Draw Better! Put Your Eyes Out!

Posted on September 27, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

In 1947, Life Magazine asked a bunch of famous cartoonists to draw their famous characters blindfolded. The result? Hilarious hi-jinks, of course…and something that looked an awful lot like high art.

That’s not exactly how Life presented the exercise. The editors instead emphasized the wacky wrongness of the characters; the anatomical, inconsistencies. Dixie Dugan is “almost a caricature of herself”, the eyes and “full lips” appearing “lopsided”. Gus Edson’s Andy Gump “loses nearly all resemblance to the original” and his moustache ends up by his ear. Suddenly, these folks who can draw can’t draw, and that’s funny.

Half a century further down the road of deskilling though, it doesn’t look all that funny. Rather, the drift off-brand is validating. Striebel’s tight, eyes-open illustration of Dixie Dugan looks like bland advertising boilerplate; the blindfolded version, with the loose, gestural strokes and the varied line-weights, has a lot more energy — a highbrow modernist sketch emphasizing individualistic brio rather than a commercial hack job. Similarly, Edson’s perfected Gump looks fusty and antiquated in its slick cartoonishness, while the stick figure outline looks like the work of someone who’s seen Fort Thunder, and knows the joys of messiness.

You could argue that this exercise exposes the shallowness of high art pretensions and the idiocy of contemporary art. “Look, my kid could do that,and with his eyes closed no less!” Or you could say that it reveals the dullness of the cartoonists, whose drab workmanlike images need a shot of modern art practice to give them life.

Less polemically, though you could instead see the exercise as an object lesson (with illustrations) of why deskilling has become so central to contemporary art, and to highbrow/lowbrow distinctions. Comic strips emphasize professional finish, reproducibility, and iconic characters — the point is a recognizable, consistent product, which obscures the contribution of the artist, so that (for example) Gus Edson can replace Sidney Smith, and the Gump remains the same.

But with eyes closed, the artists are no longer able to be professional. The practiced memes fracture and come apart; literally in the case of Chic Young’s Dagwood, whose head leaves his body. Imperfection equals idiosyncrasy. To draw the same thing over and over perfectly is to be a drone, an assembly line worker. To be an artist, you have to be less sure; the marks have to be placed, not out of habit, but from individual inspiration. Dagwood’s perfect collar disintegrates, and what’s left behind are pen strokes as pen strokes. By closing his eyes, the artist reveals his hand.

The fact that, in the blink of an eye, Frank King can move from cartoon to cubism is a reminder that the low-art/high-art divide is both more arbitrary, and less wide, than either side likes to admit. Once we recognize that, the juxtaposition can allow us to perceive some of the pleasurable oddness and wrongness in the original drawings — the weird way Dick Tracy’s mouth seems to curve up his cheek and head towards his nose, or those tufts of hair making a bid for freedom on Skeeziks’s brow. And it also lets us think about the cute, iconic professionalism behind modernist semi-abstraction, in which the artist’s tics become their own marketing meme.

Thisexercise also demonstrated, though, how absolute the high art/low art divide can be. Life’s editors were familiar with Picasso I’m sure; Boing Boing’s bloggers (which who reprinted the piece) have seen modern art. Yet the genre assumptions are a barrier, or a blindfold, to seeing what’s happening on the page and/or screen in front of their eyes. For Life (and for the artists themselves), the blindfolded cartoonists are still cartoonists; the drawings with eyes covered are mistakes, or failed attempts, or entertainingly silly errors. Deskilling is seen as a bug, rather than a feature; the drawings are comics that don’t look like comics, rather than something else which looks like itself.

I’ve mentioned before Carl Freedman’s point that genre precedes art — by which he means that preconceptions about genre determine what we see as art, and what we see when we see art. Are those images above bad comics? Or are they succesfully deskilled high art? Part of what’s especially enjoyable about them is that they’re both and neither. If genre determines what we see as art, then art that messes with genre can cross up the way we see — like looking with our eyes uncovered, or with a blindfold on.

Saul Steinberg, “Las Vegas”

Comics and the Indispensability of Kitsch

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

“The dream has grown gray. The gray coating of dust on things is its best part. Dreams are now a shortcut to banality. Technology consigns the outer image of things to a long farewell, like banknotes that are bound to lose their value. It is then that the hand retrieves the outer cast in dreams and, even as they are slipping away, makes contact with familiar contours.

…which side does an object turn toward dreams? What point is its most decrepit? It is the side worn through by habit and patched with cheap maxims. The side which things turn toward the dream is kitsch.”

“Dream Kitsch“, Walter Benjamin

The destructive effects of time especially in an era of rapid advances in technology and industrialization; making the implements, furnishings and fashions of not so long ago or even the generation before seem old and “musty.” It is a problem which doesn’t seem to have left us in the intervening years since Walter Benjamin wrote extensively on kitsch and its relevance to history, nostalgia, objective truth, and art.

Like the seemingly deficient 19th century artistic draperies Benjamin cites (via the architectural critic, Sigfried Giedion) in The Arcades Project, these rejected artistic mannerisms of an earlier age were then taken up by the Surrealists active during Benjamin’s life time. They, far from casting aside these old, tired forms embedded them in their work. We in turn, Benjamin adds, “would recognize today’s life, today’s forms, in the life and in the apparently secondary, lost forms of that epoch.”

* * *

Krazy Kat Sunday 4-30-1916. The second Krazy Kat Sunday to be published and the oldest one known to exist in the form of its original art.

It is easy to think of cartoonists from an earlier age as being purely instinctual, producing images on a treadmill and dropping images on to the paper even as the ideas occurred to them; never completely conscious of their abilities to create lasting art. Perhaps it is a feeling gleaned from our experience with the flaccid strips of our modern age.

Yet even the true grind of a daily strip like Frank King’s Gasoline Alley—where readers were expected to be more interested in character and event than formalism—suggest otherwise, often allowing a level of sophistication which can be surprising. Consider the Gasoline Alley daily of 3-26-1935 where Walt Wallet frets over the adoption of his eventual daughter, Judy.

Judy was found in Walt’s car in much the same way Skeezix was discovered at his doorstep over 10 years prior, a point which King affirms by reproducing the same naming sequence for Judy which he once used for Skeezix 15 years before on 12-3-21.

One wonders whether readers at the time would have been able to remember this without a personal collection of newspaper clippings. This mirroring seems to have been done largely for the artist’s personal satisfaction (both strips were kept by King till his death).

Those seeking examples of symmetry in form and story in comics might point to the Schuiten brothers work on Nogegon or Moore and Gibbon’s “Fearful Symmetry” from Watchmen #5, but King’s daily presents itself as an early American example of this type of formalism. Walt’s strutting gait and anticipation in the first two panels are mirrored in the final two panels depicting despondency and hesitation. The shape of the panels direct the reader’s mind to this intention which is reflected fully in Walt’s posture and his words.

So it is with the Krazy Kat Sunday first mentioned above with Krazy at rest or plummeting in every other panel on left side of the Sunday page, and airborne in all the panels on the right (one should not doubt that the figures sleeping with their heads together in the final panel are in fact in flight). Herriman separates dreams from reality by means of a boldly rulered box joining the final four panels but this line of demarcation is an illusion—the dream in all its anxiety, desire, and fulfillment has not ended.

The Sunday is dedicated to Mrs. Helen Dirks (the cartoonist Rudolph Dirk’s wife) and is the very picture of conjugal bliss—the perfect kiss coupled to an absolute faith that love has been requited. A moment reiterated nearly a century later in the pages of Kevin Huizenga’s story in Ganges #1 where a lover thinks silently through the night about the person sleeping beside him—a captive moment reiterated six times on a single page where readers are asked to remember and think to themselves, “I have seen this” or “I have experienced this.” Or “Yes, this can happen” or “I wish it did happen.”

The movement and progress of the balloon which draws the mouse, Ignatz, away from Krazy may seem like an exceptional example of Herriman’s absolute control of the Sunday page and composition, but at its heart it is a vaudevillian depiction of the fear and the pain of separation; perhaps even of grief, a feeling which C. S. Lewis once described as being “like fear…[perhaps], more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting, just hanging about waiting for something to happen.”

Which makes that consummate final panel altogether more poignant, especially if one thinks back to the final Krazy Kat Sunday in which Krazy is seen drowning alone in a pool riddled with the tremulous ink lines emanating from the artist’s arthritic hands. The relationship between Krazy and Ignatz so close to a metaphor for the marriage of Herriman to his art; the strip like an artistic statement or autobiography, on a lower pedestal than Rembrandt’s numerous self-portraits perhaps but certainly from the same school of ideas.

* * *

Somebody Loves Me

Those hesitant, shakey lines can bee seen again in Jack T. Chick’s seminal tract, Somebody Loves Me, but here less a product of age and illness than artistic insensibility. This was a best seller by all accounts and one which has been endlessly dissected (or should I say derided) and repudiated. A seemingly impoverished work of cartooning dropped in countless mailboxes all over the world and given to me as a child by a Seven Day Adventist presumably because of Chick’s interest in eschatology.

In Chick’s comic, an abused child is viciously beaten by his drunken father before finally withering away in a cardboard box on the streets of a nameless city (some hopeless Sodom or Gomorrah one presumes). But not before hearing the Good News that somebody loves him—”JESUS LOVES YOU!”

The line is untrained, the art of the ultimate outsider cartoonist where others can only pretend to this throne. So despised and rejected, and yet utterly indelible as far as the history of comics is concerned. I don’t know if Chick’s most famous tract ever worked on me but that final image of an angel carrying the abused boy to heaven seems quite grotesque when viewed today.

It is as if Chick had supped on medieval images of the Madonna and child and decided that anti-naturalistic disproportion was fundamental to demonstrating the maturity (or infantilism; it is quite hard to tell) of a newly received Christian soul. This is at odds with a much finer image of an angel kneeling at the box-home of the boy; a drawing filled with the artist’s absolute conviction, that mysterious energy of an outsider determined to promulgate the truth, to communicate by any means possible.

Yet like the works of Richard Wagner—that gross anti-Semite with his apparent caricature of European Jews in the words and actions of Alberich and Mime in Der Ring des Nibelungen—this comic seems impossible to read in isolation. Or so it would appear, for there will always be contrary opinions. The conductor, Daniel Barenboim, who is both a Jew and once led a magnificent Ring cycle at Bayreuth (with Harry Kupfer) recently denied any obvious anti-Semitism in Wagner’s Ring in an interview with Ivan Hewett:

“That’s bull—-,” he snorts. “Do you think I could bear to conduct his music if that were true? Of course there is really vile anti-Semitism in Wagner’s writings, but I can’t accept the idea that characters like Beckmesser and Alberich are Jewish stereotypes in disguise.”

The task with Somebody Loves Me is considerably easier. When Dan Raeburn (writing in The Imp) articulates his vacillation between seeing Chick as either the abused child or the abusing father at the end of his impressive study of the works of Jack T. Chick, he is reappropriating Somebody Loves Me as a metaphor for Chick’s career. For Chick is an artist fascinated with violence (by the Catholics and Jesuits etc.) and pain (the suffering Christ), as well as the forgiving power of a Christian God. One who not only seeks to spread the Gospel (one expects out of dutiful obedience to Mark 16:15-16) but who would also shake the dust off his feet (Matthew 10:14) when faced with those who would reject his message. Hastening the day of the Lord with tough love, those tracts are not merely tools of conversion but also instruments of condemnation to those who would disbelieve.

This mixture of wrath…

…and forgiveness is the thread which links the Old and New Testament and also the entirety of Chick’s oeuvre.

There is nothing inherently offensive about Somebody Loves Me. To see it in aesthetic terms is probably beside the point. One suspects that if but one person had accepted his premise and was sufficiently convinced, it would have satisfied the author. And Raeburn presents us with ample evidence of the tract’s effectiveness (one presumes for good) if largely from the author himself:

“It’s the worst thing Chick has ever done;it’s also as effective as anything he’s ever done. In fact, it’s really well-done. Forget the creation myths—Somebody Loves Me is Chick’s most basic tract, the ur-tract. He’s always had a soft spot for Somebody Loves Me; it’s his favorite of his many little paper babies, sentimentally speaking. For years he’s plugged it with these words: “Hardened men have wept over this tract.” In a 1994 open letter Jack described the first time he showed it to a coworker, a “well-educated and gifted artist,” in aerospace. “Immediately I knew it was a dumb idea,” Jack wrote.“He’ll only laugh.To my shock he burst into tears and told me of his horrible life as a kid….Years later an artist working with us”—and we know who that gifted artist was—“got a call to pick up a homeless girl….He and his wife took her into their home and loved her like a daughter.When they met her she had a copy of Somebody Loves Me clenched in her hand. She had read it over one hundred times.”

What then separates kitsch from true heart rending sentiment or artistic achievement? Is it fully in the eye of the beholder? Is it simply that moment of recognition (of truth)? Or can the answer be found in the imposition of the intellect? Is it even possible to separate the two? Winfried Menninghaus in Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity offers the following definition of kitsch:

“Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, without sublimation. It usually presents no difficulty in interpretation and has absolutely nothing to do with an aesthetics of negativity. It is unadulterated beauty, a simple invitation to wallow in sentiment…”

“Defining kitsch in terms of a saving of intellectual effort and the suspension of normative taboos is rich in implications. For Freud, these behavioral mechanism are typical…, more broadly, of the libidinous regression to infantile gratifications which have normally fallen victim to the reality principle and cultural prohibitions.”

While Chick’s devotion to the true nature of violence defies this definition of kitsch, he embraces it wholeheartedly in the denouement of Somebody Loves Me, an unequivocal statement of intent and mercy. Brushing aside any questions concerning the problem of pain and suffering, Chick’s “ur-tract” is entirely subservient to the final plan of salvation. If we place the Krazy Kat Sunday and Chick’s comic on a weighing scale, there can be little doubt that it is Chick’s comic which shows the most contempt for taboos in its depiction of violence. Yet its ending indulges quite completely in a type of emotional diarrhea (I would say far more than the revered Herriman strip).

Whether Herriman’s cartoon straddles that uneasy place between formal and intellectual rigor, and “instantaneous emotional gratification” I leave to the reader to decide. I should add that Menninghaus further states that unlike other writers of his time, Benjamin “while never fully embracing kitsch, found something not just understandable and admittable in it”, but also “a phenomenon of utmost political significance” and a factor of central concern to art itself:

“Kitsch…is nothing more than art with a 100 percent, absolute and instantaneous availability for consumption. Precisely within the consecrated forms of expression, therefore, kitsch and art stand irreconcilably opposed. But for developing living forms, what matters is that they have within them something stirring, useful, ultimately heartening—that they take “kitsch” dialectically up into themselves, and hence bring themselves near to the masses while yet surmounting the kitsch.”

For me then, Herriman and his creation surmount any would be accusations of kitsch while the Chick comic, despite its florid appeals to realism, wallows in it. For many, that moment when the boy is cradled to heaven would break any illusions of truthful artistry, suggesting the hand of a rampant fool or maniac. For others, that smiling girl offering help in front of the box home clutching a bible would be a moment steeped in delusion and falsity running counter to every experience in their lives.

But those angels are real to Chick and his adherents. His bursting anti-Catholic paranoia and unrelenting bigotry not even sensed here; that spark of creativity and unimaginable artistic acceptance a mere glint in his eye, like an angel’s kiss at twilight.

A Poor Investment: Frank King’s Gasoline Alley

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Ng Suat Tong

Of late, much of comicdom has been abuzz with the sale of the original art for the cover to Amazing Spider-Man #328 (by Todd McFarlane) for $657,250. Of this, I shall say very little. Suffice to say that the same auction house will be offering a small but similarly sized painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in November with a high estimate of $700,000. One presumes that this painting will sell for slightly more even if it isn’t the finest work in Renoir’s oeuvre.

Proceeding much more quietly over the last few months has been the gradual disposal of one of the finest collections of Gasoline Alley dailies in existence. The collection is not notable so much for its size (which while large, only numbers in the 100s at last count) but for the absolute significance of what they depict, their vintage, and their aesthetic merit. The auction house handling the sale has stated that all the art comes from the “Estate of Frank King”.

King’s skillful, light ink drawings can be found on modestly sized (about 6″ by 21″) sheets of aging paper with traces of stains and browning. The paper itself seems roughly cut from larger sheets and is frequently in excess of the requirements of the art. King gave individual titles to each daily, often writing these concise commentaries in cursive pencils at the top or sides of the finished art. Their importance relates to King’s working methods and his intentions. For obvious reasons, these titles aren’t reproduced in the recent Drawn and Quarterly reprints though the original art would have contributed greatly to the quality of that reprinting. The smeared countenance (in the reprint) of the “first Skeezix” strip of 14th February 1921, for example, would also be pleasantly rectified by the original art to that daily (which is soon to be offered at auction).

The more I look at Gasoline Alley, the more it seems to me that it is the kind of strip which is best appreciated the way it was originally intended—as a daily serial—and not read at length in the book collections which are undoubtedly welcome from an archival perspective. The passage of time is critical to the reader’s engagement with the strip. This can be easily appreciated if one considers that dailies acquired by a Gasoline Alley devotee like the collector C. E. in which we see Skeezix’s developmental milestones—from sitting (22nd September 1921) to standing (15th December 1921)—and his fateful meeting with his dog, Pal.

And if we treasure that moment when Walt finally gets engaged to Phyllis Blossom (the matriarch of a long line of Gasoline Alley characters)…

[Skeezix meets his brother for the first time.]

…it is only because of the couple’s long and chronologically drawn out process of courting, and the nefarious schemes instigated to pull the couple apart. The scenes of dark foreboding…

…contrasting with the almost saccharine, though not wholly preposterous, moments of cuteness.

While we may chuckle at these gentle scenes from another age of romanticism and worldly denial, King’s attention to detail is still striking. In the third panel of the daily above, Phyllis Blossom’s eye is subtly curved into an inverted U denoting delight and in the scene below where she is given her engagement ring, she suspiciously casts an eye out at the reader in the fourth and final panel.

***

I should add at this point that the acquisition of any fine collection of art has less to do with taste than with other factors. Far more important in the case of comics, is availability followed by price and financial ability. Only then does the collector face the question of taste. As far as Gasoline Alley is concerned, the choice (in the face of moderate financial impediments) lies between historical significance and aesthetic quality. No doubt the two often coincide in King’s famous strip but there are a number of instances where they don’t. There is nothing especially beautiful about the “first Skeezix” strip but it will surely be the most expensive Gasoline Alley daily ever sold when it comes to auction. Much the same can be said for the daily of 23rd Novemeber 1927 in which Walt gets full and final custody of Skeezix, one which I was hoping to acquire but missed out on due to a lack of stomach. The strip has little going for it in the art department but is pretty significant as far as what it portrays.

By comparison, if we consider the daily of 20th April 1926, we might say that there is almost nothing of significance being discussed; nothing except the fates of two black maids (for the uninitiated, the strip was hardly short of appalling “mammy” scenes in its early years).

Yet there can be little doubt that this is one of the most formally beautiful dailies that King ever drew. It is, of course, daring in presentation with little continuity in the backgrounds except for the impression of a forest. It is the two figures of Walt and Phyllis which push the narrative along, first proceeding down a path dappled with shadows, skirting the edges of an unseen jungle; then proceeding past the harsh vertical and diagonal lines cast presumably by a man-made structure; before settling on an Edenic scene under a tree.

[from the collection of Rob Stolzer]

There was ever this mix of industrialization and nature in King’s early Skeezix strips, the most notable example being the tour of various National Parks in 1921 in which King lightly played out the tension between the old and the new…

…and the concomitant change in values.

The words provide the context for this minor masterpiece in King’s oeuvre—a mild dispute which is finally resolved harmoniously—the interplay of emotions entirely carried by the workings of the forest light which flickers tentatively in the darkness…

…before reaching a kind of balance as Walt and Phyllis arrive at a domestic compromise.

And is it a coincidence that in this discussion of two working class African Americans, we should see the figures of the very white and Caucasian Walt and Phyllis turn from deep black to a variegated pattern of shadow and light?

***

But let’s return to the question of price vs. value which I mentioned at the start of this article.

While the sale of the McFarlane cover may seem a losing proposition as an individual investment, there is every reason to believe that the high price will be turned to profitable ends by the main players in this game—the auction houses and retailers who carry art of an equivalent “stature”. The rumor mill has not dismissed the possibility that the art itself will be sold quite magically for a profit in years to come, the highly manipulable art of price ratcheting now coming firmly into play.

In contrast, one of the famous Gasoline Alley “woodcut” Sundays—a masterpiece of the form—sold for just over $20,000 just a few months back. To put things in even finer perspective, if every one of the current crop of Gasoline Alley dailies (about 300 as of 13th August 2012) sold for $2000 (a handful have sold for more, most have sold for much less), the entire proceeds would still be less than the amount achieved for the aforementioned McFarlane Amazing Spider-Man cover.

Even so, this prime set of Gasoline Alley dailies, are very likely depreciating investments which will find it hard to keep up with the rate of inflation. The nostalgia value for these strips is almost non-existent, the collectors of these dailies being well worn and with at least a little toe (if not a foot) in the grave. The decision to sell at this opportune moment when the Drawn and Quarterly reprints have had time to settle in was probably wise though the rate at which they have been released is less possessed of the finest marketing sensibilities. And while it is excellent news for collectors that Americans disdain so much this small corner of their rich cartooning heritage, it does suggest that the greater part of this significant Gasoline Alley collection should have found a home in a comics museum the likes of which does not as yet exist. This rather than being scattered to the winds, bereft of the aesthetic weight of its size and the sheer breath of art, storytelling, and gentle humor.

Further Reading

Robert Boyd complains about the hopeless philistinism of the McFarlane purchase.

Gasoline Alley- Nostalgia for the Unknown

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Sean Michael Robinson

A String of Moment (Context)

Take the days, all of the days, and cut away all but what pleases you. Those moments of pleasure are strung together now, one by one, a trail of memory stretching uninterrupted from one year to the next. Together for the first time, they are new again.

Are you surprised at how much has been spent at the same task? Or did you cut all of that away, leaving only the odds and ends, a collection of punchlines for jokes never stated? There’s little variety or excitement in obligation. Just row after row of perfectly formed boxed filled with perfectly on-model cats gorging themselves on perfectly inked lasagna. Ack!

A Stranger Comes to Town

I have it on good authority that serial newspaper strips are not built in a day. Popeye, for instance, didn’t hitch his wagon to Thimble Theatre until more than nine years into its run. Gasoline Alley didn’t take quite that long to get going, at almost a year and a half into the strip. Allegedly it was Frank King’s editor who suggested the change, which seems ludicrous on its surface. “Let’s see—we’ve got this gag strip about men hanging about a garage discussing their flivvers and occasionally enacting a repair or two. How are we gonna make this appeal to women as well?” Well, why not add an orphan, and make him an infant for good measure?

It seems so crass, so misguidedly commercial, that it is both impossible and perfectly natural that it was really a demand from on-high. Ludicrous, but also functional. Previous to baby Skeezix’s arrival King’s observational abilities, and his eye for nuance, were primarily turned towards the ostensible subjects of the strip—the hardware, the gadgetry. The cars are lovingly discussed, examined, used and abused and eventually sold or discarded—another model on the horizon to discuss and dissect. But with Skeezix that great eye turned towards the people of the story, including this little infant who at first is so helpless, but who will eventually stand, walk, talk and play.

This innovation, this device of incredible power and utility that is the source of so much of the richness of the strip, the aging, seems to be, ultimately, an accident of Skeezix’s infancy.

Wading/Changes

I’ve read the first three volumes of Drawn + Quarterly’s Walt and Skeezix, collecting in total six years of the strip. I’ve watched Skeezix go from an infant in the arms of the confused and reluctant father Walt to seeing him run and play and talk with his newly-extended family—Walt, his wife Blossom, their maid and Skeezix’s caretaker Rachel, and their dog Pal. The deepness of this experience of shallow time, the slow accumulation of event, creates a very strange feeling of completeness, of reality, even through the melodrama, through the broad characterizations. The effect is that of reading a daily diary, dipping into the stream of days, wading, until it is a thing of itself, each one indistinguishable from the other.

History Without Intention

When Skeezix first arrived on Walt Wallet’s doorstop, what was the world like? America in 1919. Tell me. How did the air taste? How did the buildings look? How did people travel? How did they court? What did they wear? What did they swim in? What did they do for fun? Where were the hem lines, who were the heroes, and how was justice served?

The intimacy of scale encourages an inhabiting of the environment, an environment that would have largely been invisible to his readers at the time as it may have been largely familiar. After six years I feel as though I know this place in a way that would be impossible otherwise.

But what is the place that I know? Is it the unnamed town that Walt and his family inhabit? Is it all of small-town America? Or is it King’s imaginings of this place, his simplifications, his fictional yearnings and need for dramatic situation?

In 2041 will someone write a introspective retrospective on the recently unearthed T.J. Hooker, discussing all of the things they learned from the show about California in the 1980s?

Things I Learned From T.J. Hooker

In the early eighties motor vehicles were extremely dangerous. If one were to roll over, it will in a matter of seconds burst into flame and then burn.
In the early eighties policemen routinely fought vehicles in hand to vehicle combat, including but not limited to cars, trucks, forklifts, ¾ scale trains in amusement parks, planes and school buses. If any of these vehicles were to roll over on their backs in the course of this combat, they would very shortly burst into flame.
In the early eighties certain police officers had extrasensory powers of perception that enabled them to discern, almost immediately and with no externally visible evaluation or investigation, the true nature of the various criminals they confronted, and whether such criminals were good people set upon a bad path, or irredeemable scum that should be punished by all means possible.

To Unwrap and Enfold

Has there ever been a book series so well-loved, so nurtured and cared for and sensitively addressed, by its designer? Ware’s designs for his own books are virtuoso pastiches of styles long past and fallen from favor; his work on the Krazy and Ignatz series seems showy and ostentatious, not so much supporting the work within but wrapping it like a confectionist, and occasionally smothering it. But the Walt and Skeezix books use his great powers of pastiche and adaptation and put them solely in the service of the books themselves, the color and the scope of the scenery bridging the gap between the intimacy of scale of the dailies and the grandness and lush color of the Sundays.

Changes Again

When I bought these books, only a few years ago now, I was a married high school art teacher; I kept them on the lower shelf to the left of my drawing board, near the closet that we had to keep closed, so that our cat wouldn’t climb inside to nest in our belongings. The Walt and Skeezix volumes were her favorite books—she would play with the slim red ribbon that hangs from the binding of each volume. Now she’s dead, buried in the backyard, and I’m no longer married. Nor am I a high school teacher. As for the books, they were boxed up and put into the basement when I cleared out all my stuff out of the work room. Maybe I’ll sell them when I move out. I don’t think I would keep them now even if I could afford them—there’s just no place for them now.

So What Exactly Is It You Do? You Know, For A Living?

I read almost four year’s worth of these strips before it suddenly occurs to me—what does Walt do for a living? Does he have a job? If so, how does he get all of that time off for his cross-country jaunts? Maybe he’s independently wealthy—he’s certainly well-off enough to take care of his family and have plenty of dough left over for buying a new car, purchasing land or investing in one of Avery’s schemes. And yet he talks continually about money being tight, about having to save and manage and scrimp.

Is it that King felt the details of a profession would bog the strip down and leave it with less latitude for geographical change and impulsive spectacle? Is the grind of a profession a step too far toward realism and true monotony? Or perhaps King’s relentless observation had prepared him to thoroughly examine only a single man’s day to day work—his own.

It’s not immediate, but this realization fundamentally changes the way I perceive the strip. Or it could be the increasingly complex dramatic plot lines. But whatever the cause, the spell is broken. A friend of mine has her first child. I find the occasion surprisingly moving, greeting the news with a wave of elation and jealousy and confusion. I briefly consider buying her the first volume of Walt and Skeezix on remainder, and then think again, write a song instead.

Today

I did not draw. I did no work for money, had no goals, no expected outcomes. I played music, then biked to the house of a new friend, played more for sheer experience. Later we road down to the lake, wandered the park, climbed a concrete embankment, and swam in the chilly water until the sun went down around us.

It was blinding behind the trees. I didn’t think to draw it.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: Frank King

Draw Better! Put Your Eyes Out!

Comics and the Indispensability of Kitsch

A Poor Investment: Frank King’s Gasoline Alley

Gasoline Alley- Nostalgia for the Unknown