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- One of the world’s most beloved comic characters, Dennis was born in October 1950—his name inspired by Ketcham’s rambunctious, real-life son, whose mother one day declared, “Your son is a menace!” Ketcham drew the daily comic for 44 years until he retired, chronicling his last Dennis shenanigan at the age of 74.
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Feb 3, 2023 · By Emilia David / Updated: Feb. 3, 2023 3:22 pm EST. Dennis the Menace has been terrorizing his neighborhood for decades. The character's creator, Hank Ketcham, wanted to make his readers feel better about their kids' behavior. His own child, the titular Dennis, was apparently a very rowdy boy.
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- The Strip Was Inspired by A Bowel Movement.
- Another Dennis The Menace Debuted The Same Day in The UK.
- Readers Got Mad When Ketcham Introduced A Black character.
- Ketcham Disliked The Dennis Book Collections.
- He Was Kind of A Violent Little Monster.
- He Helped Fight The Cold War.
- John Hughes Was A Fan.
- He Was A “Spokestoon” For Dairy Queen.
- Someone Stole Dennis’s Statue.
- Things Didn’T Go So Well For The Real Dennis.
As Dennis lore goes, Ketcham was pursuing a career in cartooning in 1950 when his first wife, Alice, once interrupted him to share the news that their four-year-old son Dennis had just demolished his bedroom by playing with the fecal matter found in his underpants. Declaring him a “menace,” Alice stormed out, leaving Ketcham to ponder the fictional...
In a curious case of correlating creations, Ketcham’s Dennis debuted at virtually the same instant another Dennis the Menace was being unveiled in England. The UK Dennis was part of a weekly magazine called Beano and featured an older boy who was less of an accidental troublemaker and more of a highly-focused and intentioned one. To avoid confusion...
Some two decades into the strip, Ketcham decided to contemporize Dennis’s neighborhood by introducing a black character named Jackson. Although Ketcham’s design was alarmingly stereotypical, he attempted to incorporate messages of tolerance into the strip, with Dennis exclaiming he has a “race problem” with Jackson because “he can run faster than m...
Many cartoonists look forward to having their strips collected in paperback because the book royalties can make for an appreciable boost in their income. Despite having sold millions of copies of Dennis strips, Ketcham took them off the market because he felt the paperbacks weren’t reproducing his artwork properly. “I backed out of the paperback bu...
By and large, Dennis is an affably rambunctious kid—prone to making a mess, but generally not a total delinquent. That wasn’t entirely true in the early strips, when Ketcham depictedDennis inciting physical fights between adults, tying swan necks into knots, hitting other kids with a shovel and laughing about it, and filling his sock with sand to u...
In 1959, Ketcham and his wife were asked by the U.S. State Department to go on a tour of Russia as a part of a “humor exchange program.” With its modern, middle America depictions of appliances and cars, the strip was a perfect talking point to critique Communist regimes. The U.S. government also wanted Ketcham to doodle anything he saw as a kind o...
Writer/director Hughes (The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink) was a regular reader ofDennis the Menace. Following the success of 1990’s Home Alone (which Hughes wrote) that featured a booby-trapping kid named Kevin, producers were eager to try and replicate its success with a feature adaptation of the strip. Ketcham went with Warner Bros. on the cond...
Dennis spent an astounding 30 years as a mascot for the Dairy Queen frozen treat chain, appearingin commercials and on packaging before the franchise decided he was losing his appeal among young consumers. He retired from ice cream endorsements in 2001.
A three-foot-tall Dennis statue erected in 1986 in Monterey, California became the target of a troublemaker in 2006, when an unknown person (or persons) stole the tribute from its perch in a city park known as Dennis the Menace Playground. It was missing for nearly 10 years before turning up in Florida—at least, that’s what authorities believed. A ...
Ketcham’s son may have outgrown his bedroom-destroying habits, but a series of misfortunes led to a life far more chaotic than his cartoon counterpart. Expelled from boarding school, Dennis Ketcham servedin Vietnam and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. He and his father reportedly had little contact prior to the elder Ketcham’s death in...
Henry King Ketcham (March 14, 1920 – June 1, 2001) was an American cartoonist who created the Dennis the Menace comic strip, writing and drawing it from 1951 to 1994, when he retired from drawing the daily cartoon and took up painting full-time in his home studio.
Dennis the Menace is a daily syndicated newspaper comic strip originally created, written, and illustrated by Hank Ketcham. The comic strip made its debut on March 12, 1951 [1] in 16 newspapers and was originally distributed by Post-Hall Syndicate. [2]
- Doug Rogers
- Philip D. Fehrle
- Edward Salier
- Bruce Kalish &David Garberand K.C. Dee
Jun 2, 2001 · Hank Ketcham, who created a classic piece of Americana in “Dennis the Menace,” the comfortingly lighthearted comic strip about a rascally, forever-5-year-old boy, died of heart disease and...
- Writer
One of the world’s most beloved comic characters, Dennis was born in October 1950—his name inspired by Ketcham’s rambunctious, real-life son, whose mother one day declared, “Your son is a menace!”
Jun 3, 2001 · Hank Ketcham, the man who created the wildly popular Dennis the Menace comic strip, has died at the age of 81.
