Dennis The Menace by Hank Ketcham (No. 93)

Dennis The Menace (1951-1994)

by Hank Ketcham

REVIEW BY GARY GROTH:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Hank Ketcham was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, and developed an interest in drawing and cartooning at an early age: on his 10th birthday, his dad made a studio for young Hank by installing "a slanted drawing board, a shelf, an overhead light and a kitchen chair." Ketcham studied Tack Knight's Cartoon Tips and signed up to the mail order drawing course W.L. Evans School of Cartooning, and was on his way. (The artists who he most admired, he wrote later, were, among others, Walt Kelly, Percy Crosby, Milton Caniff, Cliff Sterret, William Steig, Ronald Searle, Jules Feiffer, George McManus and Winsor McCay.)

Ketcham's professional cartooning career parallels that of his peer Charles Schulz: Ketcham enlisted in the Navy during WWII, after which he sold cartoons to a variety of popular magazines. He then created Dennis The Menace, which was first syndicated in 1951 (a year after Peanuts began).

Dennis began as a fairly conventional gag panel but in a short time both the humour and drawing attained a remarkable level of sophistication. (Surely the early widespread popularity of the winsome five-year-old rapscallion and his exasperated but infinity patient nuclear family had much to do with its timing at the height of the post-War baby boom.)

At their best, the Dennis gags were so visually inspired that they couldn't have existed in any other medium. The ideas behind even the best gags would not have been as pleasing if it weren't for the expressiveness of Ketcham's line, and his attention to facial nuance and body gesture, which provided exactly the degree of subtle and understated contrast to Dennis' notorious breaches of decorum.

PATRICK McDONNELL:

Each meticulously designed panel was a masterpiece of composition.

FURTHER READING:

The Guardian: Obituary by Paul Gravett (2001)