King, Frank [Gasoline Alley] *

I really wasn't looking for a new comic strip series to collect when I first took notice of Frank King's masterpiece, Gasoline Alley. I was already heavily involved in buying Barney Google originals, Blondie Strips (especially those ghosted by Alex Raymond, Bringing Up Fathers by George McManus, and, above all, Peanuts originals by Charles Schulz. I was vaguely familiar with Gasoline Alley as a result of Howard Lowery's purchase in c. 1990 of the Murray Harris collection of comic art. I was helping Howard with telephone bidding at his first auction of the Harris material, and, in my stack of calling slips was one for Don Phelps [the dealer, not the author], who wanted to be called on an early Gasoline Alley Sunday original. I had known Don for almost 20 years, so we were chatting away while waiting for the bidding to begin on the GA. Don was carrying on about the merits of Gasoline Alley, the fact that the characters aged in real time, etc. Although I kept trying to warn him that the lot was fast approaching, Don just kept talking. I finally began to almost shout at him, since the bidding was underway and he was still just talking -- I said, "do you want to bid," several times. Don finally responded with a question at the moment the GA sold. As might be expected, he then proceeded to get angry with me and started doing some yelling of his own. It was a rather rude beginning to my awareness of King's strip. A couple of years later, I saw a Gasoline Alley original on eBay -- a daily from 1921 with a Christmas theme. It wasn't terribly expensive when I began to bid on it, and I thought the strip was very charming. As was almost always true when I bid on anything on eBay, the price just kept going up as the lot was getting close to its end time. I had no idea why it would be so popular, but I won the strip for $1,650. When I began to look further into King's originals, I learned that it was common knowledge that King had burned almost all of his originals and that it was close to impossible to find one for sale on the market. The one which I had bought had been given to a fan in 1921, so it had survived the flames. After the first volume of Walt & Skeezix was published in 2005, I found that I really liked the strips with Skeezix as a toddler, but I knew that I would have to settle for my one example of the strip. That reality really set in later that year, when Brian Walker was only able to find my early daily, a later one owned by his father, and a Sunday owned by Art Spiegelman for inclusion in the Masters of Comic Art traveling exhibition. Don Phelps' anger and disappointment over failing to win that Sunday original 5 years earlier was more comprehensible now that I was also frustrated that I could not include more GAs in my own collection. But everything changed when Russ Cochran started auctioning dozens of great Gasoline Alley originals, month after month, starting in 2011. It turned out that Frank King had kept a couple of thousand of his originals when he burned the rest to make room in a shed on his property. And his grandchildren had preserved the originals for decades. Not all of the great strips had survived, but many of the best were still around and available to be purchased, every month for years. Of course, no one, other than Russ and the grandchildren, knew what treasures were to come when the first groups of originals showed up in the auctions, so I was incredibly happy to buy my second great Gasoline Alley original. the Christmas daily from 1922, in which Skeezix, as a toddler, received his dog, Pal, for Christmas. Each month I saw more and more originals that I just had to own. By the time the strips from my favorite year, 1922, appeared for sale in large numbers, I was buying 22 or more originals per month. I figured that the availability and sales of the ones I liked the most couldn't go on forever, since, at that time, I really didn't care that much about Gasoline Alleys from later in the 1920s, the 1930s, or beyond. And the quantity of originals that King had saved seemed to be diminishing, with far fewer from the mid to late 20s appearing in Cochran's auctions. Fortunately for my collection and unfortunately for my wallet, once the later strips began to be auctioned, my appreciation for King's later work and my desire for examples from the 1930s increased to the point that my monthly outlays failed to decline. I doubt if collectors have at any other time had a similar opportunity to buy so many important works by one of the great comic strip over a short period.. I was one of the beneficiaries of one such artist's foresight to pass down to his heirs so much of his brilliant work and the dedication of those heirs in preserving King's output for decades so that these strips could ultimately be treasured by collectors. The facts that I was kept poor for years and was probably seen by others as being a fanatic are inconsequential in the scheme of things.