visiting Frank King, almost all the work on the strip was being done by Dick Moores, later a good friend; and in fact I became his syndicate editor. I have, and will, tell more here about the visits to Frank King – his studio and the interesting originals on the walls (for instance, work by onetime assistants Garrett Price and Sals Bostwick); examples of the “shadow boxes” he constructed – three-dimensional scenes with Gasoline Alley characters and elements painted on glass panes.

Every year the cartoonists gave me “parting gifts” of originals; Roy Crane once dug back for a Wash Tubbs from when it was only a Sunday top-strip. Frank pulled work from the 1940s, 1930s, and once a Rectangle panel, before Gasoline Alley was a titled feature. It is here, maybe the first time Skeezix’s name is mentioned – days after he was left on Walt’s doorstep.

Each year Frank’s age showed more and more; his recollections grew foggier. One year he smiled and said, “Let’s look for some real old-timers. The old drawings are in the tool shed.” It might have been years since had gone there, because the central-Florida humidity had done its work. Piles of originals were matted together, covered in mold. Tears came to his eyes.

Mine too.

The Tomah drawing was for a special publication marking the town’s centennial in 1955. To my eyes, although Frank might have done a thumbnail sketch, this is by Dick Moores at the very beginning of their collaboration. The panorama drawing, on the other hand, seems to be 100 per cent Frank King, and from the details and lines, how he drew at the time.

In the text he identifies the location of the alley! Vast areas of Chicago have homes whose back doors face rows of garages, and middle-class owners of new automobiles tinkered and compared notes in those alleys.

“The row of garages near 63rd Street in Chicago,” he wrote; and ID’d Bill, Avery, Walt, and Doc.

I used to urge Dick Moores to construct a story about Walt’s death. I certainly had nothing against the old boy… but the Gasoline Alley WAS noted for its characters growing in real time. I thought, and think, it would be true to the strip’s essence to “draw” that curtain. Jim Scancarelli, the current and excellent artist, has Walt and Skeezix still around, challenging the actuarial tables at Social Security; it was almost 100 years ago when Walt, an adult, found Skeezix on his doorstep.

But if they do ever “retire,” I know this great small-town American village in rural Wisconsin where they would fit right in...

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Sunday, June 23, 2019

A Crowded Life in Comics –


Jim Scancarelli drew this poster design for an exhibition I organized in 1988 for the Salina (KS) Art Center and the Mid-America Arts Alliance.

Birthdays

by Rick Marschall

Two legendary comic strips celebrate their centenaries this year, in fact about these same mid-year weeks.

Gasoline Alley and Barney Google sprouted in the fertile soil that was Chicago cartooning of the ‘teens and ‘20s. For all of the camaraderie and cross-pollination of the  Chicago “school” who fraternized, were students at, or taught at, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, there are no substantial records of a close relationship between Frank King and Billy DeBeck, respective creators of those strips.

Otherwise they were nurtured by common ferment and the glories of a great era in American cartooning.

Frank King was born in Wisconsin, but moved to Chicago and lived in the northern suburbs before the Florida sun seduced him late in life. Gasoline Alley was self-consciously set in those Chicago neighborhoods where garages faced each other behind rows of Sears Catalog Homes. Billy DeBeck first cartooned in Youngstown OH and Pittsburgh before moving to Chicago. Before settling in Tampa, after Chicago he mostly lived where good times and golf courses beckoned.

The halcyon days of the Chicago School produced an amazing Who’s Who of talent and influence in American cartooning: Editorial cartoonists John T McCutcheon, Carey Orr, Luther Bradley, Vaughn Shoemaker; strip cartoonists King and DeBeck, Sidney Smith, Harold Gray, Frank Willard, Ferd Johnson, Carl Ed, William Donahey, E C Segar, Sals Bostwick, Penny Ross; panel cartoonists Clare Briggs, H T Webster, Quin Hall; illustrators Garrett Price and Dean Cornwell… and others too numerous to mention.


Long were the careers – and influence – of many of these creators. Gasoline Alley and Barney Google are unique in that they have survived a hundred years, the latter albeit largely having been kidnapped and eclipsed by Snuffy Smith.

When I was the young cartooning-enthusiast son of indulgent parents, the last day or two of annual family vacations to Florida were given over to visiting cartoonists. The only condition was that I be bold and clever enough to arrange appointments in advance. Al (Mutt and Jeff) Smith, my mentor, and other professional friends, and Marge Devine of the National Cartoonists Society, helped me with addresses and phone numbers. After that, I reliably trusted on the native good will and friendliness of professional cartoonists.

So, criss-crossing the Sunshine State for many vacation years, I first met Frank King, Roy Crane, Leslie Turner, Jim Ivey, Ralph Dunagin, Dick Hodgins Sr., Lank Leonard, Zack Moseley, Fred Lasswell, Mel Graff, Don Wright, Worth Gruelle, and others.


Frank King was old and slow, but with a quick memory, when I met him and visited several times. The strip then firmly was in the hands of Dick Moores. On each visit Frank would give me an autographed, vintage Gasoline Alley original. They ranged from the week after Skeezix appeared on Walt’s doorstep (depicting him holding the baby before the Alley gang) to the 1930s.

I have several distinct memories. One is tragic. Frank said he could dig out an old original for me, and went to a shed out back… where he, evidently, had not been for years. There were stacks of old Gasoline Alley originals, but the years – and Florida humidity, maybe a leaky shed roof – had taken a toll. They were mildewed, stuck together; hundreds and hundreds of them. He was shell-shocked.


Other things I remember, and I hope they were saved by his family. For his own amusement Frank created what he called “shadow boxes,” scenes mostly from Gasoline Alley. Each was a large wooden box, open at the front and top. He painted backgrounds on the sides, bottom, and back; and then he painted characters and image details on panes of glass that slid into grooves. The one I remember was of Walt and Judy raking Autumn leaves – when you looked into the shadow box at eye-level, you beheld a three-dimensional cartoon of Walt and Judy and hundreds of colorful leaves all around them, including behind and in front of them.

Frank had many originals on his walls, and I remember being struck by names I had not heard of – Sals Bostwick, a talented assistant who died young; and Quin Hall; and his friends from the early days whose names I knew as illustrators but not as cartoonists, like Garrett Price and Dean Cornwell.

Audacious camera angles, meticulous detail, masterful shading, dialog revealing mature character delineations – hallmarks of Dick Moores’ work on Gasoline Alley)

Later I became a friend of Dick Moores, also as his Editor at the syndicate. An amazing talent, as was the next successor and current resident of the Alley, Jim Scancarelli. A friend who discusses mountain fiddling and Uncle Fletcher’s washrag collection (from radio’s Vic and Sade) as readily as he discusses comics history.

Gasoline Alley can be read as The Great America Novel. For my money, the continuity lines and characterizations in Billy DeBeck’s creations (including in Parlor, Bedroom, and Sink and Bunky) rival Dickens in craft, depth, and invention.


I did not knowe DeBeck, of course; he died in 1942. But I got to know his successor Fred Lasswell very well. One of the most colorful figures in American cartooning; surely the inevitable cut-up in any room he filled with his outsized personality. And body. King Features Present Joe D’Angelo was resigned to being, in some innovative way or another, the butt of a Lasswell practical joke whenever Fred visited New York. For instance having a waiter deliver a bottle of champagne and flowers to every table in a restaurant… charged to Mr D’Angelo.

By the time DeBeck died, relatively young, during World War II, Barney, Loweezie, and assorted hillbillies had taken over the strip. Barney himself receded as a side-character – Spark Plug even more so – and the mountain-folk indeed were a national sensation. Never a casual about any of his passions, DeBeck became a first-rate scholar of Appalachian life, lore, and language. He read all the dialect humorists of the mid-1800s, and caught the mountain folks’ personalities and ways. Phrases he did not borrow, he manufactured… with authenticity.

Such things were not in DeBeck’s background; neither Lasswell’s; but he was a quick study. The stock cast has dominated the strip for nigh-on 80 y’ars naow. Fred was an “A” personality, and even starred in “Uncle Fred’s Cartooning Lessons” videos in the 1980s. We occasionally appeared together in the mid-1990s promoting the US Postal Service’s “American Classic” set of commemorative stamps. We each sported ties, by coincidence, with hand-painted Yellow Kid figures on them.


Snuffy and other denizens of Hootin’ Holler comfortably are in the capable hands of John Rose these days. As in life itself – I mean real life; or realer life than comics – longevity can be attributed to many factors. With Gasoline Alley the old characters and new faces surely have attracted readers’ sympathies. It was the first comics strip where characters aged in real time. (I remembering urging Dick Moores to have Walt die, something that he would have handled sensitively; today Walt should be at least 120 and Skezzix 100. It would have maintained the comic-context realism, and garnered publicity.)

But the changing cast of Gasoline Alley and the frozen-in-time setting of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith (it probably has been a half-century since Barney or Snuffy visited a big city, the strip’s original setting) explain only parts of the strips’ longevity. Obviously the talents of the successors are responsible as well.


But as in real life, as I said, in strips there is a healthy gene pool that is dominant. The premises and conceptions of the progenitors obviously are the gloriously guilty parties. I feel especially blessed to have known, in my Crowded Life, some of the gifted people who have managed these precious creations so well.


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