Gasoline Alley

by Dick Moores

137 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Richard Arnold Moores was an American cartoonist whose best known work was the comic strip Gasoline Alley, which he worked on for nearly three decades.
(source: Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Dale · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had thought that this would be all of the strips in chronological order for a period of one year. I did appreciate the historical background. The format made it feel like I was reading a comic book rather than a comic strip.

[Alex Sarll]

A semi-random purchase from the estate sale of the late, great Garry Leach, and it turns out knowing that is appreciably more melancholy than merely speculating about why your local charity shop has suddenly had an influx of cool stuff. I knew the name Gasoline Alley, and that it was one of the longest running US comic strips, no more than that; between the introduction to this 1970s volume and a quick skim of the Wikipedia article for what happened next, I can now tell you that it's been going for over a century and only had three creators in all that time (at least for the dailies – the Sunday strips, not included here, stretched to a comparatively promiscuous five). Dick Moores, of whose work this offers a sample, was the middle one. To give some idea of the sort of timescale we're talking about, the intro here casually talks about Doonesbury as one of the best of the new strips. It also contrasts Gasoline Alley with gag strips, which I think may explain why it's never had much of a presence in Britain; there is humour here, but it's very gentle, and in the earlier strips can be unhappily close to that Jack Daniel's ad 'humour' which gives the impression of someone who's seen jokes done but really doesn't know how they work. Over the years, though, either Moores got more of a knack, or I got more tuned in to the wavelength, because by the end of this the stories were definitely raising smiles, if never laughs. It's down-home Americana, more or less, centred on a family of loveable lummox men and much more realistically drawn women, but generally most entertaining when they gently cede the foreground to the more broad-brush characters, and that's in the sense of 'local characters'. Elderly kleptomaniacs, the town's miserly landlord, and especially the two amiable ne'er-do-wells Joel and Rufus who, along with their mule and cat, are immune to the real time ageing* which afflicts the more realistic characters. Which, to be fair, does reflect my own experience of that sort of person in this sort of community, the way nobody's quite sure how old they are or how they keep going, but they do. It's Moores' art which makes it, though, packing characterful detail, incident and sometimes an enormous cast of characters into these little strips like a small-town, spandex-free George Perez.

*For a given value of the term – looking at the lifespans of some of the principals, this strip must take place in one hell of a blue zone. Though I did notice that the character called Flick didn't seem to last too long, and I'm not surprised, because it turns out it's very true about how old-fashioned comics lettering made that word look.

[Wdmoor · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my large family the Sunday comics were always battled over. Blondie, Peanuts, Beetle Bailey and Nancy were popular with my sisters, but I was always fascinated with Gasoline Alley. There was something so human about it. I always wanted to live in that town.

[Michael Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daily strips from 1964 to 1967, one of the best comic strips I remember from the times I actually read newspaper comic strips. Over 900 of them, bringing back good memories of my middle and high school years.