Character Artist

Sunday Additional Samples Day.

I am slowly selling all of the magazines I got to find all the stuff I have been showing here for the last ten years. To prepare for that, I am going through them again and I found a huge amount of Hank Ketcham cartoons I had not yet scanned most of them from two of Ketcham's biggest clients, Collier's and True. Over the years I have shown many of Ketcham's cartoons. There was a small book made by Fantagraphics, but that doesn not nearly contain even half of what's out there. Maybe one day I will sit down and gather all I have done and combine it with thes enew ones. I love these cartoons. Not only are they funny, Ketcham also displays a flair for character design that he use din his early years on Dennis the Menace - although it did go to the background in the later years, as more and more gags were centered around the main characters only.

Most cartoonists had a set and recognizable style. The same goes for Ketcham. But sometimes he did try different techniques (such as the time he started doing gags that looked more like roughs than finished drawings in 1946/1947). Here, his less slick inking style reminds one of the work of Reamer Keller, another Collier's regular.

Here are some more I came across:

This last illustration I added, but I am not sure if it is by Ketcham. The style is similar, but it also has something of Roy Doty's work. Ketcham worked for Collier's after the start of Dennis the Menace, sometimes doing illustrations. But when the Dennis Sunday pages started, he seems to have stopped contributing.