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Gasoline Alley is a comic strip created by Frank King and currently distributed by Tribune Media Services. First published November 24, 1918, it is the second-longest-running comic strip in the US (after The Katzenjammer Kids) and has received critical accolades for its influential innovations.[1] In addition to inventive color and page design concepts, King introduced real-time continuity to comic strips by showing his characters as they grew to maturity and aged over generations.[2]
The strip originated on the Chicago Tribune's black-and-white Sunday page, The Rectangle, where staff artists contributed one-shot panels, continuing plots or themes. One corner of The Rectangle introduced King's Gasoline Alley, where characters Walt, Doc, Avery, and Bill held weekly conversations about automobiles. This panel slowly gained recognition, and the daily comic strip began August 24, 1919 in the New York Daily News.[3]
The early years were dominated by the character Walt Wallet. Tribune editor Joseph Patterson wanted to attract women to the strip by introducing a baby, but Walt was not married. That obstacle was avoided when Walt found a baby on his doorstep, as described by comics historian Don Markstein:
Skeezix called his adopted father Uncle Walt. Unlike most comic strip children (like the Katzenjammer Kids or Little Orphan Annie) he did not remain a baby or even a little boy for long. He grew up to manhood, the first occasion where real time continually elapsed in a major comic strip over generations. By the time the United States entered World War II, Skeezix was a adult, courting Nina Clock and serving in the armed forces. He later married Nina and had children. In the late 1960s, he faced a typical midlife crisis. Walt Wallet himself had married Phyllis Blossom and had other children, who grew up and had kids of their own. During the 1970s and 1980s, under Dick Moores' authorship, the characters briefly stopped aging. When Jim Scancarelli took over, the natural aging was restored.[2]
The Sunday strip was launched October 24, 1920. The 1930s Sunday pages did not always employ traditional gags but often offered a gentle view of nature, imaginary daydreaming with expressive art or naturalistic views of small town life. Reviewing Peter Maresca and Chris Ware's Sundays with Walt and Skeezix (Sunday Press Books, 2007), comics critic Steve Duin quoted writer Jeet Heer:
The strip is still published in newspapers in the 21st century. Walt Wallet is now well over a century old (115, as of April 2015[5]), while Skeezix has become a Rex Morgan M.D.
These characters break the strip's rule about aging with the calendar.
King was succeeded by his former assistants, with Bill Perry taking responsibility for Sunday strips in 1951 and Dick Moores, first hired in 1956, becoming sole writer and artist for the daily strip in 1959. When Perry retired in 1975, Moores took over the Sunday strips as well, combining the daily and Sunday stories into one continuity starting September 28, 1975. Moores died in 1986, and since then Gasoline Alley has been written and drawn by Scancarelli, former assistant to Moores. Scancarelli returned to Done-In-One separate situations for the Sunday strip.[6]
The strip and King were recognized with the National Cartoonists Society's Humor Strip Award in 1957, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1982 and 1985. King received the 1958 Society's Reuben Award, and Moores received it in 1974. Scancarelli received the Society's Story Comic Strip Award in 1988. The strip received an NCS plaque for the year's best story strip in 1981, 1982 and 1983.[7]
Examples of the full page Sunday strip were printed in The Comic Strip Century (1995, reissued in 2004 as 100 Years of Comic Strips), edited by Bill Blackbeard, Dale Crain and James Vance. Moores' dailies and Sundays have appeared in Comics Revue monthly, as have the first Scancarelli strips. In 1995, the strip was one of 20 included in the Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative US postage stamps.
In 2003, Spec Productions began a series of softcover collections, Frank King's Gasoline Alley Nostalgia Journal, reprinting the strip from the first Rectangle panel (November 24, 1918). To date, four volumes have appeared:
In 2005, the first of a series of reprint books, Walt and Skeezix, was published by Drawn and Quarterly and edited by Chris Ware. The first volume covers 1921–22, beginning several weeks before baby Skeezix appears. These reprint only the daily strips, with Sundays slated to appear in another series:[8]
In 2007, Sunday Press Books published Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, which collects early Sunday strips in the original size and color.
Moores' work on the strip was published in three different collections, all currently out of print, as well as being serialized in Comics Revue magazine:
On October 9, 2012, IDW Publishing published a hardback collection Gasoline Alley, Volume 1, collecting several years of the daily strip by Frank King and Dick Moores.[9]
There were several radio adaptations. Uncle Walt and Skeezix in 1931 starred Bill Idelson as Skeezix with Jean Gillespie as Nina Clock. Jimmy McCallion was Skeezix in the series that ran on NBC from February 17 to April 11, 1941, continuing on the Blue Network from April 28 to May 9 of that same year. The 15-minute series aired weekdays at 5:30pm. Along with Nina (Janice Gilbert), the characters included Skeezix's boss Wumple (Cliff Soubier) and Ling Wee (Junius Matthews), a waiter in a Chinese restaurant. Charles Schenck directed the scripts by Kane Campbell.
The syndicated series of 1948–49 featured a cast of Bill Lipton, Mason Adams and Robert Dryden. Sponsored by Autolite, the program used opening theme music by the Polka Dots, a harmonica group. The 15-minute episodes focused on Skeezix running a gas station and garage, the Wallet and Bobble Garage, with his partner, Wilmer Bobble. In New York, this series aired on WOR from July 16, 1948 to January 7, 1949.[10]
Gasoline Alley was adapted into two feature films, Gasoline Alley (1951) and Corky of Gasoline Alley (1951), replacing the Blondie film series which ended in 1950 with Beware of Blondie. The films starred Jimmy Lydon as Skeezix, known at that time for Life with Father (1947) and his earlier character of Henry Aldrich.[11]
Cold War, Battle of Stalingrad, Nazi Germany, Battle of the Atlantic, Second Sino-Japanese War
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