On Feb. 14, 1921 the orphan who came to be known as Skeezix landed on Walt Wallet’s doorstep, forever changing the trajectory of the Gasoline Alley comic strip and helping to propel it into the hearts of millions of Americans. Until then, Walt had been the main character in a small tribe of small town fellas who loved to tinker with cars (hence “Gasoline Alley”) and trade quips and jibes. With the introduction of Skeezix, however, the strip became a uniquely introspective saga of everyday human connections, the progression of generations, community dynamics and values, the emotional cadence of everyday human interaction.

Gasoline Alley is best known for being the only major American strip that let its characters age and even pass away. By the 1930s, Skeezix would hit early adolescence, and the strip became one of the first works of pop culture to focus on this modern phenomenon of the “teenager.”

Authored by Frank King, Gasoline Alley was a genuinely homespun comic strip. While many American cartoonists had their roots in the Midwest and small towns, King brought that personal experience to the center of the strip. He patterned many of the characters after friends and acquaintances. Walt was based on a childhood friend. Skeezix’s growth paralleled King’s own son, including those rough teen years. But more than anything else, King based his strip on the language, rhythms and emotions of everyday exchanges. As Jeet Heer points out in his excellent introductions to the ongoing reprints of the strip, Gasoline Alley was not a gag strip or a soap opera, nor was it slapstick or satire. Strips rarely ended with a punchline or a cliff hanger. The four daily panels typically added perhaps a little insight into a character, advanced a plot line just a smidge, or showed characters interacting in a slightly new way. The joys of the strip were cumulative, an extended immersion in the little interactions and feeling of a tightly knit cluster of friends and family, people who knew one another deeply.

Which is to say that no small collection of reprinted strips here can really capture the unremarkable remarkableness of Gasoline Alley. I find that extended immersion is King’s world is truly compelling but takes days and weeks of persistent exposure. As Here says, “Gasoline Alley achieves its hold on its audience by being ruminative and cumulative.” It lets you peer into the nuances of family, immediate and extended and the subtle ways in which people know and appreciate one another. But the strip below, which marked the first anniversary Skeezix’s appearance, hints at the kind of emotional depth and intimacy King crafted here. As a single father for the first years of Skeezix’s life, he proved to be the prototypical sensitive male, that rare figure in popular culture of the nurturing man. IT is a good example of how King was getting at aspect of modern American culture that