Wallace

Origin

Wallace is an inventor from Wigan, Lancashire, in the north of England, who has created numerous gadgets, ranging from those that help around the house (getting him up in the morning, dressing him and preparing breakfast) to time machines and moon rockets. He lives with his pet dog Gromit, who is just as inventive and generally more sensible and grounded, and has an inordinate fondness for cheese.

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, with Wallace being voiced by veteran British actor Peter Sallis in most of them (Ben Whitehead handled the role for the Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures computer games).

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.