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.
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.
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.
It took a full week of strips for the eponymous hero of Lee Falk’s Mandrake the Magician strip to make his grand entrance. June 11, 1934 was the first strip, which evokes some of the feel of a classic mystery wind-up. But on June 15, in what has to stand as one of the most unambiguously racist intros in pop culture history, Mandrake’s “servant” Lothar heralds the coming of his “master.” One doesn’t even know where to start here. Falk’s full bore colonialism is more fully and relentlessly explored in his later The Phantom series whose origin we covered here and whose fetishes we covered here.
For all of its weaknesses, Mandrake remains important both to comic strip and comic book history in that his is the first strip to move towards a super-powered hero. Mandrake’s “magic” is only nominally super-natural, in that it is based on the power of suggestion and influence over others’ minds. But it precedes the appearance of Superman by 5 years and aldo nods towards costumed heroism, which would be more fully introduced in Falk’s The Phantom.
Billy DeBeck described his own comic anti-hero as a “low-life” with a heart, but it took a few years from Barney Google’s introduction in 1919 for DeBeck to find his real character. Barney started as yet another henpecked husband, a servile schemer whose daily antics focused on outflanking his overbearing wife. From the start, however, DeBeck’s imagination veered towards outlandish solutions to everyday slights and oppression, At one point the early Barney plots to avoid his wife’s wrath by getting beat up to garner sympathy. Barney was DeBeck’s man on the margins, bouncing from job to job, always broke, forever buffeted by wife, bosses, circumstances or dumb bad luck.
As DeBeck came to understand his own character, Barney literally shrank in stature, from a tall but stooped supplicant to a figure half that original size, now more crushed than stooped, a compact underling of life whose famously oversized “google eyes” always seems to be looking up at other characters. With so little space between Barney’s nose, mouth, torso and legs, he looks like a crumpled ball of formerly human features, the visual embodiment of a man pressed down into a diminutive stature.
But the real heart of Barney Google comes out when he connects with Spark Plug, the horse that would win and lose countless races over the next decade. See above the first strip in 1922 introducing Sparky. In many ways, the horse replaced Barney’s wife as his love-hate interest. Barney raged whenever his nag lost a race but never could bring himself to stay mad for long. There was real romance here. It is not surprising that Spark Plug became a merchandising hit in the 1920s. One later comics historian compared the nag to Snoopy in the level of his fame.
But the coming of Spark Plug also literally raised the stakes for Barney’s conniving. Now he is on a larger stage, traversing the country with Sparky, plotting to get race entry fees, looking for shortcuts. And his fortunes rise and fall radically, from wealthy purses Sparky wins to big bets that come cup a cropper. And Barney starts looking the part, now donning a top hat and formal coat. He has evolved from petty existential haplessness to riding up and down the rollercoaster of American pluck and luck. Barney Google becomes both a celebration and satire of American ambition. He is always on the make, looking for the big chance, and a universe of pitiless institutions, authorities and chance bounce this compressed ball of a character up and down fortune’s wheel. DeBeck is working in a grand tradition of American comic archetypes and echoing some of the tropes that were driving the great slapstick silent clowns of the same decade. Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton also explored the marginal man, luckless but big-hearted and managing an absurd cosmos with clever survival skills.
And there was relentless scheming, DeBeck knew no bounds in dreaming up ways that Barney could make money, thwart rules, fool race officials, or just cheat to help Spark Plug win. In the strip above he gets Sparky a facelift in order to convince the race judges that his horse is a genuine three-year-old.
DeBeck’s plotting of Barney Google’s machinations to succeed were so convoluted that he became famous for recap strips that just reminded readers what his little schemer was up to. And it is this low-level conniving that is the beating heart of Barney Google. Barney is a hapless creature in the comic strip tradition of Happy Hooligan, Slim Jim, Mutt and Jeff, Boob McNutt, Boob Baxter and even Baron Bean. The lovable loser was a particular hero of the American comic strip. It begs so many questions about the role of this art form in Americans’ everyday lives. There was a special kind of social satire going on here, under cover of clever banter, situation comedy and screwball antics. At heart, many of the comic strip figures of the 1920s – Google, Andy Gump, Boob McNutt, Moon Mullins — were more victim than victor.
Panels & Prose 