Color Comics on Saturday – June 1954

Back on this post from last month, I made the observation that in 1954 there was no Sunday Journal yet (that wouldn't happen until August 1968) so consequently the paper didn't have any Sunday color comics. I noted that I remembered a comic section that came with Saturday's edition in the 1960s that had Moon Mullins and Lolly in it. In that same blog post's comments, regular contributors Rae and Wendy each said they remembered a color comic section in the Journal much earlier than the 1960s.

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.

I always liked Gasoline Alley (it helped that it ran on the comics page just a little below Li'l Abner). I liked its gentle, situational humor and likable characters. I remember that Skeezix (the adopted son of Walt Wallet) was the same age as my father, being born in 1921. For many years, the comic's gimmick was that the characters aged in real time, just like its readers.

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.