Gasoline Alley by Jim Scancarelli for February 17, 2024

So what is wrong with Walt?

What are you doing? Staring into space. Still laughing.

I suppose we’re not going to find out what all the heartburn is about until Joel and Rufus show up.

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As we wait on the reveal, we have a full tray of classics for the 17th, and all of them manage to advance the current plotlines:

Skeezix is in a club, which now that there’s three Rangers, you could call it a street gang … and he’s taken up smoking! Since Walt would never dish out the old-fashioned discipline, it’s up to Phyllis to work this out, and it’s an idea right out of Rachel’s old wives’ tales handbook.

Percy Priss has to explain how he managed to kill Notch Carver in self defense, to keep up the charade which protects his secret identity.

Brenda has had the limit of Chuggie and his ANTics, but romance can hit you from the strangest of angles.

Skeezix has run the garage for some 25 years at this point? He’s always just scraping by, going without things at home and not taking fancy vacations… so it may take him awhile to figure out if he can afford to give Slim a raise, from the buck-and-a-half an hour he’s been paying the Kid.

Poor Walt’s all shook up.

This is REALLY getting inane!!

Enough lead in already! Get to the point!

Like Paul Harvey used to say, Let’s hear the rest of the story!

Is Walt Wallet about to die? Find out next week – Even if on Sunday and/or Monday we get a Gasoline Alley President’s Day related strip.

If this is turns out to be about scrapbooking there’s gonna be real trouble…

cue the dark ambient music with discordant overtones which, although broadly tonal, is inflected with chromatic and polytonal passages representing the archetypal example of a florid, melodramatic style without being interpreted as an overly heavy-handed metaphor within the context of the thematic material a bit on the frenetic and frantic side with interesting rhythmic devices which seem to counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor utilizing a novel imaging technique known as positron emission tomography and the spontaneous nondenominational conceptions by expansively recontextualizing liminal narratives of colonic hydrotherapy

I do not have any inside information. I swear on my sainted mother’s grave. But I have a queasy feeling the second-longest running comic strip in newspaper history is about to end. I hope I’m wrong.

as Mony Python would say ….Get on with it! how many weeks are they going to drag this out? I doubt the newspaper and news would run a story about Walt not eating besides he refused to eat after the news.LOL with today’s DEI junk they will announce Slim is noe transgendered and he will be known as Large Marge from now on

If there is about to be a significant change, I’m hoping it’s a new author. I’ve never really been a fan of the current one. Too cutesy. Animals that talk? And Walt is still alive? He’d be about 124 by now. I assume the characters are not aging normally anymore.What we need is someone who can channel Frank King and Dick Moores, take the timeline back to 1986, and start again from there.

Once the characters (other than Rufus, Joel and Melba) no longer aged, the strip lost some of its uniqueness. That started once they killed off Phyllis (20 years ago!) but not Walt. They tried later to explain Walt’s age with that pre-Skeezix flashback desert story where he and his companions MAY have drunk water from the Fountain of Youth, but it didn’t take. (By the way, I expected to eventually see a present-day return of Walt’s two companions from that adventure – and the camel, too! LOL)

Remember decades back? When Skeexiz got the late night phone call and everyone thought Walt had died, but it was his wife. This has that same feel of misdirection about it.

Considering that Jim Scancarelli is 82 years old, unless he has an understudy, he may be considering hanging it up.

I feel that Scancarelli is trying to channel Lucy vanPelt!! Even my purest Charlie Brown is recalcitrant to believe the football will be there to kick or anything like Walt’s death or the end of the strip is likely on this arc.

Maybe Walt is ready to cross Jordan.

Here’s an explanation that would look whether GA continues with new strips or not. The big news is: the Cartoon Characters Retirement Home needs to be relocated due to some type of urban renewal. A site on the other side of the country is available for the relocation. Walt is invited to join them in the big move.

Now, if the strip is continuing, Walt leaves with the retirees, with tears all-around. The other characters start aging again. The strip is revitalized with a new creative team.

However, if the strip is being discontinued, Walt is also told that there is room for all his family and friends at the much-larger new site. Many of the current GA characters also decide to join them. At the new location, Phyllis and some of the other dead GA characters are there to greet them. The strip ends on a Sunday with a breaking of the fourth wall in order to say farewell to the readers. THE END

I wonder if an intern has published Walt’s obituary by mistake?