(1886–1941), and he used his own son, Robert Drew King, as the model for Skeezix. Tomah's Dr. Johnson was the inspiration for the character of Doc, and Bill in the strip was based on Bill Gannon. King hired young Bill Perry from the Chicago Tribune'''s mail room and then trained him to work as his assistant. Although King leaned toward a homespun simplicity in his Sunday story situations, he also introduced some unusual experiments with time and space, as noted by comics critic Paul Gravett: Other precedents from America’s newspaper supplements were occasional experiments by Frank King in his Gasoline Alley Sunday pages where he would turn the whole page into one continuous landscape. For example, on 24 May 1931, King uses an unrealistic, almost isometric perspective to turn the page into a single image, like a diagram viewed from above, of the neighborhood and its assorted residents. This angled aerial view he divides into 12 equal panels, each containing at least one fresh character to contribute their own moment of comedy. In more of an ensemble of jokes than a strictly linear narrative, no characters appear here more than once. King went further, however, in 1934 when over three consecutive weeks he used the whole page as one image to portray a house being built, from bare site to construction to finishing touches. The first of these, dated 25 March 1934, presents repeated images of Skeezix and his pal Whimpy as they play around the foundations dug out of their favorite baseball diamond and meet a local girl. Here the threesome move around 12 identical square panels and time unfolds in sequence, although jumping ahead sometimes by a considerable period from one to the next. The success of Gasoline Alley escalated until it was published in over 300 daily newspapers with a daily combined readership of over 27,000,000. According to Lew Merrell, the strip and its merchandising made King a millionaire. In 1929, the Kings moved to Florida. For 20 years, they lived between Kissimmee, Florida and St. Cloud at his Folly Farms estate on the northeast shore of Lake Tohopekaliga. The cartoonist's estate of along the Lake is still there, hidden among the other houses in the Regal Oak Shores subdivision. In 1941, King wrote, "Just what the future holds for Skeezix and Gasoline Alley nobody knows. If permitted a fanciful prophecy, I should say that Skeezix will