Gasoline Alley is a comic strip created by Frank
King 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, 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 since Walt was a confirmed bachelor at
the time. Ten years later, another confirmed
bachelor, Popeye, star of the comic strip Thimble
Theatre, found a similar basket containing the
infant Swee'pea. Walt Wallet eventually married
Phyllis Blossom.

The baby, Skeezix, grew up, the first occasion
where real time elapsed in a major comic strip.
The Katzenjammer Kids never grew up! Granted,
Hairbreadth Harry had grown up from an infant, but
stopped doing so in his early 20s. Even today,
Charlie Brown lives in perpetual childhood. Only a
very few strips allow their characters to age,
notably Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury and Lynn
Johnston's For Better or For Worse.

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 soap opera.

The strip is still published in newspapers today.
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. Since 1986, Gasoline Alley
has been written and drawn by Jim Scancarelli,
fomerly assistant to Moores.

The strip has been reprinted from time to time.
There are some beautiful examples of Sunday full
pagees 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 appeares.

Walt and Skeezix: Volume One, 1921–22, ISBN
1896597645 
Walt and Skeezix: Volume Two