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Gasoline Alley has been featured several times on this blog before, but it just continues to be a wonderful source of Christmas themed strips, so I keep going back to it. While it was created by Frank King in 1918, after King's death in 1969 it was carried on by a succession of different cartoonists and continues to this day. In fact, in just three more years, when it reaches its 110th year of publication, it will surpass The Katzenjammer Kids as the longest running newspaper comic.
Here we have an example of one of the later Frank King strips, and one that I can certainly relate to. I love making hand-made Christmas cards for my family, and in the past have actually considered doing either a wood block or linoleum block print for them. It would certainly make reproducing them multiple times for all my siblings easier. I may consider it again for next year. I did quite a lot of printmaking in college, so I'm familiar with the process that Skeezix shows off to Nina here. The only part that he forgot, of course, is that you have to carve the letters into the block backwards, so that they read forwards when you stamp it onto the paper. You have to retrain your brain a bit in order to make the letters wrong so they will be right later. I certainly made that mistake when I was first starting out. In fact, my senior art project included some woodblocks, and I even made that mistake on one of those pieces as well. There was someone yelling "AAAAAAAA!" and I put the exclamation point on the wrong side of the exclamation. I hope no one noticed.