walt and skeezix save the day

Then sometimes there are those days when all you want to do is curl up with sweet, sad, painfully earnest, yet completely witty comics, am I right? That's where this Drawn and Quarterly Walt & Skeezix collection comes in. I picked it up this weekend and couldn't put it down. For the uninitiated, Gasoline Alley was Frank King's daily strip for the Chicago Tribune in the 20s. Walt is a big lout of a mechanic who is also incredibly sweet (and occasionally incisive), and Skeezix is the orphan left on his doorstep whom he adopts. I'm in one of those moods that all I need is a little drawing of Skeezix tugging at the dog's tail and I'm about ready to burst into tears. So...cute...and as Chris Ware mentions in the preface, there is an undercurrent of melancholy beneath the whole thing.