They were right!
As the ad above from the June 4, 1954 Lorain Journal notes, the paper's Week End Edition on Saturday included eight pages of color comic, including Dick Tracy, Smittie, Moon Mullins, Winnie Winkle, Terry and the Pirates, Little Orphan Annie, The Gumps, and Gasoline Alley. That was in addition to the paper's regular daily comics.
This ad below from the June 5, 1954 Lorain Journal promoting the Gasoline Alley comic strip by Frank King has a listing of the Monday through Friday strips. It's interesting that only Gasoline Alley and Terry and the Pirates were in both the daily and weekend comic sections.
Anyway, Gasoline Alley is still around – more than a hundred years after its debut. The beloved main characters are pretty old, but the current cartoonist happily has not made it a point to kill them off, although Walt became a widower in the early 2000s.
Here's a Family Tree chart of the main characters. There have been some new ones added since this was created.
Here is a recent Sunday strip with Walt and Skeezix.
This strip kind of cracked me up because when my mother first went into a nursing home, she loved to watch Gunsmoke reruns. During my daily visits, we used to sit through several hours of it each day.
You can read Gasoline Alley online everyday – for free – here.
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For many years, I made annual trips to North Bay, Ontario (which is almost four hours north of Toronto). Once you hit Highway 11, there aren't a lot of gas stations. But there is a 'last chance' stretch of several service stations just north of Barrie that's called – you guessed it – "Gasoline Alley."
Read more about it here.
7 comments:
Hey Dan - As a kid reading the Sunday comics and enjoying donuts from DeLuca’s during summer vacation with the screen door open in the kitchen…waiting for bike rides or baseball at City Field. What a great time and we didn’t even know it. Beatle Bailey was probably my favorite. Loved Otto. Todd
Sunday Comix - The Picksburgh Press had a *double* comics section. It's one of the reasons I learned to read, to figure out what all those people were saying, and I read every one of them, too, even if I didn't understand what was going on.
Tom Batiuk aged his Funky Winkerbean-ians, killed one of his main characters with cancer, made another addicted to substances, and jumped them ahead in time several years. Lyn Johnston aged her For better or Worse-ers in real time for almost 30 years.
Even Dagwood and Blondie's kids grew older over the years.
I'm glad I didn't have to witness Prince Valiant with gray hair!
Walt Wallet is, what, 125 years old now? Skeezix is 103?
I've been following it on and off for the past few years, and it doesn't seem like the current cartoonist dwells on the actual chronological ages too much. I did notice that the comic has gotten fairly bizarre in recent years, with many fantasy sequences and sometimes it's hard to know what is going on or who the younger characters are. But I sort of think he might have frozen the well-known characters at advanced ages and left it at that. What's really weird is that Rufus and Joel (the junk men) are apparently outside of the Gasoline Alley space time continuum because they haven't aged at all since the 1960s.
Comics have a logic of their own, I suppose.
I used to read Gasoline Alley when I was a kid (and Skeezix was 30 or so), and I don't remember any bizarre fantasy sequences. Things do change, I guess.
I remember reading it in the late 1960s/early 70s when Chipper (Skeezix' son) had an apartment, a jeep and a cute girlfriend. I remember thinking "So that's what it's like to be young and single." I wanted a jeep for a long time after that.
Dan:
I still want a jeep, but when I test-drove one, it made me carsick, like I was trying to drive a clothes dryer. The ones they have now as stupid-big. I suppose I need, like, a 1948 jeep.
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