Walt & Skeezix
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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.