Gasoline Alley by Jim Scancarelli for August 15, 2010

It’s nice to see these tributes to characters past (recent and ancient). When was the last time we saw Dondi?

Poignant.

Or Buster Brown?

I wonder if Walt will get to make another visit in October when CATHY posts her last strip?

Old comics are like “old” everything else … just plain old! Too bad, so sad.

Anyone know how many newspapers in the U. S. that GA actually appears?

Or the Yellow Kid?

Well, Basil has a weakness for redheads.

Annie, how we miss you.

GA is not in our local paper. Our local paper is getting thiner. Budgets.

A good one for us Annie fans.

I bet “Smokey Stover” is the fire marshal there. “Cathy” will be checking in next month.

I still have hopes that Annie may return someday. It was said in the final strip: “and this is where we leave our Annie, for now.” I’m pinning my hopes on that last phrase “for now.” Maybe some day she will be resurrected in some other news paper or medium. Hope springs eternal!

I miss Dondi, I wish someone would reprint it from the beginning.

Noreen Klose said, I miss Dondi, I wish someone would reprint it from the beginning.

Noreen, Classic Comics Press did reprint Dondi from the beginning in recent years! Two full volumes have been published– check their website! They also do On Stage and Juliet Jones, and have Big Ben Bolt and Rusty Riley on deck…

Dondi was one of the first comics to have a lead character die. Whitey died in a car crash, leaving Dondi to “Missy Mcgowan, who first resented him, but later accepted him. By the way, I have heard that Dondi was either a Korean war orphan or a WWII orphan. Does anyone know which it was?

If you think the newspaper is thin today, wait till Cathy leaves it.

Ba-dum.. TISH

With the name Dondi, he is probably Italian.

But the comic strip was supposed to take place at the time that it appeared in the papers in the 1950’s, not right after WWII. Did you mean that he was 9 at the time that the strip began?

Oh such nostalgia. The past falls further and further behind, Thank goodness their not forgotten.

Wikipedia mentions that the fact that Dondi never aged in the strip made his original origin story impossible to maintain if they were keeping the strip current in other ways. So, the war in which he was orphaned was adjusted with the changing times (a mistake, I feel, as the name of the character was inherent in the backstory–that he was found wandering around saying “where … where” but the GI did not understand his language).

I recognize Dondi, Krazy Kat, Yellow Kid, Buster Brown, Wash Tubbs, Mutt and Jeff, The Little King, and of course, The Annie gang.