Origin
Gromit is a dog who lives with his friend Wallace, an inventor, in the northern English town of Wigan, Lancashire. Though Wallace is presumably Gromit’s nominal owner, Gromit is only notionally a pet, instead acting as Wallace’s housekeeper, assistant (in inventing and in whatever business Wallace has set them up in using said inventions), and general… dogsbody. He’s not a servant though, undertaking these tasks because he is the more sensible and grounded of the pair, and because he knows that if he doesn’t, then his friend will forget to look after himself while focussed on a goal, or end up in serious trouble when one of his creations goes awry.
Creation
Wallace and Gromit were created by Nick Park, a member of Peter Lord and David Sproxton’s Aardman Animation (the company that had previously created Morph, and later made the movies Chicken Run, Flushed Away and Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists), and the pair debuted on June 3rd 1989 in the clay-mation short film A Grand Day Out, which followed them on a trip to the moon to replenish Wallace’s stock of cheese. Several subsequent films followed, both short and feature length.
Wallace and Gromit made the transition to comics with the book Wallace & Gromit: The Lost Slipper. A handful of subsequent books followed, both original stories and graphic novel adaptations of the films. In October 2005 Titan Magazines launched the Wallace & Gromit Comic, which initially serialised some of the existing Wallace & Gromit hardcovers before publishing additional new stories. It came to an end with the 26th issue in Autumn 2007, but the pair have since featured in BeanoMax and in a newspaper strip in the newspaper The Sun, the latter produced by Titan, who also make the strip available as a download.