Hank Ketcham made it look so easy…and that was the trick. His loose, thick cartoony line seemed to skate across the page. A Dennis the Menace daily feels so comfortable and easy to take in at a glance, as if we are in the flow of Ketcham’s relaxed line. And his imagery is equally easy, almost as abstract as a UPA cartoon (Gerald McBoing Boing, Mr. MaGoo). But unlike the jazzy cartoon aesthetic of the 50s, Dennis the Menace was firmly situated, perhaps petrified, in the iconography post-WWII white suburbia. And Ketcham himself said he aspired for his art not to call attention to itself and almost look not there.
But of course, this kind of easy transparent style was the result of tremendous skill and care. Take for instance this otherwise anodyne daily of Dennis making yet another disastrous assault on his perennial target, the cookie jar. Ketchum’s loose, flowing pen line was much admired by fellow cartoonists because it was at once light in spirit and cartoony but also controlled and precise. He credits Noel Sickles with teaching him how to use a pen more like a brush and relax his line so it seemed to flow so effortlessly.
Consider the sheer economy of this scene, how so few lines establish his figures and setting. He establishes his modern suburban kitchen setting with such selective specificity – refrigerator and cabinet handles are sparse and abstract, but the three storage jars on the counter embody the post-war mid-century modern style. And yet the broken cookie jar is detailed and minute, pulling the eye to the center of the chaos.
I have read some fellow artists praise Ketcham’s mastery of drapery, and here is a great example of using that detail to carry the weight of mother Alice’s reaction. Henry and Alice Mitchell only speak for themselves on occasion in Dennisworld. Most often they are reacting graphically to Dennis’s transgressions in minute details – the positioning of an eyebrow line, body posture, slightly splayed feet. In this panel, we don’t even need Alice’s facial expression to complete the scene. Ketcham positions us at kid level and uses the drape of her skirt and flying kerchief to render the reaction shot.
Hank Ketcham mapped mid-century American suburbia so simply and beautifully. He was a perfectionist with establishing perspective that made you part of the scene. In this early 50s panel, his composition and staging of characters is everything. It establishes the dynamic among characters and separates Dennis from the group in just the way he is emotionally. And Ketcham’s Disney training comes through in the ways each of the adults is animated and characterized individually. Every person in the scene is laughing in a particular way that suggests their own character and backstory. And it was all told visually with that signature loose and flowing pen work that makes a well-planned panel feel effortless. No wonder so many of his contemporaries envied his artistry.
Perspective was critical to Ketcham. He often finds ways to place us in the scene that also involves us in the flow of the action or in relation to a character’s perspective. The panel above underscores his thoughtful use of point of view to heighten meaning. Here Dennis and the gang’s boyish conspiracy feels more intense, intimate, secretive by being set back from the action.
The aesthetic of Dennis the Menace is centered in the brilliant design of Dennis himself of course. First it is important note that Dennis is impossibly small. Compared to the adults around him, this five-year-old is considerably smaller than his age, barely reaches the knees of his distinctly lanky parents. His bunched, oversized coveralls keep him even more grounded and often give him the appearance of a cannonball in motion.. Dennis rarely trips, falls or loses control. It is the physical and human world around Dennis that loses its footing. Adults grimace, recoil in shock or just scatter and lie akimbo in his wake. Ketcham describes Dennis as innocent. But the power of this strip is the way Ketcham embodies that innocence visually. Dennis is pure innocent determination embodied in physics. Either his low center of gravity keeps him steadfast in his attitude or momentum expresses the conviction of his chase or escape.
In earlier stints at the Lantz and Disney animation studios, Ketcham absorbed his strong sense of animated motion and rich characterization. But he also found at Disney and his work on many Donald Duck shorts the visual model for Dennis himself. With his butt sticking out, legs angled back to balance a cantilevered belly out front, Ketcham describes Dennis in one of his model sheets as “not unlike D. Duck.”
Nudism is one of Dennis’s favored modes of expression…and Kaetcham’s. He flees his dreaded bath by careening bare-assed and in flight into the neighborhood. He is not just unselfconscious but truly free. When he stands principled against clothing, butt to the viewer, the open arms and declarative mouth dramatize obliviousness, not shame. The otherwise buttoned down Ketcham somehow finds in nude Dennis a way to celebrate visually a sense of liberation in nakedness that in an unlikely way anticipates counter-cultural ideas a decade in advance.
Which is to say that Dennis the Menace exemplifies what makes the comic strip medium distinct. In its best hands, cartooning is not just an illustrated or dramatized punch line. The artwork embodies and deepens the meaning of the idea.
I posted a lot this past year and attracted thousands of new visitors along the way. And so as the year ends I wanted to surface some of the most popular items of the past year that might be of interest to newer readers of the blog.
”Moon Mullins on the Margins” was the most-read post this year, and it was part of a mini project exploring several comics characters on the edge of social respectability that flourished in the 1920s. Frank Willard’s deft touch with comic timing and raw flurries of insults and put-downs really impressed me this time through just a sampling of his work. I wish more of his strips were available in reprint. I used this old short edition, which is still available from used booksellers.
Likewise, the piece on Mutt first meeting Jeff in 1908 explored how the acerbic relationship between these two scallawags grew. Bud Fisher used this scheming duo to take aim at social and political trends, and could be suprisingly edgy. In one case they plotted to dodge the draft for WWI. Mutt and Jeff is another classic that could use a reprint. The most recent one, which I used for this post, was part of NBM’s Screwball reprints in 2007, still available, however.
Maurice Ketten’s short-lived ”Hurry-Up New Yorker” series in 1906 for The New York World was a wonderful find for me this year, as it seemed to be for many of you. Ketten’s modernist style embodied the theme of this strip and was among many visually interesting takes on the new urban environment in the comics pages. And to get on my hobby horse again, I think this very theme of urban change is one of those places where the American comics distinguished itself in Americasn culture. Few other popular or high art forms were capturing the new experience of urban environments as richly and as consistently as comics artists.
Discovering the wondrous Nell Brinkley was one of the highlights of my comics journey this year. She was a trailblazer in so many ways. Her heroines were flapper feminists, and her ideal of modern femininity replaced the Gibson Girl with that Brinkley Girl. I discovered Brinkley in my favorite book of last year, Trina Robbins’s ”Flapper Queens,” which I can’t recommend enough. Still widely available at a good price for the size, quality and scope of this look at several of the most popular women cartoonists of the 1920s.
The idiosyncratic style and worldview of comics strips is one of my main attractions to the form, and I got to revisit two of my favorite extremists of the form this year. The cranky Harold Gray’s populist vision of humanity and society in Little Orphan Annie was established in every aspect of the strip’s plainspoken art style, plotting and characterization. Human character was the real subject of the strip. And to this day I find no cartoonist more compelling and absorbing than Chester Gould. As the Library of American Comics wound down its massive 29 volume reprinting of Dick Tracy, it gave me an excuse to come at the strip from several angles, all compiled here. I especially enjoyed reviewing the many ways Gould doled out retributive justice in the grisly ends to his gruesome villains.
Looking forward to 2022 here at Panels & Prose, I have some thoughts on Hank Ketcham and Dennis the Menace on deck. I’d like to dig into The Bungle Family, especially if I can get hold of more dailies than are reprinted in the indispensable LOAC Essentials volume. Tuthill’s was a uniquely dark vision of 1920s family and social dynamics. Similarly, I don’t think E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre both before and after Popeye’s arrival, for its highly critical view of modern American character and acquisitiveness. As Fantagraphics starts reprinting the Sunday Popeyes, it makes a fine occasion to revisit the contentious Oil clan and its many machinations.
Also I hope to enrich Panels & Prose with some more forays into the larger reach of comic strip media in American culture. The many film and radio serials inspired by comics series, as well as the invention of the situation comedy itself, all beg for greater scrutiny. Finally, I also hope to step up my postings about new books of special interest to comic strip fans. There are so many resources online aimed at comic book collectors, but no one I have seen is focusing on what is new and available during this new golden age of comic strip reprints.
Many thanks to all of you who have been reading my musings this year.
Hank Ketcham says he always found it odd that he spent his life in service to a five year old. But of course Dennis the Menace was never for kids, really. At his best, Ketcham used Dennis as a device for poking gently – ever so gently- at the straitjacket of post-WWII suburban repression and painful social self-consciousness. And Ketcham himself was as straight laced, conventional and revenant as we imagine the Mitchells and their world to be. How else could such a pint-sized hellion find so many lines of propriety to transgress so habitually?
Ketcham’s breathtaking tone deafness to the songs of change singing around him in the 60s especially would surface in a famous episode we will save for another post. But for now let’s enjoy Ketcham at his cleverest, usually in the 1950s, using Dennis as a wry observer of pre-feminist gender typing.
Newspapers by and for predominantly Black audiences were a thriving part of the American press throughout much of the 20th Century in most major cities, even if they have been woefully invisible to most media history. More obscure have been the comic strips and their artists that appeared in many of these major newspapers like the Chicago Defender, Atlanta World and Pittsburgh Courier. The dearth of surviving hard copies and poor microfiche renderings have complicated attempts to retrieve that history to publish much-overdue reprints of some of this work. The 1993 Dark Laughter: The Satiric Art of Oliver W. Harrington is among the only extended reprints of a single Black artist I have found. Recently, however, a few industrious comics historians started filling in this blind spot. Ken Quattro’s indispensible Invisible Men: The Trailblazing Black Artists of Comic Books was among my favorites of last year (reviewed here). Also full of great reprinted work is Dan Nadel’s It’s Life As I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940-1980. And Rebecca Wanzo’s more scholarly The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging has a unique take on how many Black cartoonists navigated the shoals of stereotype.
Earlier this year a small treasure fell into my lap courtesy of Library of American Comics head Dean Mullaney. During an email exchange about the possibility of reprinting Black cartoonists he sent me this pristine rendering of a rare surviving 8-page color comics section syndicated by the Smith-Mann company and appearing in the Pittsburgh Courier for Nov. 11, 1950. Smith-Mann distributed a full-color section to the Courier for only a few years, from August 1950 to Nov. 1955, according to Allen Holtz, who has done some legwork on Smith-Mann at his essential Stripper’s Guide. The sone of one of the syndicate’s founders has posted his own history and extensive samples of the Smith-Mann comics section at The Museum of Uncut Funk.
This Nov. 11 1950 edition Dean sent me includes espionage adventure Guy Fortune (by Edd Ashe), western The Chisholm Kid (by Carl Pfeufer), gag strips Sunny Boy Sam (by Wilbert Holloway) and Woody Woodenhead (by Edo Anderson), sports adventure Don Powers (by Sam Milai), romance strip Torchy Brown Heartbeats (by Jackie Ormes), adventure Mark Hunt (also by Ashe), sci-fi adventure Neil Knight of the Air (credited only to “‘Carl and Mac”), and animal adventure Lohar (by Bill Brady). The full 8-page section is below. In the coming weeks I will tease out a few of these strips and artists for more detail.
It didn’t take long for Popeye and Olive to hook up after the pugnacious sailor joined the Thimble Theatre in 1929. Popeye because part of the Sunday Theatre in 1930, which is now being reprinted by Fantagraphics. E.C. Segar’s characters had a special kind of grittiness and irascible repartee. And here we see how Thimble Theatre could get remarkably raw. Popeye and Olive’s noisy smooching gets under Mr. Oyl’s skin. The sexuality of the younger generation in 1920s America had been an important topic of discussion across media. WWI had exposed an entire generation to less inhibited European attitudes towards sexuality. The arrival of the automobile especially created a way for boys and girls to escape the scrutiny of their parents. Moral arbiters worried publicly about this new wave of “petting parties” where youth explored their bodies in troubling ways. Apparently, Olive Oyl and Popeye used the Oyl living room for their own personal petting party.
Gasoline Alley may be a singular American masterpiece. It was unlike any other cultural utterance of its day. In it, creator Frank King exposed aspects of modernizing American culture other cultural sources overlooked.
The remarkable gentleness of Frank King’s Gasoline Alley is its signature distinction from much of the comic strip universe of the 1920s and 30s. It has no henpecked husbands, no nagging wives, no snarky kids, no withering repartee among supposed friends. All of the familiar domestic and small town tensions are there, but King’s is a sweeter, gentler version of the tropes his fellow cartoonists deployed in The Gumps, The Bungles, Moon Mullins, Barney Google, Mr. and Mrs., Thimble Theatre or Bringing Up Father. These strips were the heart of the medium’s move in the late 1910s and 1920s into the suburban and family sphere. But King’s take on this world was distinct for what it was not. Husbands don’t suffer flying rolling pins or eviction from their homes at the hands of jealous spouses in Gasoline Alley America. In the narrow confines of this alley, wives get mildly peeved when their husbands do too many favors for the new single woman in town, and they follow her lead in bobbing their hair. Walt’s garage tribe, Avery, Doc and Bill, gently chide one another without ever truly straining their eternal friendship. So far in my reading of King, I have yet to see a character get angry enough with a friend or spouse even to stop talking to them.
King’s talents ran deeper. The little gestures and moments of emotional significance were his terrain. And he created a perspective for the reader that was more giving and loving than the grumpy, shallow nostalgia and easy irony effected by rest of the comic page. In the Thanksgiving 1921 image above we see the classic gender divide that fuels much of comicdom. But in King’s hands it is rendered as separate but mutually respectful spheres. During a road trip to National Parks, King creates a strip of panels depicting passersby waving hello to the travelers. It is a quiet testament to quiet human connection.
Frank King (1883-1969) himself may not have understood how the title for his Gasoline Alley strip suited his own aesthetic ambitions for his decades-long novel. The strip was named after the the back alleys of early 20th Century American cities, where pioneering car owners erected the first backyard garages to house and maintain the first romanticized gadgets of the modern age, the car. But his frame was quite narrow, with the feel and composition of a small town, much like the Tomah, Wisconsin of his own childhood. His initial focus was a tightly woven group of friends, Walt Wallet, his fellow car enthusiasts Avery, Bill and Doc and to a lesser degree their wives. That world expanded slowly, organically in real time with the introduction of the foundling Skeezix on Walt’s doorstep in 1921. It was indeed an alley of American life. But King was not crafting the usual “slice of life” comic we find in J.R. Williams Out Our Way, Gene Ahern’s Our Boarding House or the many Clare Briggs series like Real Folks at Home, even though King apprenticed under many of these strips and artists. defined by immediate family, small town sensibilities, friends who know each other subtly and deeply.
Often it is hard to grasp what any given Gasoline Alley strip is about or what was accomplished by that day’s four panels. There is rarely an obvious gag or punch line, and if there are they feel weak. Skeezix gets sand in his pants from playing in the sandbox. Walt comes upon his evolving love interest Mrs. Blossom sewing Skeezix’s drawers and decides not to intrude. Walt agrees to wait for a package coming to Mrs. Blossom, only to sit all day in vain. During a road trip to National Parks, King creates a strip of panels devoted solely to wordless images of passersby waving hello to the travelers. “Ho Hum” a frustrated Walt says in the final panel, a feeling a reader might share at the end of many Gasoline Alley dailies. Nothing happens.
And yet, everything happens. In the unique cadence and focus of Frank King’s comic strip world a little and a lot are going on at once. These little glimpses of Skeezix, without gag or storyline, mark his development for us and help put us into the everyday world of the Alley and its commonplaces. And as the only major strip to watch its characters age in real time, King is mimicking the incremental changes much the way King himself was observing and marking his own son’s childhood. King peppers these little checkins with Skeezix every few weeks. In one we see him favoring Walt or Mrs. Blossom, all according to who last gave him a piece of candy. And each is mildly hurt by feeling snubbed. Yes. The little protean, irrational responses of a toddler can tug at our personal insecurities and self-worth in emotionally piercing ways. In another daily, the family maid Rachel wonders who is ringing the front door bell, only to find it is little Skeezix. Yes. A small moment tells Rachel and us shows without telling how a child grows into self-consciousness, power over things and people. It uses the unique cadence of the everyday strip and pantomime to pull us into the vision of a young parent watching the subtle ways a human being develops. And it uses a plainspoken, very Midwestern, show, don’t tell, visual voice to do it. There is a reverence for the small, everyday expressions of inner feeling and emotional exchange, done without mawkish sentiment. As Donald Phelps put it expansively in his Reading the Funnies, “the function of his art seemed not to impose the folksy haberdashery and cosmetics of Norman Rockwell, not yet to yoke with his interpretation of their lives, but to convey, by pooling his craft with theirs, and by rendering their corporate style as a way of life itself (p. 198).”
Gasoline Alley’s special place in modern American culture, its genius really, is in counterpoint to the modern aesthetic sensibilities around it both on and off the comics section.
Start with the visual center and emotional heart of the strip – the doughy, roly-poly Walt Wallet. Visually, Walt is the opposite of the typical bigfoot characters around him on the comics page. His is not the squash, big-headed figure of Fisher’s Jeff (Mutt and Jeff), McManus’s Jiggs (Bringing Up Father), Milt Gross’s Pop (Nize Baby) or DeBeck’s Barney Google. Walt is the inverse bigfoot – massive, but impossibly small-headed and relatively small-footed. King usually depicts him as a mass divided by ink black trousers and white button-down shirt. He is often canting forward and seems ready to teeter. He is all-heart, all pillowy comfort. And while he dominates most panels in form he never dominates in spirit. With the arrival of Skeezix in 1921, Walt becomes the most unlikely of pop culture males – the sensitive man-nurturer – perhaps the only one in American pop and literary culture at the time. And like his visual contrast to other strips, Walt is apart from the bloviating, scheming satirized fathers like Andy Gump, Barney Google, Moon Mullins. And Perhaps King meant this Walt’s weight problem is baked into the character from the start.
In the newly domesticated comic strips of the 1920s, most artists were inventing the tropes of modern situation comedy that grounded radio, romantic comedy and television: disempowered, scheming but hapless husbands; domestic disharmony borne of miscommunication; gender politics; wives manipulating husbands; husbands’ misfired jealousies. It lacks the withering, distrustful repartee of Mr. and Mrs. and Moon Mullins, let along the flying rolling pins and plates of Maggie and Jiggs. Gasoline Alley dallies on occasion with these sit-com elements but at heart was onto something else. It was a gentler vision of domestic and neighborly relations, a daily idyllic respite from the the knowing, ironic and sharp-tongued tone of 1920s American culture.
While Gasoline Alley was inspired by and originally set in the urban alleyways and walkups of 1910s Chicago, where King conceived of the strip, it looks and feels more like a small town. In fact, there is little visual evidence of urban life here, and King generally was leaning on his memories of his boyhood rural home and people in Wisconsin. More to the point, Gasoline Alley embraced the village ethose that Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, H.L. Mencken’s and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s smart set were fleeing, mocking and condemning. Much of American letters of the time engaged in a “revolt from the village” that rejected the sentimental regionalism of William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland, Charles Chestnutt that tended to locate the spriritual heart of the nation in the small town idyll.
King was extending the dwindling traditions of American Regionalism, the tone of Hamlin Garland, Edward Egglesten, Willa Cather. Like many of these authors, King envisions the village as self-contained, comfortably insular and defined by its limited populace. Outside developments like the auto, bobbed hair and clothing styles and radio technology are engaged, even embraced, as alien intrusions that are absorbed through the sensibilities of the town. Walt’s eventual love interest Mrs. Blossom introduces the bobbed hair style to the wives of Gasoline Alley, but it is a curio that gets quickly dropped. The car itself, a model of modern tech and mass production, is recast as a locus of male bonding and a vehicle for engaging natural landscapes. Gasoline Alley is the inverse of modernization. Its world changes and shapes modernity at least as much as modernity changes them.
Frank King had nothing but understanding and curiosity about the small town American. And just as importantly he had no reverence for them either. There is no mawkish sentimentality to Gasoline Alley. King depicts many touching moments of small human connection and kindness among his cast. A day’s strip shows Walt and co. on vacation touring the country, depicted as three wordless panels of locals making welcoming waves at the passing car. Walt sewing Skeezix’s britches as the child is bent over his knee. Walt hugging the one person among his friends who praised his new wire car wheels rather than bemoan their downsides. Walt in silhouette in four successive panels getting up in the middle of the night to feed Skeezix and sleepily slip into bed. Most of these sequences are pantomime, and King never feels the need to underscore them with sentiment. Again, this is the embodiment of the plainspoken American style – show, don’t tell. And what King showed for the most part was an inner emotional reality with a subtlety and complexity that rivaled and perhaps exceeded the richest introspective novels.
Much of 1922 is spent on a romantic slow burn of Walt coming to realize what the reader and his friends already know – that he is in love with newcomer Mrs. Blossom. Walt is a confirmed bachelor. A signature Gasoline Alley sequence shows some awkward domestic exchange among Bill, Avery or Doc and their respective wives, ending in a panel of Walt strutting away declaring how he is so “well off” being single.
He protests too much of course. The attractive Mrs. Blossom moving into the neighborhood initiates one of the longest approach-avoidance sequences in modern literature. And here is where King uses the iterative qualities of the daily strip to render ambivalence on a grand scale. One day finds Walt peering over fences wondering what the newcomer looks like or claiming indifference to his buddies stumbling over one another to help her tend to her car. When Mrs. Blossom starts gushing over Skeezix, Walt is overcome with mixed feelings – pride, resentment, jealousy, and more. In one memorable strip Walt marches through the first panels insisting he will firmly reject Mrs. Blossom’s offer to take baby Skeezix for a ride in her car. But upon confronting her in the final panels, he hands the tot over to her and then wonders why he just did that. King is exploring ambivalence, suppressed feeling and befuddlement over one’s own real feelings in a way only the comics strip can dramatize. Each day’s strip displays his feelings moving one way or the other, so that cumulatively we feel their depth.
And King’s touch is so light but sublime in capturing the silly beauty of our inner lives. One strip has Walt putting on jacket and tie, brushing up his signature hair swoop in front of a mirror – primping and sprucing uncharacteristically for Walt. And in the final panel we see that all of this preparation was not to go on a date but to make the phone call to ask Mrs. Blossom out for a date.
By title alone Frank King’s Bobby Make-Believe strip is compared to Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo. But King Brought to the strip richer and subtler understanding of the inner life of children than McCay. And yet, like McCay, King loved to play with nature and landscape, bringing out their surreal potential. But this strip foreshadows the gentle sensitivity to everyday emotional reality King was about to bring to Gasoline Alley.
Panels & Prose 