The second of the four coolest books published in the past few years is another oversized volume from Sunday Press Book -- Sundays With Walt and Skeezix. It collects a number of Sunday pages from Frank King's brilliant long-running strip Gasoline Alley, one of the glories of American popular art. I've written before about the series from Drawn and Quarterly Press which is reprinting the entire run of the daily strip in a succession of handsome volumes -- but the Sunday pages are something else again.
In the daily strip, King created a narrative masterpiece graced with many flights of visual invention, but in the color Sunday pages his visual imagination grew much bolder -- lyrical, almost abstract at times. He looked at the Sunday page sometimes as an arena for the wildest experimentation -- to see just how far the expressive potential of a comic strip might reach.
In the Sunday Press collection we can see these Sunday strips almost as their first viewers did -- in the same colors and in the same size. It's a measure of our culture's descent into mediocrity and triviality that no work of such ambition and grace now accompanies any daily newspaper in the land, and certainly no cable news channel. It used to be assumed that the visions of great popular artists ought to be part of every American's daily dose of media. Today only cheap digital graphics and portentous musical jingles accompany the canned "news" doled out by the major media outlets.
Americans have never liked being spoon fed "culture" -- meaning culture that somebody decided was good for them. That was the beauty of the comic strip -- it was an art form so unpretentious, so vernacular and casual, that Americans could consume it over breakfast or before dinner without a trace of self-consciousness or social anxiety. But its expressive range was almost limitless. We know that from the work of artists like Frank King, who in their own quiet but audacious ways tested its limits to the full.
You could read through these comics and weep that stuff this great used to be thrown up on the porches of millions of Americans by paperboys every Sunday morning -- and isn't anymore. Or you could read through them and take heart at the fact that stuff this great could ever have been part of American popular culture -- and so might be again. Why not?
You can buy Sundays With Walt and Skeezix here.