Hank Ketchum, who created the popular comic strip Dennis the Menace, died last Friday at the age of 81.  Like Carl Barks, Ketchum was born in the Northwest (Seattle), and worked in Hollywood animation studios (Walter Lantz & Disney) before finding his true calling.  After a stint in the Navy during World War II, Ketchum created his comic strip in 1951.  Fifty years later the strip is still running in over 1,000 papers in 48 countries and 19 languages.  It inspired a television series, a 1993 movie adaptation, and even a musical, but Dennis the Menace in other media lacked the incisive touch that Ketcham's drawing provided.  Peers like Bill Keane considered Ketcham in his prime 'The finest pen-and-ink line artist in America.'  The strip will continue thanks to the team of Marcus Hamilton and Ronald Ferdinand, who took over in 1994.

 

In the future cultural commentators will no doubt look back on Hank Ketcham's work and note how his comic strip captured the mood and spirit of the 1950s as the World War II generation settled into a life of domesticity and produced the original baby boom, for which the perpetually 'five-anahalf' year-old Dennis will remain as one of its enduring symbols.