'Gasoline Alley' Death to Be Revealed May 5

By: Dave Astor Readers are speculating whether it was Walt Wallet or his wife Phyllis who just died in the current "Gasoline Alley" story line. Cartoonist Jim Scancarelli is being ambivalent in the sequence, but plans to reveal who died in the May 5 strip.

The classic Tribune Media Services comic dates back to 1918, and the cast ages in real time. So Scancarelli has been forced to deal with the mortality of some of his oldest characters. "Walt is probably about 104, and Phyllis is pretty close to that," he said during an interview today with E&P.

Scancarelli's story line has received a lot of reaction so far from people calling the cartoonist or commenting in Internet chat rooms. Some don't want Walt or Phyllis to die no matter how old they are. Others are sad about the death but feel it was inevitable.

One e-mailer wrote E&P: "With all of the hoopla over 'Doonesbury' and 'Get Fuzzy' coming to terms with the Iraq war, what's being missed is the very human drama of 'Gasoline Alley' where comic-strip icon Walt Wallet or his wife Phyllis surely will be pronounced dead very soon."

But another e-mailer told E&P he was upset at comments made in the strip this week by a mortician named Sheila. On Wednesday, Sheila asked for $700 upfront to dig the grave. Yesterday, she joked that "the cost of going down is going up."

Scancarelli recalled once dealing with a mortician who was "about as flip as they come" and who said things like the fictional Sheila said. He added: "I felt -- and the syndicate felt -- that this is a comic strip and it needed some levity." But he also tried to do the sequence with care and taste befitting "a very sad occasion" -- and there are indeed poignant moments such as when Skeezix cries after learning about the death of one of his parents in a middle-of-the-night phone call.

"Gasoline Alley" was created by Frank King, who was later succeeded by Dick Moores. Scancarelli became an assistant in 1979, and took over the strip after Moores' death in 1986. The comic now appears in more than 80 newspapers.

"It's an honor to work on the strip when you had guys like King and Moores doing it before me," said Scancarelli. "But how do you handle something this grave? I agonized over it. It wasn't a spur-of-the moment whim."