Gasoline Alley

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gasoline Alley is the best known comic strip by the American cartoonist Frank O. King . The strip, whose characters age in real time, has appeared as the daily strip since 1919 and was held by King until 1959. Andreas C. Knigge considers Gasoline Alley "one of the most important American newspaper trips".

action

In the early days, the strip focused on portraying the enthusiasm for automobiles of several young men who regularly meet with their Ford T in a courtyard. Walt Wallet, the main character and one of these men, finds a baby on his doorstep on Valentine's Day in 1921 and adopts it. The discovery of this baby, called Skeezix, meant a substantive departure from the original conception of the strip as a family trip. Walt Wallet marries Phyllis Blossom and has another child with her before they adopt a second child. Skeezix grew up, served as a soldier in World War II , opened a car repair shop in his hometown after the war, got married and had offspring himself.

Publication and draftsman

Under the title Sunday Morning in Gasoliney Alley began on November 24, 1918 in the Sunday supplement of the Chicago Tribune a cartoon series. At the request of the publisher Joseph Medill Patterson , this series was reworked into a daily strip, which appeared for the first time on August 24, 1919. The associated Sunday page was introduced on October 20, 1920.

By 1951, King drew both the Sunday page and the daily strip. Then he handed the Sunday page over to Bill Perry, and in 1959 he handed over the daily strip to Dick Moores , who from 1975 also drew the Sunday page. Both artists had previously assisted King. Since 1986, both the Sunday page and the daily strip have been drawn by Jim Scancarelli .

In 1951, two film adaptations based on the comic appeared: Gasoline Alley premiered on January 2, 1951, and Corky of Gasoline Alley was released on September 17, 1951. Edward Bernds directed both films .

literature

  • Franco Fossati: The large illustrated Ehapa comic lexicon . Ehapa Verlag, Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-7704-0865-9 , p. 110.
  • Andreas C. Knigge: Comic Lexicon . Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Vienna 1988, ISBN 3-548-36554-X , pp. 274-275.
  • Marcel Feige: The little comic dictionary . Schwarzkopf and Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89602-544-9 , p. 316.
  • Wolfgang J. Fuchs and Reinhold C. Reitberger: Comics - Anatomy of a mass medium . Rowohlt Taschenbuchverlag, Reinbek b. Hamburg 1971, ISBN 978-3499115943 , pp. 22, 46, 51ff., 189, 194 ff.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Andreas C. Knigge: Comics . Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek 1996, ISBN 3-499-16519-8 , p. 49
  2. ↑ Frank O. King on lfb.it , accessed on July 9, 2010
  3. ^ Gasoline Alley in the Internet Movie Database , accessed on July 9, 2010
  4. ^ Corky of Gasoline Alley in the Internet Movie Database , accessed July 9, 2010