Dennis Sunday Comic Strip 9/26/54
So, we're all quite familiar with Al Wiseman's Dennis comic books (or we should be, no?). But what the heck do we know about his work on the Dennis comic strip?
Well, not much. According to Hank Ketcham's book The Merchant of Dennis, Hank hired Al to work in his studio when he found out that his syndicate wanted a Dennis Sunday strip to go along with the daily panel. The daily had started in 1951, the Sunday strip premiered in 1952 and the comic book followed in 1953.
The very early Sunday strips tended to hide Wiseman's distinctive style under a heavy Ketcham influence. Was it that Wiseman was such a talented mimic that he was able to copy Ketcham's style so convincingly? Or perhaps Hank himself was pitching in? Chances are there were other artists involved as well.
Here's a mighty keen strip from 1954, by which time Al's easily recognizable style had finally broken through to the surface:
Seems that around this time Al's comic book workload got to be so intensive that his contributions to the Sunday strips lessened and finally ceased altogether...
Hey, wouldn't it be nifty to see the early strips reprinted?
Oh, if only...
Please order Dennis the Menace books from Fantagraphics (and ask them to reprint the Wiseman Dennis comic books and Sunday strips).
"Dennis the Menace" & related characters are ©Hank Ketcham Enterprises, Inc.
5 Comments:
I would absolutely love to see Al's Sunday strips reprinted as I've never seen most of them.
As they were never reprinted in paperback form, I never saw them even as a kid.
As far as Al's distinctive style, it took awhile to emerge in the comic book as well. The very early issues of Dennis don't look as "clean" as Wiseman's classic version of the character.
How much of that was due to Ketcham's influence or to other assistants working on the books or just to Al trying harder to imitate Ketcham's style rather than his own, I've never known.
Unfortunately, the Dennis comic I posted didn't include the panels from the top row. Apparently, the newspaper I scanned this from decided that the "non-essential" upper panels really were "non-essential".
So we're missing one-third of the strip...
Actually, most Sunday strips were produced to allow editors of local papapers to crop the first tier of panels depending on how each laid out their Sunday comics sections.
All the more reason to see these strips reprinted - so we can see them in their uneditted glory.
My Father pointed out to me one day that the Sunday strip always had a seperate joke in the first 3 panels.
Now I am looking forwaed to see more Sunday Strips.
JRW
Like you guys, I can't get enough of the 1950s Dennis Sundays. At this point in my research, it's pretty clear that Al was doing the art for the comics, the merchandise, and the Sundays almost exclusively until Lee Holley came along and took over the Sundays in the late 1950s. After that, in the early 1960s, Owen Fitzgerald, the artist of Dennis Goes to Camp (Bill's favorite :) ) did the Sundays.
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