Hank Ketcham - Due Process

I’ve long been a fan of Hank Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace, drawn particularly to Ketcham’s terrific line work, his wonderfully composed imagery, and the lovely use of contrasts found in the strip.  Ketcham’s panel designs were often beautifully understated, with furniture and architectural elements being used as vehicles to carry the viewer’s eyes throughout the panel.  A stairway banister might travel diagonally upwards, drawing the eyes towards the ceiling, or a comfy living room chair might anchor the composition from the bottom left corner.  The characters in Dennis the Menace are vitally important to the feature, of course, but Ketcham’s construction of the elements in the strip go a long way in giving those characters a place to reside.  And that construction of the strip began with Hank Ketcham’s process.

I first wrote to Hank Ketcham in 1984.  I don’t recall what I wrote, but I’m sure that I extolled the virtues of at least some of those elements above, as they were as meaningful to me then as they are today.  To my surprise, I received a lovely reply from Ketcham, along with a couple of pencil roughs, and one discarded ink drawing.  Five years later I wrote Ketcham again, and he responded in kind with additional sketches.  In that second letter, Ketcham talked about his process.  He would pencil his drawings on a translucent piece of vellum, later putting that vellum on a light-box with a piece of two-ply Strathmore illustration paper laid on top.  Ketcham would then ink directly onto the Strathmore paper, with no additional penciling.  He worked this way in order to maintain as much energy of the original pencil drawings as possible.  Like Bud Blake, of Tiger fame, who worked in a similar fashion, Ketcham felt that the drawings lost too much liveliness by re-penciling the pieces before inking directly onto the same paper.  Too much like tracing the pencil lines.  Ketcham and Blake both had these lovely, rambling pencil drawings in which they were trying to locate the form of the drawing, almost in an Alberto Giacometti sort of way.  And you can see from Ketcham’s first letter that he was not at all that precious about the drawings.  If something didn’t work, he’d toss that piece, lay down a new sheet of Strathmore and try again until he got it right.

You can see in the ink drawing that Ketcham sent along with the first letter that he found some anatomical inaccuracies in the piece, which caused him to toss the piece.  The line work though, has that wonderful liveliness that is found so often in Dennis the Menace.  

 While Ketcham found anatomical errors in this drawing, I find some of the line work to be simply marvelous.  Those lines that travel down Joey's legs onto his shoes and capture those wonderful laces, are so lively and descriptive.  Likewise, Ketcham could describe so much with so little, such as Joey's hand holding the soda can.  Lovely stuff.

I’m not sure what this sports montage piece was used for, but I assume that it was more advertising-based than something done for the comic strip.  Ketcham makes Dennis' figure movement look so easy, but he knew just how Dennis’ body could move after so many decades of working with it.

One of the pieces that Ketcham sent along back in 1984 is a sweet pencil preliminary drawing depicting Dennis and Joey looking over the landscape at a crescent moon.  Dennis says, “It’s a new moon.  I don’t know what they do with their old ones.”  The finished, published version of this cartoon appeared on June 14, 1984, the same year that Ketcham sent the pencil sketch to me. 

 Fast-forward 22 years.  In 2006, Russ Cochran was auctioning off the finished ink drawing to my preliminary piece, so of course I had to bring them back together.  You can see how Ketcham lost a bit of the rambling nature of the pencil line in the finished piece but brought in some lovely contrasts to convey a rhythm in the piece.  The various black shapes do a nice job of bringing your eye from right-to-left.  

 You can also see, in the finished cartoon, Ketcham's mastery at working with various patterns and textures in his ink work.  Stripes, hatching lines of various weights, and more gestural mark-making all add to the richness of the drawing.

What follows are some additional pencil preliminary drawings that Ketcham sent to me over the years, along with the printed versions of the final artwork:

February 25, 1984

 

March 30, 1990

October 6, 1987

Finally, a last look at Hank Ketcham’s mastery with two examples.  In the first cartoon, published on August 11, 1977, you can see how Ketcham is able to create a wonderfully bouncy rhythm in the piece via the different shapes and contrasts.  The foliage at the lower left corner does a great job in both anchoring the composition and setting off the contrasting tone of the road. 

There is such facility in Ketcham’s brush and pen as it dances across the paper, capturing movement and speed. And note how he further conveys that movement by using the tops of the clouds to help frame the entire cartoon panel.  Deceivingly simple brilliance in action.

This later example, from October 23, 1991, is quite different from the previous panel, as it’s more about the competing textures and contrasts.  The fire hydrant in the lower left, like the foliage in the 1977 panel, anchors this composition, with the movement of the scene extending out from that corner.  The shadows in the piece, nearly solid shapes, are brilliant as they move the viewer’s eyes from left to right. And those textures!  Crazy, man!  With those near woodcut-like techniques, you can feel the crispness of the autumn air in this drawing.  Ketcham clearly had a blast inking this panel, playing around with the pleasantly raucous approaches to convey the mood. 

Hank Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace remains one of the iconic comic strips of the latter half of the 20^th century.  While Ketcham’s work from the 50s and 60s is beloved and has its own charm, I find the later work, from the 70s until Ketcham’s passing in 2001, to be his strongest and most experimental artwork.  Again, to compare Ketcham to Bud Blake, both men were still looking for those best lines, those strongest movements, and that most honest liveliness in the work, until the ends of their respective runs.  The pursuit of those attributes lay purely in their shared process.

Since I've mentioned Bud Blake a few times, it's only fair to leave you with a couple of his lovely Tiger daily roughs.  We will most certainly revisit Bud's work in a later blog post.  Hopefully these two pencil roughs will whet your appetite.