Walt and Skeezix Take a Walk

It's been miserably cold and wet here, not good weather for taking photos. Just before midnight, I shot this image out of a book I have called "Sundays with Walt and Skeezix," which reproduces some of the Sunday strips from "Gasoline Alley," the second longest running comic strip in U.S. history. The strip was created by Frank King in 1919 and it is still running (albeit with new artists and writers).

At first the strip was about a group of friends who got together and talked about automobiles, but the strip took a major turn on February 14th, 1921 when one of the characters, confirmed bachelor Walt Wallet, found a baby left on his doorstep. He named the baby Skeezix and from then on the strip became a look at the daily trials and tribulations of raising a child. There were subplots involving Skeezix's real parents (at one point Skeezix is even kidnapped by his birth mother after a year has gone by and she decides she wants him back) and a storyline devoted to Walt falling in love and getting married.

The strip is considered to be innovative in that it was the first strip to age its characters in real time. The world got to watch Skeezix grow up day by day and eventually saw him enter the army during WWII.

The Sunday strips, which this panel is from, didn't follow a traditional storyline. Sometimes they depicted dreams or daydreams, or sometimes, like this one, they took a look at the natural world.