In this talk, Professor Matthew Levay discusses the early years of Frank King’s Gasoline Alley as a case study for understanding the variety of serial experimentation that permeated popular forms of the early twentieth century. Levay demonstrates how the comic, whose characters famously aged in real time, purposely juxtaposed four distinct forms of temporality–the speed of the automobile and technological change; the course of an individual life; the everyday routines of labor and leisure that dominate the strip's action; and the daily seriality of the newspaper’s production and consumption, which facilitated the strip's narrative and readers' experiences of it–and thus offers an unprecedented, popular modernist inquiry into the confluences of narrative, historical, and periodical time.
Matthew Levay is Associate Professor of English at Idaho State University. He is the author of Violent Minds: Modernism and the Criminal (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and The New Old Style: Anachronism in Contemporary Comics (forthcoming with the University of Nebraska Press), and his essays have appeared in Modernism/modernity, the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, Modernist Cultures, and the Journal of Modern Literature, among other venues. The Co-Editor, with Elizabeth Sheehan, of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, he currently serves as the Program Chair of the Modernist Studies Association.
