Thought about saving this for October, but I figured I'd forget it by then. Besides, I found this at someone else's, probably Heidi's, site so I figure a great deal of you have already seen this anyway. But undaunted, I press on.
Apparently the classic newspaper comic strip Gasoline Alley, which has never run in a newspaper that I've had access to in my lifetime, had a regular ongoing Sunday page feature, during the Autumn months, in which the principal characters (which, apparently, aged in more or less "real" time- take that, For Better or For Worse) would go on walks in the countryside amidst the Fall colors- sometimes in humorous fashion, sometimes melancholy in nature...but usually always well done and very interesting. Here's a website which contains scans of about 73 years' worth of these, which are grouped into three sets- one for each artist that has worked on the strip to date.
Frank King's 20's-40's strips, especially the early ones, have that quaint charm that is inherent in most artistic endeavors from that era, and I can't help but wonder if his successor Bill Perry, whose tenure was from the 50's through the 70's and whose work is displayed above (click to see all biggerer), wasn't an influence on Richard Sala; those characters above look an awful lot like those drawn by Sala in his stories, which are a lot less innocuous than Alley seems to have been...but the similarity is striking to me.
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