Sunday, May 10, 2020

True Fantasy

Sunday Been There Before Day.

One of the goals of a forties or fifties cartoonist, was to get a regular series in one of the major magazines. Not only did it mean a steady job, but you could also use it as a step up to a newspaper series and still sell your regular cartoons as well. Master cartoonist and Dennis the Menace later daddy scored one at the end of his career as cartoonist. It's Only Your Imagination ran at least from 1949 tot 1951 in the monthly magazine True. There were two fomats, as you can see. The single image one and one where both the imagination and the reality were shown. I don't know if Ketcham drew them himself. He was know to have used writers on Dennis, though probably not from the start. That the series ran 1951 means he did it alongside the daily Dennis. What it has in common with that panel (and all of his post-war cartoons) is his impressive talent at creating secondary characters. That got worn down in Dennis, but it is still there in his first few years and a major draw to the series for me. If I was a company doing a new animated movie or cartoon series, I would certainly have a look at those for a consistent body of models.

I have shown some of these cartoons before, but I cleaned them all again and put them together with some new ones I found. There is only one collectio of Ketcham cartoons and it shows only afraction of his work - and none of these.



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