The recent continuity in Doonesbury regarding B.D.'s war injury eclipsed a dramatic plot twist in another newspaper strip. Gasoline Alley has been around since 1918 when Frank King created it. King and a couple of assistants did it until 1956 when it was taken over by Dick Moores, who many feel made it into an even better feature. Since 1986, Jim Scancarelli has been the guy in charge of what is still, in some circles, a much-loved strip about a much-loved family.
One of the innovative things about Gasoline Alley was that King allowed his players to age more or less normally and for the focus of the strip to shift as different things happened in their lives. Initially, Walt Wallet was more or less the star of the strip and in 1921, Walt found a baby on his doorstep. That baby, who was named Skeezix, actually grew up in the strip in something close to real time and eventually became the main character. Ol' Walt Wallet aged at roughly the same rate though Dick Moores found it necessary to slow down and even stop the process. Scancarelli has somewhat restarted the clock.
In the current storyline, death has finally come to one (maybe two) of the strip's oldest characters. I am not being evasive. Scancarelli is deliberately writing it so you're not sure who Skeezix and the others are grieving over. It appears to be Uncle Walt Wallet, but the dialogue and art are ambiguous. Some readers think it's his wife Phyllis while others think they've both passed away. This is actually being debated on many message boards at the moment.
I don't have a guess, but it seems like a very intriguing, well-planned storyline. At least, it prompted me to go back and read the last few months of Gasoline Alley, which I enjoyed quite a bit. The current strip can be read at this website and there's an Archive feature there which will enable you to go back a few weeks and then read forward in sequence. If you have a little time, go back to the 2/23/04 strip and read two months of strips that will take you up to today. If you're in a hurry, start with 4/5/04.