Showing posts with label Hank Ketcham. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hank Ketcham. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Dennis And The Bible Kids!
In 1977 Hank Ketcham allowed his Dennis the Menace character to be used for a series of six religious comics telling Bible stories. The artwork on the covers of the Dennis and the Bible Kids from series from Word Books is typically eye-catching.
In 1980 Ketcham and crew added four more books for a total of ten. This last quartet is not as strong in its cover design as the original six were. And indicative of the inflationary times, the price per comic had jumped a whopping twenty cents in just three years.
Anytime comic characters get used in some other way like this, it's usually effective. Comics speak to us in very fundamental ways and using them as vehicles to proselytize can be very effective. Archie was doing much the same thing at Spire Comics at the time and like these Dennis comics are very memorable. I think the little icon of Dennis with the halo above his head plays neatly against his somewhat less benign and well established reputation in comics and elsewhere.
For a bit more on these books check this out.
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Friday, January 23, 2015
Paperback Menace!
Dennis the Menace I think I knew about as a television series before I became acutely aware of it as a comic strip. The craftsmanship of the single panel always impressed me. Hank Ketcham was always able to do so much with a few lines (Alex Toth comes to mind). There was a liveliness to the panels, an energy that perfectly informed the theme of the strip, which was that the domestic tranquility was threatened at all times by the ferocious vigor of youth. Mildly scandalous in a decade where children were akin to time bombs.
Here are a batch of the earliest Dennis paperbacks, bundles of chaos thrown into the bliss of the American dream. Enjoy!
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Sunday, June 16, 2013
World's Greatest Comic Dad?
Here is a Baker's Dozen reasons why Henry Mitchell is arguably the greatest dad in all of comics. All this and Dennis still lives.
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