Masters of American Comics, pt 1

bugsybanana spent the weekend, and I showed her The Venture Bros and the Battlestar Galactica miniseries. We saw Babel, but didn’t get around to seeing Casino Royale.

Today we went to the Newark Museum for the strips part of the Masters of American Comics exhibit. (The books part is at the Jewish Museum; we may go during the week.) I was pretty surprised by Frank King’s early work. I remember the Gasoline Alley of my childhood (the ’70s) as a boring slice-of-life strip that I’d skip over on the way to reading Hagar the Horrible. (Those may have been after King retired and his assistant Dick Moores took over.) But back in the ’30s King used to do all sorts of visual experiments in the strip — characters walking through a modern art landscape, or twelve panels sharing a single continuous background with the action wandering across it.