When I started this blog I showed a lot of cartoons by Hank Ketcham. Most of them selfscanned, because apart from a very haphazardly collected book by Fantagraphics, not a lot of his work before Denis the Menace has been collected. Recently, I found two more lots of Ketcham cartoons from the midand late forties. The earliers ones, which I'll show later, show him trying out styles and learning his craft. The later ones (from which these are only the first few) are from The American Legion, a rightwing magazine for exmilitary and anyone with a similar outlook on life. This magezine featured the best of the midrange cartoonists, including Hank Ketcham, Virgil Partch, Mort Walker and a whole host of Collier's and Saturday Evening Post regulars. These cartoons show what I like about the early Dennis cartoons. Not only are they very funny, but Ketcham was a very good carater artist. All of his characters are very nicely designed, as were most of the secondary characters of Dennis the Menace in the first ten years (after which they sadly disappeared). Strangely enough, these characters show Ketcham worked for Disney, even if his cartoons right after the war didn't.
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The late Hank Ketcham, who brought for us, Dennis The Menace.
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