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About Comics to Publish the Bus and Car Travel Cartoons of Wally Falk

About Comics is reviving the cartooning work of Wally Falk, who spent fifteen years driving for Greyhound Bus Lines.

Published Fri, 13 Sep 2024 14:58:09 -0500

Nat Gertler is a comic book-and-related hero, an Eisner Award-winning comics history writer, putting work back into print that had been unduly forgotten, missed out from the canon or in urgent need of archiving. From religious-themed cartoons to superhero comic The Factor, from Stephen Weiner's analysis of Jeff Smith's Bone to a facsimile of The Green Book, or bringing back to print Gail Simone and Lea Hernandez's Killer Princesses, his work as About Comics is always worthy of note. And now it is reviving the cartooning work of Wally Falk, who spent fifteen years driving for Greyhound Bus Lines, and then turned that career into one of cartooning. Initially for Greyhound publications, and then as a syndicated newspaper cartoonist. About Comics is publishing two themed themed cartoon collections The Family Car Road Trip by Wally Falk and Bus Busters by Wally Falk.

The Family Car Road Trip culls from the Falk's 1956-1961 syndicated strip "The Family Car". That single-panel series was all about the place of the car in the American life, and editor Allison Gertler has selected about a hundred cartoons focused on the great American tradition, the road trip. These came out during the golden age of the road trip, when prosperity meant that more Americans than ever could afford cars, but air travel was still prohibitively expensive. Americans took their vacations in their sedans and station wagons. They traveled endless stretches of asphalt during the day by following the lines on awkwardly-folded maps or AAA Triptiks. They squeezed in together each night at motels, motor lodges, and campsites at night. The travel time was filled with license plate games and back seat battles, with stops for gas, service station bathroom breaks, natural wonders, bizarre roadside attractions, and if they were lucky, a pecan log. All this spirit, the good times and the awkward ones both, are captured in Falk's cartoons.

This book is the first collection ever for "The Family Car". But the original edition of Bus Busters was a pocket-sized book co-published in 1954 by Falk himself. The cartoons all focus on the buses, the people who ride them, and those who drive. Some cartoons were original for the booklet, some were reprinted or reworked from Falk's newspaper panel "Kickin' Around" (which was credited on many a funnies page as "by bus-driver Wally Falk".) For the new edition, About Comics has not just physically enlarged the book but expanded it, adding dozens of bus-themed cartoons from "Kickin' Around". While that panel ran from 1945 to 1956, all of the added panels are from within a couple years of the original edition's publishing date, in tone with the original collection.

While About Comics has no plans to solicit these books in the direct market, they are aiming beyond just Amazon. Much of their business is in the museum gift shop market, and they hope to get these titles into travel-related museums. And at least one further Wally Falk collection is in the works.

The Family Car Road Trip is a 108 page black and white 5.25"x"8" paperback with a cover price of $9.99.
Bus Busters: Expanded Edition is a 128 page black and white 5.25"x"8" paperback with a cover price of $12.00.

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