walt and skeezix take a trip

Okay, I'm not mad at the internet anymore. Mostly because Mr. Ambulette told me about pandora, and it's making me a soothing Cat Power-inspired mix to help my jangling brain settle down enough to do stuff at work.

Anyway. Important question: do you realize there are still people in this world who associate comics with nerds?!?!?!?!?!

I know, I find this shocking too. Thank god I'm a nerd, though, or I'd be missing out on the particular joys of Walt and Skeezix. Walt and his Gasoline Alley pal Avery have challenged one another to a cross-country race, and I'm eating up each scratchily expressive square of the story. (Not LITERALLY! Ouch!) I was reading the introduction, which is full of gorgeous, dreamy black-and-white photographs of Chicago, Glencoe (where King lived -- in a beautiful house nestled in gardens that almost convince you that the suburbs are a great idea -- but then it was the country, of course), and the southwest, where the Kings liked to travel. I hadn't realized what a big deal going west was to people then, what a hallowed vacation destination the Grand Canyon was. The introduction speaks to the dramatic, inhuman scale of things in the desert, and how this made it a dynamic backdrop for the small-scale, personal stories of comics like Gasoline Alley. I couldn't agree more. It's a big obvious, I know, but the desert's just so evocative.

The introduction also calls out Walt's constant anxiety about losing Skeezix. Later on in the strip -- I don't want to give anything away here, but! -- he actually DOES lose Skeezix. It is pretty intense, particularly for a comic strip. (When did comic strips get so dumbed-down? This one is so beautiful and complex! Such emotional range! Hello, Family Circus, take notes.) Anxiety about parenting, about caring for people, about whether anyone can ever really take care of someone else -- I realized very late in the game that these were the themes that tied together most of the stories I was writing in grad school, and so I culled those stories out and wrote some more and -voila!- thesis. But I'm not entirely sure where this theme came from. In King's case it's tidily obvious. Not to be overly reductive or anything, but hey, he and his wife wanted a big family, lost their first baby, and when they had their son she nearly died in childbirth. The son later had scarlet fever. And this is interesting -- the kid was sent away to boarding school his whole life. Hmm! You can see how this person would have kids, and losing kids, and adults' obligations towards kids on the mind. How this person would write a long comic book about a man with a tenuous grip on a child he loves desperately and is always in danger of losing.