| October
2007 |
Frank O.
King, Walt
& Skeezix, 1925 and 1926 [Vol. 3],
Preface by Chris Ware, Introduction by Jeet Heer
(Drawn &
Quarterly, 2007).
By Michael Moon
Captain Joe Patterson, who
inherited the Chicago
Tribune and went on to found
everybody’s favorite prolie paper, the New York Daily
News, definitely had a way
with comic strips. Orphan
Annie, Dick
Tracy, Terry and the
Pirates, and other legendary
strips were, in various instances, conceived, named,
plotted, replotted, and otherwise majorly tweaked by him.
Frank King, author-artist of the work under present
consideration, had started drawing a single-frame comic at
the Tribune
under his
boss’s watchful eye in 1918. Entitled Gasoline
Alley, the cartoon featured a
fat young auto mechanic named Walt Wallet standing around
discussing cars—those then fascinating, unreliable,
indispensable contraptions—with his older male neighbors
Doc, Avery, and Bill.
After three years, Cap’n
Joe decided that Gasoline
Alley needed to expand its
audience. Popular enough with adolescent and adult male
readers, the strip, Patterson reasoned, could, with a
strategic turn of plot, attract a faithful mass following
of women and children, too. He called King in and told him
to add a baby to the main storyline. And to let the baby
slowly grow up; women are interested in babies, Patterson
told King, and children like comic strips about other
children.
So on Valentine’s Day,
1921, somebody left a four-day-old infant on Walt’s
doorstep. Astonished and apprehensive at first, something
clicked for Walt very soon after the baby’s arrival. Naming
him “Skeezix” (cowboy lingo for “motherless calf”), the
young bachelor proceeds to raise the foundling, often
analogizing between what cars need for maintenance and what
babies probably need, and with the help of a live-in mammy
named Rachel, supported by the wives and mothers of the
Alley. Before very long at all, Walt has developed a
ferocious love for the infant and has grown intensely
protective and possessive about him. He is sometimes
troubled by the arrival of lavish gifts for Skeezix that
make him worry that rich and powerful relatives may sooner
or later appear and claim custody of the child.
Not long after the arrival
of Skeezix, another figure of mysterious and questionable
origins appears in the Alley: a young woman called Mrs.
Phyllis Blossom, who is as willowy chic as Walt is rotundly
downstyle. The men in the alley act more like gentlemen
when Mrs. Blossom is about, and their wives gossip about
exactly what kind of “widow” she may be. Walt and Skeezix
and most of the other characters are drawn in a winning
combination of comic-cute and what would become classic
clear-line style. (King’s incisive way with his pencil is
said to have been determinant in Hergé’s development of the
latter style in Tintin
two or three
decades later). In contrast with this cute/clear style,
Phyllis Blossom appears to have migrated onto the Alley not
just from a different comic strip, but almost from a
different styleworld altogether—with her bobbed hair and
flapper silhouette, all silk daygowns and chiffon
overjackets, she looks (somewhat incongruously) like a
paper doll out of early Vogue
that some
Henry Darger (a faithful collector of Tribune
strips) has
collaged into the frame.
Readers may be disturbed
by the now-painfully obvious way in which the svelte
desirability of Phyllis Blossom is implicitly
“underwritten” by the strip’s only descent into the
grotesque in King’s depiction of Walt’s housekeeper and
Skeezix’s mammy Rachel—all malapropisms, mobcap, raccoon
eyes, and dumpy, dotted mammy dress. King is sometimes able
to recuperate the now glaring stereotype by consistently
honoring the venerable narrative convention of clown as
truthteller and exposer of the blindness of others (as when
Rachel overhears Walt, as he’s in the process of falling in
love with Phyllis, tell a neighbor that his house and his
adopted son certainly could use “a woman’s touch,” and
Rachel pointedly mutters that she wonders that he doesn’t
seem to notice how much both house and child already
benefit from the “woman’s touch” she
provides).
As has been the case with
the two previous volumes in this reprint series so far,
Phyllis Blossom, the mysterious female alien from the
fashionable world, brings with her all kinds of
plot-generating trouble to the other, more down-home
characters. Despite her and Walt’s growing affection for
each other, Phyllis maintains her friendships in her “other
world,” including a powerful, intimate, and fairly
illegible bond with a leading European opera star, Madame
Octave, whose protegé Phyllis appears to remain even after
settling into the neighborhood of the Alley and beginning
to accept Walt’s carefully paced courtship.
In the latter part of the
1924 strips, the toddler Skeezix is kidnapped by agents of
Madame Octave, who hopes to extend her celebrity status to
the States by pulling the publicity stunt of adopting
Skeezix away from Walt. Although King does everything he
can to suggest that Phyllis herself remains a good person
at heart, he also makes it obvious that she is to some
degree complicit in the kidnapping and in the other
troubling goings-on around Skeezix. After a prolonged
courtship, Walt and Phyllis first become engaged and then
marry in a big June wedding in the present volume, and then
spend a full summer’s honeymoon dude-ranching it out
west.
Madame Octave repeatedly
tries to woo Phyllis back from her fat fiancé, threatening
for awhile to reveal the younger woman’s sordid past to
Walt in order to break them up. Phyllis is finally driven
to tell Walt herself that she and her opera-star friend
worked together as nurses during World War I, and that
Phyllis had married a dashing young officer for whom she
felt pity as well as infatuation. The callow young man
betrays her into taking the fall for a malfeasance of his
own, getting her in trouble with the law, before his own
untimely death. Over the weeks during which Octave is
trying to keep Phyllis from escaping her clutches and
marrying Walt, the strip reaches one of its most
interesting narrative peaks. King draws the melancholy and
imperious Octave with conspicuous smudge marks under her
eyes—vampish mascara or the signs of a chronic insomniac or
habitual masturbator? The mid-1920s was the heyday of Theda
Bara and Pola Negri and other kohl-eyed film temptresses of
a certain age, and it is striking how openly King depicts
the strength of Octave’s woman-on-woman-dominatrix hold
over Phyllis, and Walt’s accepting attitude toward his
fiancée as she forms deep bonds with him and Skeezix
without by any means entirely relinquishing her earlier
bond with this powerful older woman.
Clearly, people who
mistakenly think early comic strips were all funny animals
and slapstick nerds have yet to pick up on the sado-lesbian
frequencies of Gasoline
Alley throughout the spring of
1925. While that vibe isn’t the main one, it’s certainly a
notable and juicy part of the mix. While King has long been
recognized as one of the most influential draughtsmen in
comics history, we have just begun to recognize his
originality and strength as an architect of extended serial
narratives derived from an incoherently rich array of
visual and narrative styles. With its combination of the
comedy of single fatherhood and everyday domestic life with
the sentimental melodrama of adoption and kidnapping and
young women with “pasts,” Gas Alley
was one of the
first very successful and longrunning (ninety years and
still counting) soap operas—along with The
Gumps, a model for the radio
soaps that started broadcasting a decade later, in the
early Thirties. Is Skeezix Phyllis’s biological child?
Madame Octave’s? Or did he come from somewhere (someone)
else in Madame Octave’s glamorous and shady international
circle—or from yet somewhere else? I don’t know about you,
but I’m planning to tune into the next volume of
Walt and
Skeezix next year and see if I can
find out.
