Gasoline Alley
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Image:Gastamp.gif Gasoline Alley is a comic strip created by Frank King that was first published on November 24th, 1918.
The Chicago Tribune ran a page on Sundays called "The Rectangle". Staff artists would do one-shot panels, or continuing plots or themes. A small, humble corner of The Rectangle was home to Frank King's Gasoline Alley, where weekly Walt, Doc, Avery, and Bill had a conversation on cars. This black-and-white panel of the page slowly gained recognition and either on August 25 of the same year or in January of 1919, the daily Tribune picked up the panel.
It became a strip, then the Sunday version moved from "The Rectangle" to a page of its own, full color. The Sunday pages, particularly of the '30s, had neither traditional gags nor fantastic adventures, but instead presented a gentle view of nature or imaginary daydreaming with expressive art.
Captain Joseph Patterson, the Tribune's editor, wanted to attract women to the strip and had Walt Wallet, the protagonist, find a baby on his doorstep -- the only way to introduce a baby into the strip since Walt was a confirmed bachelor at the time. Ten years later, another confirmed bachelor, Popeye, star of the comic strip Thimble Theatre, found a similar basket containing the infant Swee'Pea. Walt Wallet eventually married Phyllis Blossom.
The baby, Skeezix (slang for motherless calf), grew up, the first occasion where real time elapsed in a major comic strip. The Katzenjammer Kids never grew up! Granted, Hairbreadth Harry had grown up from an infant, but stopped doing so in his early 20s. Even today, Charlie Brown lives in perpetual childhood. Only a very few strips allow their characters to age, notably Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury and Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse.
Gradually, the Gasoline Alley characters married, had kids, and it became the first comic strip-soap opera in the post-War babyboom 1940s, before there was even such a genre as the soap opera. A 15-minute radio version of the strip was developed and broadcast for a time in the same decade, sponsored (naturally enough) by spark plug and parts maker Autolite, and hooked around Skeezix as a young adult running (what else) a gas station and garage.
The strip is still published in newspapers today. Skeezix has become an octogenarian. Walt's wife Phyllis, aged an estimated 105, died in the April 26, 2004 strip, leaving Walt a widower after nearly eight decades of marriage.
King was succeeded by his former assistants Bill Perry and Dick Moores. Since 1986, Gasoline Alley has been written and drawn by Jim Scancarelli, fomerly assistant to Moores.
The strip and its creator, Frank King, have been recognized with the National Cartoonist Society Humor Strip Award for 1957, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1982, and 1985, and their Reuben Award for 1958. Jim Scancarelli received the National Cartoonist Society Story Comic Strip Award for 1988 for his work on the strip.
The strip has been reprinted from time to time. There are some beautiful examples of Sunday full pages in Bill Blackbeard's The Comic Strip Century and many years of Dick Moore's dailies and Sundays have appeared in Comics Revue monthly, as well as the first strips by Jim Scancarelli. In 1995, the strip was one of 20 included in the Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative US postage stamps. In 2005, the first of a series of books reprinting the series has begun, published by Drawn and Quarterly and edited by Chris Ware. The series is called "Walt and Skeezix", and the first volume covers 1921–22, beginning when baby Skeezix appears.
- Walt and Skeezix: Volume One, 1921–22, ISBN 1896597645
- Walt and Skeezix: Volume Two, 1923-24, ISBN 1896597998
Gasoline Alley was also the title of a 1970 record album by Rod Stewart.