Walt & Skeezix.

by

Frank O. King.

1929 & 1930.

Drawn & Quarterly Books, MONTREAL.

Introduction

b y

J e e t H e e r .

“The love of parents for their children is the most important factor in the present rapidly accelerating popularity of home movies.” — Parents Magazine, April 1929.

F ilm has this much in common with memory: both take time to develop. Frank King was an artist obsessed with memory. He wasn’t just content to live his Living as we do in the digital 21st century when images can be instantly recorded, the life: he also used many different media to record his everyday experiences, creating a old analog technology of film, used for both photos and movies over the last century, rich personal archive of diaries, sketchbooks, photos, home movies and other memory- might seem hopelessly slow and patience-taxing. Even pictures from a Polaroid instant laden artifacts. This trove of mementos existed not only for the sake of personal pleasure, camera took a few seconds to develop. After you shook an “instant” photo you could see but also as the raw material of images and ideas King would rework into his comic the shapes and colors gaining definition and precision before your eyes. Yet the very strip Gasoline Alley, which chronicled the life of a fictional family, but was built on an slowness of film has the advantage of mimicking our thought processes, with memorable autobiographical substratum. events not being immediately lodged in our minds, but rather gaining solidity and force In pillaging his past for material, King was no different from many (if not most) over time as we process our experiences. Our personal memories aren’t like computer artists. What made him distinct was that there was a systematic time lag between databases where items are easily accessed with a quick search engine. Rather, private experiencing events and selectively appropriating them in cartoon form. King and his recollections are more like a closet full of home movie canisters and photo albums, a heap wife Delia had their only living child, Robert, on February 13, 1916. Almost exactly of disorganized images of varying quality, some crisp and bright, others fuzzy and of five years later, baby Skeezix, a foundling, was introduced into Gasoline Alley when he uncertain provenance. Just as old photos and films fade and take on an odd coloration, our was discovered on the doorsteps of the portly bachelor Walt Wallet. Skeezix would memories have the fragility and changeability of physical things. grow up in real time in the strip, aging day by day. Since King based Skeezix’s youth

13. on observations of Robert’s childhood, identical journey by Walt, Skeezix and the cartoonist was constantly fishing out their friends. More typically, King would memories from half a decade earlier. Prior let a memory simmer and stew in his mind to Robert, the Kings had a stillborn child for a year or more before he was ready to in 1913, a tragedy that fed the cartoonist’s serve it up in comic strip form. Thus, an lifelong tendency to worry about losing actual 1923 vacation to Monument Valley his son. didn’t result in a comic strip counterpart Coupled with this five-year waiting till 1924. A 1927 trip to the British Isles, period was King’s personal tendency France, and Belgium took even longer to towards introspective rumination and percolate, making it into Gasoline Alley dwelling on the past. This trait set King in a very truncated form in 1931. These apart from more journalistic cartoonists vacations were extensively recorded by such as Harold Gray and Chester Gould, King in photos and home movies, which two colleagues who also had comic strips then served as reference tools when the internationally syndicated by the Chicago cartoonist needed them. Tribune. Gray’s Little Orphan Annie and Photos and home movies were a crucial Gould’s Dick Tracy were both deeply component of King’s cartooning. In journalistic strips featuring stories about previous volumes of the Walt and Skeezix crime and political corruption that series, we’ve been fortunate enough to have deliberately echoed blaring front page access to the extensive collection of family headlines. King would only occasionally photos kept by King’s granddaughter dabble in this type of tabloid cartooning, Drewanna. These photos have given us an mainly in a long–running but intermittent unparalleled glimpse into King’s personal series of stories tracking custody disputes life, and have showed us how extensively over Skeezix. More typically, King his visual imagination was informed by borrowed storytelling rhythms not from his practices as an amateur photographer. the insistent attention-grabbing percussive With this volume, King’s photos can beat of newspaper reporting, but rather be augmented by an even more precious from the quieter melody that comes source, the home movies King started from contemplating a cherished personal making in the early 1920s, samples keepsake like a family album or a home of which can be seen in the DVD that movie. accompanies this book. Now that these On rare occasions, the events in photos and home movies are available, we Gasoline Alley would mirror what had are able to link King’s cartooning more just recently happened in King’s life, deeply to his wider creative practices as an as in 1921 when a real-life vacation to amateur photographer and filmmaker. Yellowstone National Park taken by the King family and some friends was closely This and page 12 — the driveway to the Kings’ home in shadowed in newspaper pages by an almost Florida; undated, but c. 1930s.

14. F rank King was born into the age of film. Within the lifetime of his grandparents and parents, the technology for freezing time into static images was developed and later supplemented by inventions to capture movement. The crucial dates are 1839, when Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre announced his new photographic process (known as the daguerreotype), and 1872, when Eadweard Muybridge began his experiments in capturing high-speed motion photographically, inventing a process that recorded the galloping movement of horses and set the stage for future developments in moving pictures. King was born in 1883, only a decade after Muybridge’s earliest motion studies. Aside from horses in motion, Muybridge took photos of the American West, specializing in sublime landscape shots of Yosemite (home of the eventual national park), anthropological studies of the Modoc Indians (then in the bitter last days of war with the American army), and breathtaking panoramic views of San Francisco. Muybridge’s work in this vein can be seen as one of the cornerstones of an American tradition of frontier photography that would later flower in the work of Ansel Adams. In his own hobbyist way, King’s photographs were also a part of this tradition. It is almost a literal statement of fact that King followed in Muybridge’s footsteps into Yosemite, recording updated images of the then new national park that the pioneering photographer had recorded decades earlier when it had been contested Indian territory. Throughout his travels in North America, King was fascinated by Native American tribes, taking pictures of the Navajo in Arizona, the Seminole of Florida and the Haida of British

King at home with some of his photography equipment, c. 1930s. “Hobbyist” seems an inadequate term here. In 1923, the Kings made an extensive tour of the American Southwest, which King documented in extraordinry detail; the material was organized into photo albums and used as reference both for his strips and other sundry artistic projects. Columbia. King’s fixation on Native American culture can be seen as a continuation of faces permanent possessions; it was only when the later photographic processes arrived Muybridge’s moving and sensitive photos of the Modoc. Muybridge’s sweeping panoramic on the scene that photography extended its grasp in space as it had it time. The images views of San Francisco influenced future filmmakers who tried to get a “bird’s-eye view” piled up, and photography became an industry too. The world was growing larger and of the world (a task aided by the development of skyscrapers and airplanes). Once again, more complicated, and photography was both an agent of the enlargement and a device King travelled down the same road. In for trying to sort it all out, to own it, his 1927 trip to Paris, King used the to make it manageable. Photography Eiffel Tower as a perch for viewing the had frozen the river of time, but a whole of the city, lingering over how torrent of photographs began to pour the Seine cuts through the metropolis from the photography studios into as well as the bridges that arched over homes, pockets, albums, photographs the great river. As a cartoonist, King of pyramids, empresses, streets, poets, would often deploy the “bird’s-eye- cathedrals, trees, actors.” view” to provide a fresh perspective on Solnit’s metaphor of “the river of a scene. More than once, he gave his time” is worth fastening on to because, audience a panoramic view of Gasoline as it happens, the flow of water is one Alley with all the characters surveyed of King’s favourite filmic subjects. from above, a shot that allowed readers Wherever he went, he looked for a to see the characters as belonging to a chance to record the ripple of a lake or cohesive community. the weave of a wave. In Paris, he filmed In River of Shadows, a sprightly and the Seine; in the Pacific Northwest, idea-rich study of Muybridge’s legacy, roaring waterfalls; in rural England, the art critic Rebecca Solnit posits that picturesque creeks; on camping trips the invention of photography radically in the northwest, a canoe-filled river; changed how we experience time and in Florida, a crowded beach as well as a memory. “Even so, photography was a calm lake. profound transformation of the world Why was King the filmmaker so it entered,” Solnit argues. “Before, attracted to water? Aside from his every face, every place, every event, general love of nature, perhaps there had been unique, seen only once and was a formal element at work as well: then lost forever among the changes of if photographs freeze “the river of age, light, time. The past existed only time,” then film is the ideal medium in memory and interpretation, and King’s brother Leland visiting the Kings’ new property in Florida, 1928. for actually capturing rivers in their the world beyond one’s experience was natural, gushing unfrozen fluidity. As mostly stories … Every photograph no other medium can, film can show was a moment snatched from the the flow and movement of liquids and river of time. Every photograph was a piece of evidence from the event itself, a material King, as his comics make clear, had an aesthetic interest in matching form with content. witness. The youthful face of a beloved could be looked at decades after age or death or Aside from water, King had several other thematic obsessions as a filmmaker that show separation had removed that face, could be possessed like an object … Soon countless up time and again. Closely allied with his water fixation was his fascination with boats thousands were lining up to possess images of themselves, their families, their dead of all sorts: he filmed countless scenes of luxury ocean liners, ferries, skiffs, sailing ships children, to their own past. Most daguerreotypes reached out in time to make familiar and fishing vessels. Also related to the water theme was his interest in bridges of many

17. Frank, Delia amd Robert and two unidentified passengers in a seaplane, dated 1922. varieties: rickety wooden bridges in remote parks, ancient So far, we’ve been focusing on the recurring background stone bridges in England and vast modern suspension bridges, images in King’s home movies. But while he was clearly among others. For someone as travel-minded as Frank King, visually engaged with subjects such as rivers, bridges, ships, bridges must have been a resonant symbol, carrying with horses, and birds, all of these items are merely the stage them the promise of journeys and crossings to new territory. setting for what was King’s chief concern: family life. Spending so much time vacationing in remote national Before the 1920s, amateur filmmaking was largely a parks, the Kings were clearly nature lovers. As the home pursuit of quirky inventors and do-it-yourself types who took movies make evident, there were three types of animals that Edison as a model and wanted to create an alternative to the the cartoonist particularly loved: dogs, horses, and birds. In expensive 35mm film, costly in large part because it was the 1920s, the Kings had a frisky Airedale terrier named Pal easily flammable and had to be shipped in weighty, hard-to- (the prototype for the comic strip dog owned by Skeezix). handle lead-lined cases. Frank King and his younger brother Living in Florida in the 1930s, the Kings acquired two sleek Leland were both mechanically minded and often created and formidable Doberman Pinschers. One home movie clip optical contraptions of their own, so it’s possible that they shows Pal freaking out over a garter snake, madly barking participated in these early days of homemade film production, while keeping his distance. Interestingly, Delia King isn’t although we have no evidence one way or the other. bothered by the snake, which she confidently handles. A Modern home movies were born in 1921 when two 1929 Gasoline Alley strip is based on the contrast between leading firms (Kodak and Bell and Howell) worked two rivals for the affection of Skeezix: the ultra-feminine together to make the new 16mm acetate-based stock the Sally who is afraid of snakes and the tomboy Jean who has no industry standard. This stock had the advantage of being compunction about grappling with creeping animals. Clearly non-flammable, and therefore much safer for amateurs. Delia King, who happily donned khaki pants to join her Within a few years, Bell and Howell’s Filmo 70 and husband and son on their far-flung camping adventures, was Kodak’s Cine-Kodak (both of which came with cameras and of the tomboy variety. projectors) became the most popular movie-making tools for King shot many scenes of horses, once again placing himself non-professionals, and the age of amateur inventors was over. squarely in the Muybridge tradition. To be sure, in those The Filmo 70 cost $389, which in 2011 terms comes days cars were still a novelty and horses still often used for to nearly five thousand dollars. This relatively high entry transportation, but it’s notable how alert King was to ambling cost meant that the early adapters to home movies tended equines. King grew up in a world where horses were the to come from the upper middle class. In 1921, Frank King major means of transportation and, in his lifetime, witnessed earned $20,476.69 (the modern equivalent of a quarter of a the triumph of the automobile, which was, of course, a major A 1932 advertisement for the Bell and Howell Filmo 70D, million dollars), so the cost of buying a movie camera wasn’t thematic subject of Gasoline Alley, a comic strip that recorded a popular model of amateur motion picture camera. prohibitive for him. how the combustion engine remade American life. King’s focus However, film remained expensive even for the well-to-do, on horses in his films testifies perhaps to his strong feelings for which explains one of the peculiarities of King’s movie- the world that was being lost. making, a trait he shared with other pioneers in the home The cartoonist also had an eye for birds of all species: whether elegant swans or movie field. In his early home movies from the 1920s, King never lingers long over a ungainly chickens, sea gulls in flight or grounded turkeys, there was something shot, no matter how intrinsically interesting it might be. Most of King’s shots are only a about feathered animals that caught King’s fancy. Among human subjects, King few seconds long, which makes the early home movies a bit too jerky and abrupt. King enjoyed filming cute little kids and women in bathing suits. He seems to have been would overcome this tendency in the 1930s as the price of film became cheaper and the particularly attracted to women with zaftig pear-shaped figures. cartoonist gained confidence in his camera skills.

19. walt5_inprogress_1929.qxd:walt2.pages62-390.qxd 5/12/11 7:47 AM Page 68 (Black plate) 1929.

January 3rd and 4th. walt5_inprogress_1929.qxd:walt2.pages62-390.qxd 5/12/11 7:47 AM Page 69 (Black plate) 1929.

January 5th and 7th. walt5_inprogress_1929.qxd:walt2.pages62-390.qxd 5/12/11 7:48 AM Page 70 (Black plate) 1929.

January 8th and 9th.