Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis The Menace 1955-1956 (Vol. 3)

Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis the Menace 1955-1956 (Vol. 3)

by Hank KetchamHank Ketcham's Complete Dennis the Menace is one of the most successful books in the company's history, greeted by reviews with praise similar to that garnered by The Complete Peanuts. This third volume publishes every single panel strip from 1955 and 1956 in one handsome and thick hardcover volume. Ketcham's legendary pen and ink work achieves its full flowering in this volume, as do the various situations and themes that Ketcham would return to: the first "split screen" (two-panel strip) that Ketcham would occasionally use; Dennis actually flirts with a girl; he rats Dad out to Mom; exacerbates confrontations between Dad and the police; and stymies hapless baby-sitters. Oh, and Mr. Wilson finally comes front-and-center as Dennis' #1 victim!From BooklistThe 1950s saw the apogee of the magazine gag cartoon, with dozens of skilled artists plying their trade in publications ranging from the Saturday Evening Post to Playboy. Ketcham's one-panel syndicated newspaper cartoons were as graphically adroit as any, but it wasn't his visual sophistication that kept Dennis the Menace on the comics page for half a century. Funny-pages readers aren't that artistically demanding. Rather, it was consistently sharp humor and the well-defined personalities of Dennis, his beleaguered parents, curmudgeonly neighbor Mr. Wilson, and the rest of the cast, who were never more engaging than in these early panels. Gordon FlaggCopyright