Hank Ketcham Biography

Ketcham was the creator of Dennis the Menace, a one-panel comic strip starring a five-year-old scalawag and the friends and family he tormented. As a young man Ketcham dropped out of college and worked for animators Walter Lantz and Walt Disney (he worked on the Disney films Fantasia and Pinocchio, among others). In 1951 he first published Dennis the Menace, the strip based on the antics of his own 4-year-old son Dennis. (Among the strip’s supporting cast were the long-suffering curmudgeon Mr. Wilson and the snippy schoolgirl Margaret.) He continued drawing the strip until 1994, when he retired and passed the strip onto a team of writers and cartoonists.