Stripped Down

For the last week or so I've been trying to broaden my comics reading by exploring the world of Web Comics as well as that of newspaper Comic Strips. The two things that I've fallen in love with the hardest so far have been Chris Onstad's Achewood and Frank King's Gasoline Alley (currently being collected as 'Walt and Skeezix'). Both of these titles took me a little bit of time to get into.

I'd had Achewood recommended to me years ago by a couple of friends whose taste I really, really trust. I'd given it a shot at that time and decided that for whatever reason it just wasn't for me. Over the last few months I've started to see it mentioned more and more by 'notable comics commentators' (i.e. bloggers who write regularly and coherently about comics + a handful of paid critics), and I started wondering if I should give it another chance. I went back to the beginning of the strip and just started going through one-by-one. I spent a while wondering if people simply said that they liked it because they thought that it made them look smart for some reason. I didn't hate it, but I certainly couldn't understand what the raving was about and I didn't see any potential for it to turn into something that would warrant that either. Gradually though, as I got to know the characters and became more invested in their world, the strip started to win me over in a big way.

I'm not really sure at what point I started enjoying it, but I know that I became conscious that I was in love with it once I reached the middle of 2003 in the archives. I know that I wouldn't have made it through two years worth of strips if I hadn't started consistently enjoying it before that, but that was the point that it became clear to me that it actually did live up to all the hype. The most amazing thing is that the strip still hadn't fully matured by that point. Once I decided that I was all kinds of into it, it started to take my ideas regarding the heights it could reach, take those, and use them to show me how limited my imagination was with regards to quality. Every couple months worth of archives would knock me freshly on my ass by raising my expectations of how funny and perceptive this bizarre strip could be.

The stories started to get longer and more structured and the characters voices got more defined and expressive. The world got deeper through all of the side projects like Ray's advice column and the blogs and, holy shit, all the sudden Achewood is not just this web-comic that I dig - it's one of my favorite comics period. I'm starting to figure out how to budget getting all of the books and buying volumes of them as gifts to people and getting annoyed that there's only one volume of the blogs available right now and, what the hell just happened? I think that a lot of it comes down to me as a reader, as well as Onstad the writer, figuring out over time exactly what's going on. I figured out how to read the series at the same time that Onstad was refining his voice. By the time I knew how to approach it, he had already not only become the heir to Bloom County, he had already zoomed past that rarified air and discovered his own, stronger, more layered, more ambitious, more singular, and more detail oriented voice. Hell, I'm even buying the damn cookbook. That's how great this shit is.

Gasoline Alley was something that I'd also been hearing about for years, but in it's case what I'd been hearing about was the 'importance' of it. Well, there's nothing like 'importance' attached to something to make it sound unappealing. There's also the fact that the comics section in the paper I grew up with carried Gasoline Alley when I was a kid. I know now that it was well past the period that is subject to any measure of acclaim, and that King had been dead for a long time and hadn't been associated with the strip for some time before that and blahblahblahblah, but the associations that my childhood encounters with Gasoline Alley left were hard to shake. Those associations were that Gasoline Alley was boring, unfunny crap about uninteresting old people. I knew that I was 'supposed' to want to read the old ones because I love comics, but, well, they weren't in print and, boy, what a disappointment that was. Sincerely.

Oh. Wait.

They're suddenly coming back into print? In big editions like the Peanuts books? Aw, maaan. *sigh* I guess this means I'll have to check them out at some point.

Oh. Wait.

Chris Ware is involved? And he's spouting off about how getting these collected is his dream project? And talking unendingly about how much influence he's taken from them. *whew* That's got me off the hook. I mean, why would I want to waste my time with something that fucking Chris Ware is not only the biggest champion of, but seems to be unable to shut up about.

Fuck Chris Ware.

Fuck Acme Novelty Library, fuck Jimmy Corrigan, and more than anything fuck his boring-ass, one-note, dishonest, bullshit writing.

Chris Ware has yet to write a comic that didn't leave me feeling that he may be the only person on the planet who didn't get beat up enough when he was a kid. Depression-posturing is just not remotely interesting or attractive on someone after the age of 14. If Gasoline Alley/Walt and Skeezix/whatever-the-fuck it is is one of the main sources of inspiration for this asshole, lord knows I don't need it.

Then I found myself scanning the shelves at the library the other day. I wanted to find something that was the first volume of a series that I hadn't read before, as well as something that was outside of my usual range of interests. My eye fell on Walt and Skeezix. It was one of about a half dozen titles I took home that day. Out of everything that I pulled out of my bag when I got home, I thought that Walt and Skeezix was the one that I was least interested in, but somehow it drew me in and made itself the first one I started reading.

You can read about the whole history of the strip from more informed and eloquent sources than me. It went through kind of an interesting evolution to become what it eventually became, and it's worth reading about if that sort of thing interests you. It interests me, I dug it, I'm not going to bother regurgitating the stuff that I've read on it over the last week. What I will say is that I am completely hooked. It's a gag a day strip that focuses on a group of dudes who really love their cars. I am not at all a car guy. I take the bus everywhere. But even though this was done in the '20's, I recognize these dudes. I have known a few gearheads in my time and it looks like they were pretty similar back in the day as they are today. Then one of the dudes has a baby dropped on his front step and the series gets another layer. We start getting a lot of strips dedicated to a gearhead bachelor dealing with being a single dad.

Cute.

Nice.

Human enough to carry truth to today. It'll make you chuckle. It'll make you go, oh aren't people just like that. In other words, it'll make you feel like you have become the thing you see anytime you have watched your parents or some other disliked, out-of-touch representation of 'older people' read 'the funny papers'.

Then, after a little while you start to notice that the baby is aging at a natural rate. And that Walt's priorities are starting to shift. And that there's some real human relationships going on behind the joke-a-day structure. And, more interesting, that the joke-a-day structure is actually frequently utilized to show the readers who these people are, as much as it is used to generate a chuckle.

Once I started picking up on that I looked at the years of the strips original publication, and started to do some thinking. I knew that one of the things that it was famous for was that the strip took place in something approximating 'real-time' where each character ages 1 year for every year of publication, but that didn't really mean much to me until I was watching this kid Skeezix learning how to walk. Suddenly I'm wondering where his life is going to go, and realizing that he's going to be an adolescent in the middle of the depression and that he's going to be 20 when the US gets involved with WW2, and I'm feeling all protective of him and wondering what's going to happen to him. Around this time King is starting to build in longer story arcs, and create questions about characters and..... I want to know what happens next. And I don't want spoilers. And I'm invested. And why the fuck doesn't Chris Ware apply his prodigious talent to something this good and rich and human instead of continuing his 'I'm serious because I'm self-loathing and depressed' posturing?

I've just finished the first volume of Walt and Skeezix, and I have the second waiting for pick-up at the library and I've sent in an interlibrary loan request for the third. Next up is Dick Tracy and then Terry and the Pirates. Sometimes I can't believe how many truly great comics already exist that I still have yet to read.