Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (4 points)

 The comic I read was called Gasoline Alley. I do not see many specifics as to which one this was, but I do know it was the comic on page 115 of the Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. The comic stood out to me as having these strange, trippy, dream-like scenes throughout the entire comic. While this one takes place in a dream so this weird abstract world makes sense, this was a lot more common in early comic strips then I originally anticipated. Tons of comics strips throughout the 20’s to 30’s had weird almost abstract drawings, which is interesting because the medium was in its early stages and already people were experimenting with it. The prevalence of this type of art style also shows that, while not the most popular, it was very popular amongst the average comic strip reader. Which is odd because now these hyper abstract worlds have fallen (for the most part) out of popularity. In Fact it seems that this shift even happened by the end of the 30’s. In this issue of Gasoline Alley, there is a trippy dream sequence, however it cannot just happen on it’s own, it needs the context of being in a dream. This is most likely because it was made in 1931, so they needed context for their absurdity. I also found it interesting how the comic’s abstract world even extends to the language used in the comic. It might be partially the fact that it was written in the 30’s, but the sentences in the comic do not connect to each other at all, furthering the dream vibes the comic is going for.

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