Jim Scancarelli - Gasoline Alley

Gasoline Alley

Scancarelli says his deep appreciation for comics was cultivated during childhood visits to his grandfather's house. His grandfather read the strips to him and pointed out details in each panel. His earliest comic strip recollection is of Gasoline Alley. He now lives in that same house and notes, "Little did I know that 50 years later I’d be working on the comic strip in the next room."

Scancarelli spoke about EC Comics and his other early influences in a 1997 interview with Jeffrey Lindenblatt:

The first things I really got enamored with were Foster’s Prince Valiant, Li’l Abner, Roy Crane. Crane still sticks with me a lot. But the guys who hit me over the head hardest, when I got to be 13 years old, were Wally Wood, Jack Davis and Bill Elder on Mad. They were phenomenal! I couldn’t believe anyone could draw like that... I remember picking up an EC comic, Weird Science or Weird Fantasy, and Wally Wood drew some of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen—in spacesuits, or almost spacesuits—I couldn’t believe anyone could render planets and moons and space vehicles with this degree of realism. It drove me crazy, and I would sit around and try to draw stuff like that. I think then my mother prohibited me from reading EC for a while. Then Mad came along, and I would try to copy that stuff. A little bit of Davis rolled off, a little bit of Wood.

Scancarelli began his professional association with Gasoline Alley as an assistant to Dick Moores in 1979. Moores sent him the strips fully penciled with the faces inked, and Scancarelli would finish the inking. Although other artists had auditioned for the role, Scancarelli claims his advantage was that he was "the only one who read the strip and knew the characters."

When Moores died in 1986, Scancarelli succeeded him as creator. In 1988, Scancarelli created a sequence wherein Walt Wallet made copies of the Wallet Family Tree. Walt then broke the fourth wall and offered a copy to each reader who sent a self-addressed stamped envelope. It was Scancarelli himself who had to fulfill the requests, which numbered almost 100,000, with copies printed at his personal expense.

The strip's lettering is unique in that it uses upper and lower case, although almost all strips follow the tradition of upper case only. Scancarelli also takes the unusual approach of combining continuity storylines with daily gags. He is the strip's sole creator, as he explained to Lindenblatt:

I do love it. The deadlines are the only thing I don’t love about it... Dick Moores used to say that if he didn’t have the strip, he’d be dead. The bad thing is, he did have the strip, and he did die... Once in a while, Mark Cohen will write a poem or give me an idea for a Sunday page, but I do the rest of it. I stare at a blank sheet of paper and come up with it.

Cohen died in 1999. Scancarelli remembered Cohen with a 2009 Sunday page tribute.

Having also collaborated with NCS president George Breisacher on Mutt and Jeff, Scancarelli became the only cartoonist to be involved with two strips on their 75th anniversaries.