by Hank Ketchum, Fantagraphics

There are plenty of gag panels that garner critical acclaim, and there are plenty of comic strips with recurring characters that are similarly respected, but the combination of the two–a gag panel with recurring characters–is generally the bottom of the barrel of the comics page. This is where Family Circus, Marmaduke, and Ziggy, the three horsemen of crap, reside; the mediocrity of Heathcliff looks like quality by contrast, but that’s really damning with faint praise. I suppose it’s a problem of dissonance between medium and content: strips lend themselves to character-driven humor, while panels lend themselves to the pure gags of Arno or Addams, and trying to shoehorn characters into one panel a day is comic poison.

The prime exception is Hank Ketchum’s Dennis the Menace, a thoroughly character-based gag panel that may stink nowadays (”Dennis has certainly left meancehood behind long ago,” the Comics Curmudgeon has observed) but was once a beautifully drawn and often very funny paean to or condemnation of the savage days of childhood, depending on how old you were when you read it. It should probably come as no surprise that Ketchum did not invent Dennis ab nihilo and start drawing perfect little panels from day one; he was a prolific gag cartoonist for magazines before Dennis ever appeared on paper, and Where’s Dennis? collects what I take to be a sampling of his output.

There are plenty of bratty kids here, but there’s also a thug in a pawn shop explaining to the dubious proprietor: “‘Honey,’ I says, ‘I know it’s gonna break yer heart fa’ me to hock yer opera glasses and mink coat, but I ain’t got no choice.’” it’s a good gag, and something that could never make it into Dennis; and there are plenty of good gags here. Ketchum’s art, always a high point of the Dennis panel, is showcased here with more variety that we’re used to seeing. Ketchum was a master of a particular ‘fifties style (Dennis’s father’s design is derived from it part), but he could also do ink-washed New Yorker-style cartoons as well as wonderful simple sketches with exaggerated facial expressions. The changes in art style could be due to the venue and could be due to the passage of time. I say could be, because there’s no way to know. The book gives no information where anything is from, or when. For someone trying to acquire a survey-level understanding of Ketchum’s career this is fatal, but even the casual reader will encounter trouble, as some cartoons don’t make much sense when removed from context. There’s a picture of Eisenhower getting ice cubes dropped down the back of his shirt, which I guess is kind of amusing, but leaves one wondering why this picture was ever produced. Some of the reproductions in this book are clearly just spot illustrations, but others are ambiguous enough that I found myself searching for a gag that may ever have been there. Maybe I just don’t get it, or maybe there’s nothing to get. This lack of context–we don’t even know what years the book spans–is frustrating.

But Where’s Dennis? does sport one ingenious conceit. It presents some of Ketchum’s magazine gags side by side with the Dennis panels in which he reuses them. Ketchum was pretty thrifty about recycling material, and the comparison between the original composition, and the Dennis the Menace copy, makes for an interesting study.

Although it would have been more interesting if they’d reprinted the publication dates, too.