![]() ![]() In those days, comic books were seen as entertainment for children, which is why the anti-comics activists had an easy time playing to parental fears about what their kids were seeing in the industry’s crime and horror titles. Small wonder he found a huge audience for his strip, given the number of new parents back then who could laugh at the antics of a young child who no doubt reminded them of their own little terrors at home.Ĭomic books, though, are not comic strips. He was created by Ketcham, a parent, for the delight of other parents - of which there were many in those baby boom years. Some succeeded but most didn’t, and I have a theory as to why that was the case.ĭennis the Menace was a multimedia star, but he is first and foremost a star of the newspaper comic page. Not long after the strip debuted, comic publishers (always on the hunt for the next big trend) came out with a plethora of pint-sized punks to grab a piece of that market for “brat humor” for themselves. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Dennis should feel very flattered by all the sincerity that has been chucked his way. ![]() Ketcham received the National Cartoonists Society’s prestigious Reuben Award for the strip in 1953, and over the years Dennis the Menace has inspired many TV shows, films, comic books, paperbacks, and pieces of merchandise. The Peanuts gang came along in 1950, Marge Henderson’s Little Lulu first showed up in a 1935 issue of The Saturday Evening Post… heck, you can even go back to the 19th century’s Yellow Kid and Katzenjammer Kids if the topic of rambunctious comic-strip youngsters is on the table.īut Hank Ketcham’s strip about a troublesome but good-hearted kid (inspired by his own young son, Dennis, after his wife cried “Your son is a menace!” in a moment of exasperation) was a major hit right out of the gate, going from 16 newspapers in 1951 to 245 newspapers - carrying the strip to 30 million readers - just two years later (at the time of Ketcham’s death in 2001, that number was closer to 1,000 newspapers in 48 countries and 19 languages). To be clear, there were kids in the comics long before Dennis the Menace made his debut on March 12, 1951. 22 Comic-Book Kids (and One Who Wasn’t) Inspired by Hank Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace ![]()
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