Gasoline Alley

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For other uses, see Gasoline Alley (disambiguation).

Gasoline Alley is a comic strip created by Frank King that was first published on 24 November 1918.

The strip's origins lie in the Chicago Tribune, which ran a page on Sundays called “The Rectangle”. Staff artists would do one-shot panels, or continuing plots or themes. A corner of the Rectangle was home to Frank King's Gasoline Alley, where characters Walt, Doc, Avery, and Bill would have weekly conversations on cars. This black-and-white panel of the page slowly gained recognition and eventually the daily Tribune picked up the feature, either on 25 August of the same year or in January of 1919 according to varied accounts.

It became a strip, and then the Sunday version moved from “The Rectangle” to a full color page of its own. 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 due to Walt's status as a confirmed bachelor at the time. Walt Wallet eventually married Phyllis Blossom. The baby, Skeezix (slang for motherless calf), grew up, the first occasion where real time continually elapsed in a major comic strip unlike such examples as the Katzenjammer Kids.

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 conventional soap opera. A 15-minute radio version of the strip was developed and broadcast for a time in the same decade, sponsored by spark plug and parts maker Autolite, which focused upon Skeezix as a young adult running 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 26 April 2004 strip, leaving Walt a widower after nearly eight decades of marriage.

King was succeeded by his former assistants, Bill Perry taking responsibility for Sunday strips in 1951, and Dick Moores (first hired in 1956) for other days in 1959. When Perry retired in 1975, Moores took responsibility for Sunday strips as well. Moores passed away in 1986, and Gasoline Alley has been written and drawn by Jim Scancarelli, formerly 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 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.

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