More fun with 'Dennis The Menace'

When wry observations backfire.

Dennis The Menace was one of my favorite comics when I was a kid. I was even sort of excited about Dennis' status as a mascot for Dairy Queen. Only when I grew up did I realize that the Mitchell family depicted in the comic was a cesspool of mutual resentment and acrimony. And it wasn't just my imagination either. The comic strip is based on a real family, and it presents a considerably sanitized, brightened-up version of their lives. The real Alice died of a drug overdose in 1959, and the real Dennis became estranged from his father and had a troubled adulthood. The real Henry, aka cartoonist Hank Ketcham, continued to exploit their misadventures for fun and profit for decades, putting a happy face on their domestic strife. But the truth oozes up through the drains sometimes. Here's the real comic for comparison. It's debatable whether my version is nastier or less nasty.

George Wilson cannot enjoy even the smallest of victories

An expanded Dennis The Menace cartoon.

In his landmark 1993 book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud stated that single-panel newspaper features like Bil Keane's The Family Circus do not qualify as comics because they lack sequential juxtaposition, i.e. the very feature that defines comics as a unique medium. I wonder what Mr. McCloud might make of Hank Ketcham's Dennis The Menace. From Monday to Saturday, Dennis is (usually) a single-panel feature with a very limited cast in a very defined setting. On Sundays, it expands to a multi-panel layout. And, every once in a while, the thankless artists who do the strip today (Ketcham died in 2001) will divide one of the daily panels into halves. So Dennis The Menace is occasionally a comic and occasionally not a comic. It is the Schrodinger's cat of the cartoon world. I think it should be a multi-panel feature every day. Sometimes, when there's just one panel to work with, the joke is not really complete. Today's Dennis is a perfect example. You see it up there at the top left. It needed a couple more panels to be whole. So I added them.