Hank Ketcham

Career

Ketcham started in the business as an assistant animator for Walter Lantz and, starting in 1939, for Walt Disney, where he worked on Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and several Donald Duck shorts. During World War II, Ketcham was a photographic specialist with the U.S. Navy Reserve. He also created the character Mr. Hook for the Navy during World War II, and four cartoons were made (one by Walter Lantz Productions, in color, and three by Warner Bros. Cartoons, in black and white). Also while in the Navy, he began a camp newspaper strip, Half Hitch, which ran in The Saturday Evening Post beginning in 1943. By 1944, his freelance cartoons were running in Collier's and Liberty magazines.

After World War II, Ketcham settled in Carmel, California, and began work as a freelance cartoonist. He built a two-bedroom redwood house and studio in Carmel Woods. By 1955, Ketcham moved from his Carmel cottage to upper Carmel Valley, where he purchased the former Fred Wolferman ranch, only 40 minutes from the Monterey Peninsula. The Spanish adobe home on the Carmel Valley property was designed by architect Hugh W. Comstock with bitudobe brick. On the edge of the orchard was a Victorian ranch house for the foreman and his family, designed by architect Wilson Mizner.

In 1958, Dennis Play Products, Inc., was created by Ketcham to distribute toys, which included the Dennis the Menace Doll, Ruff Dog, and Banshee Ball. Between 1959 and 1964 Dennis the Menace was broadcast on CBS television, based on the Ketcham comic strip. The show was a great success.

In 1970, King Features Syndicate revived Ketcham's wartime strip Half Hitch as a newspaper comic. The strip was published under Ketcham's name, although it was drawn and written by others. The new version of Half Hitch ran until 1975.

Family

Ketcham's first wife, Alice Louise Mahar Ketcham, died on June 22, 1959.

Later life and retirement

When his Dennis the Menace cartoon added a Sunday strip, Ketcham hired artist Al Wiseman and writer Fred Toole to produce the Sunday strips and the many Dennis the Menace comic books that were published. People from around the country sent captions to him, and he would find one that he liked and illustrate the gag.

In 1990, Ketcham published a memoir titled The Merchant of Dennis the Menace chronicling his career. He retired from drawing the daily panel in 1994, when his former assistants, Marcus Hamilton and Ron Ferdinand, took over. At the time of Ketcham's death, Dennis the Menace was distributed to more than 1,000 newspapers in 48 countries and 19 languages, by King Features Syndicate. his third wife, Rolande; and their two children, Dania and Scott.

In 2005, Fantagraphics Books started publishing what was to be a complete Dennis by Ketcham from the start of the strip, collecting two years per volume, but the publishing ceased in 2009 with the 1961–1962 volume.

Legacy The Dennis the Menace Playground was designed by Ketcham and with the help of sculptor Arch Garner in 1954. The playground opened on November 17, 1956, with children's play areas including a 1924 locomotive steam engine, donated by the Southern Pacific Railroad. A life-sized, , bronze statue of cartoon strip character Dennis the Menace was displayed at the entrance to the playground. In recent years it has been stolen twice. The statue was sculpted by Wah Ming Chang, another Disney man who resided in Carmel Valley.