All the art work on this page is my own doodling imagineered from the old comic strips just to see if I could do it. I soon realized that my ability falls short of the original art work, but it was fun anyway. I can't personally relate to the era of this beginning as it started over twenty years before I was born. There are many other characters in the comic strip, I only chose to mention the ones with cars. Walt of course is the main character in the comic strip that started being published in the early twenties. Frank King, the artist, chose a real person from his neighborhood in Chicago for the character "Walt". Walt became a father overnight when someone left the baby "Skeezix" on his doorstep early one morning. |
| The Gasoline Alley comic strip is centered around the lives of Uncle Walt and Skeezix. Here is Skeezix Hot Dogging in his first car. I redrew this image free hand and made it much larger in the process to make the work easier. |
| Avery was a made up character that was Walt's closed friend and was an absolute skin flint. The car looks very much like a Model T touring model and always remained the oldest car of the neighborhood gang. |
Bill was also a real person from the Alley neighborhood in the strip. The real "Bill" was a locomotive engineer but no mention of that is in the comic strip. I'm not sure was kind of car he drove as it could be a Model T also. The actual neighborhood garage with its constant repair activity became the plot for the comic strip. Frank King added junk and broken fences from this real garage in his art work that made scenes real to life. |
| Doc in the comic strip was the local Doctor that never seemed to work except in a few instances. His car was a larger sport model that a doctor could afford. |
| Mrs. Blossom was what some called a "grass widow" that moved into the neighborhood early in the strip. She drove a rather stately car for someone that didn't work either. Walt eventually marries her and they have children that become main characters in the strip that I remember in the forties and fifties. |
| Mr. Wicker is a wealthy business man that moves into the neighborhood and builds a large garage for his luxury car. |
| I thought that cartooning would be a piece of cake compared to other crafts and art work I have done. I bought some books on the subject and acquired the recommended materials. It took me a long time to draw and paint the above images and still have a long way to go for neatness and speed. The last panel (Mr Wicker) was the only one colored with the computer and even that was difficult and has some flaws. |