Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (4 points)

 A strip that I found interesting and innovative from the Smithsonian Collection was Frank King’s Gasoline Alley. The selected strips from the comic focus on the daily lives of Uncle Walt and his curious adopted kid, Skeezix. It is a very relaxing and meditative slice of life. I thought the selected strips were interesting as they explored dreams and dream like sequences on pg.108-109 and pg.111, much like McCay’s Little Nemo. On pg.108-109 they enter a painting, while making rather amusing statements on the world of the art. It is interesting to see the disconnect of the two different styles of the simple characters and the modernist environment. On pg.111, it explores Skeezix dreams, and how they are influenced by the world around him. His orange and black striped bed sheets become a tiger that transforms into elephant, that then turns into a hot air balloon, and finally into a tub. In the panel where Skeezix wakes up, the reader sees Walt in orange pajamas, and Corky sleeping in a cradle next to him, relating his dreams to reality. They also had interesting paneling like the strip on pg.110. It is one image split into 12 panels; but by splitting it into 12, King creates intricate relationships between time and space of the actions happening in each panel. It makes what could be seen as a single image/ moment in time, and splits it with panels and speech bubbles, giving it timing. Upon further research of this strip, I learned what also made Gasoline Alley unique from comics at the time was that the characters aged and it still running from the original publishing date of 1918. It follows generations of characters as you see them age and grow up, and I quite like that as a concept.