Gasoline Alley
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Gasoline Alley is a comic strip 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 30's, did neither have traditional gags nor fantastic adventures, but instead 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, a course of action that had to be taken since Walt was a confirmed bachelor at the time. He eventually married Phyllis Blossom.
The baby, Skeezix, aged, marking the first time any such cartoon character would do such a thing; this path has been followed by very few, Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse being perhaps the most notable example. Granted, Hairbreadth Harry had grown up from an infant, but stopped doing so in his early 20s.
Gradually, 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.
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. Gasoline Alley has been written and drawn by Jim Scancarelli, fomerly assistant to Moores, since 1986.
In 1995, the strip was one of 20 included in the Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative US postage stamps.
External links
- UComics (http://www.ucomics.com/gasolinealley/)
- Toonopedia (http://www.toonopedia.com/gasalley.htm)
- 30's Sunday pages (http://bugpowder.com/andy/e.king.html)