LA Times

http://www.latimes.com/wires/20010601/tCB00a7531.html

Friday, June 1, 2001
'Dennis the Menace' Creator Hank Ketcham Dies

Reuters

    LOS ANGELES--Hank Ketcham, the onetime movie cartoon animator who
created the "Dennis the Menace" comic strip because his wife complained
that their five-year-old son was a menace, has died at home in Carmel,
California, a spokeswoman said on Friday. He was 81 years old.
Ketcham, who had been in falling health after a battle with cancer,
died of a heart attack on Thursday night, spokeswoman Linda Dozoretz said.
The cartoonist celebrated the 50th anniversary of his creation of the
freckle-faced, golden-haired boy-next-door on March 12.
Ketcham dabbled in cartooning as a child and went to Hollywood where
he worked at the Walter Lantz animation studio until he joined the Navy
the day of the Pearl Harbor attack. After the war, he quickly became one
of the country's most successful and prolific cartoonists with work
published in Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home Journal,
Liberty and The New Yorker.
Inspired by the antics of his own 5-year-old son Dennis, Ketcham
created his own comic despite a top newspaper editor telling him: "I don't
see how it can last ... there's only so much you can say about a
5-year-old kid." Ketcham boasted that he proved that editor wrong.

Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times

Goodbye Hank.

Very sad. This fine man gave me a basis to model my early childhood on. If it wasn't for Dennis the Menace and The Katzenjammer Kids I might have had a very dull childhood.