ComicBookGuy

Welcome to the forums! It's always great to see new Dennis fans dropping in. It's also great to hear about kids - any kids - reading comics.

Here's the picture you were trying to post:

Wiseman's attention to detail is amazing and always meticulously rendered. At the top we can see the "Fred Toole Complicators" an in-joke about writer Fred Toole making Al's life so miserable by scripting such complicated scenes for him to draw. (I would imagine.) Thanks for sharing!

By the way, if you haven't checked it out yet, be sure to see Bill Alger's great Al Wiseman blog at

www.alwiseman.com

Great stuff!!!

Just off the top of my head, in this thread we've seen Dennis promoting

US Savings Bonds

Encyclopedia Britannica

Cream of Wheat

A&W Root Beer

Del Monte

Schaeffer Pen

Unicef

Red Cross

Sears

Carpet Care

Rhuli Jelly

Kellogg's Raisin Bran, Rice Krispies, and Corn Flakes

Morning Funnies Cereal

Dairy Queen (for thirty years)

I'm sure there's more.

Allen, post your list of comics you need here. What better place to find them than here! I'm sure someone has them.

Finally, here's another A&W ad from a magazine. I believe that's four that we've uncovered so far.

For anyone interested, Suzy and I visited the Geppi Museum here in Maryland this past Saturday. The museum is overwhelming and amazing, and I have never seen anything like it as far as its display of pop culture and comic items. Absolutely worth the visit!

As far as Dennis items go, there were two that I found:

1) a box of Dennis napkins

2) a beautiful copy of Dennis #1

There may be more, and I plan to visit the museum a few more times to take it all in.

Next up is a pinback I picked up from another collector. Again, a beautiful piece. It's a flicker button, and one of the cooler ones I've ever seen. I would have to say that A&W really had the nicest Dennis products of any of the many companies we've talked about here that used him as a promotional character. This is another one and only item. I've seen it only once period. Insanely rare!

The first image is of Dennis drinking root beer, then the next is of him saying, "Good!" I couldn't get the second image to show up on the scanner.

Seems crazy to be responding to your post over a month after you asked the question, but the only place I have ever seen the Sundays reprinted is in the Pocket Full of Fun digests. Even more, the ones that are reprinted in there are not the old Wiseman Sundays from the 1950s but seem to be mostly Owen Fitzgerald reprints from the 1960s.

By the way, it was great meeting you at the con this past Sunday, Allen, and knowing how much you like those old A&W root beer items, I will post a few that I've been meaning to post for a while.

First is this large 6-foot long banner. In my opinion, far and away the nicest piece of Dennis advertising I have seen to date. This closed at $430 on eBay, and NO collector I know has seen this before.

I have a two or three foot stack. I've sold about $500 worth over the last month and am sick of scanning them. I can make a list if you want. Are you interested only in Wiseman issues? Tell you what, Bill, I will send you a pm.

I second that. It would be great to see and hear about some of those.

First, welcome to the boards, David. It's always great to have new collectors joining in.

The official word from Hank Ketcham Enterprises is that Dennis is published in 19 languages. A shame is that in his own language he hasn't had his own comic book in over two decades. (Thanks a lot, Marvel. )

The different languages represented in Dennis comics I have are the following:

1) English (duh!)

2) Italian

3) Dutch

4) German

5) Swedish

6) Mexican/ Spanish

And those European ones I got from good old Jim Wiseman earlier this year.

We saw a Hebrrew (7) one a couple pages back, plus you said you had a Chinese (8) and Norweigan (9).

My guesses for some of the other ones would be

10) Portuguese

11) Danish

12) Swiss

13) Russian

14) Japanese

15) Korean

16-19 would be anyone's guess. Possibly Finland and Belgium have them translated, or the Czech Republic, etc. Pure speculation on my part.

As far as those giveaways go, we posted them all throughout the thread. I would rank the most difficult in this order:

1) Pumpkin Festival (one known copy)

2) Dr Posner's Scientific Shoes (I've seen one, period)

3) On Safety (one was on ebay about a week ago, not too hard)

4) Away We Go Calydryl with a band-aid still attached

The rest are pretty easy. Personally I would be interested to see if anyone has tracked down each of the different printings of Poison and Dirt giveaways. Poison had two different versions but Dirt was the same one with a different date as far as I could tell. Maybe some research is in order.

David, I will pm you about missing issues and hope I can help you out. I just sold a ton of doubles on eBay. ( Even Bill bid on my Dennis Giant #1.) There's still a lot left, though.

I got a subscription to this magazine just to get the Dennis issue. The first issue arrived a couple weeks ago, the one on the Yellow Kid. Then I get another envelope on Thursday, and I go to open it, and it's another copy of the Yellow Kid! I emailed them and hopefully I'll get my issue soon.

Thanks for posting that link. Marcus Hamilton's work before Dennis is very impressive. How many comic artists can claim a cover to The Saturday Evening Post? I've always thought he was an excellent artist and look forward to the interviews. As for him not doing the panels lately, I just hope that he's all right. I can't imagine what would happen to the strip if the two artists stopped doing them.

The next one has credits for Fred Toole as writer and Hank Ketcham for art:

There were six of these early kids books. The first was in 1956, and while it says HK was the artist on this first one, one look at the cover tells us it's AW:

And here is the second page. I can scan more if anyone is interested. It's interesting to look closely at the art since it helps to see exactly what AW's Dennis looks like, as opposed to HK's and Lee Holley's.

Here is the inside cover and first page of a book I have right here. Notice AW is actually credited.

I know it's been mentioned before that Al Wiseman was rarely credited, and that one time he was credited was in Dennis Giant #6 - In Hawaii. Another time he was credited was in this Little Golden Book:

Great work on that, Jon! It's a great accomplishment. If you want good covers, go to the first pages of this thread where I posted high grade scans of the first 25 issues, mostly Bethlehem copies. If these don't work, let me know and I will email you good scans.

With all the talk about Al Wiseman, our friend and fellow poster Bill Wray auctioned off another Wiseman page recently that sold for $500. It's the same story that I own a page of and that JRW now has a page of. Too bad we broke up the story, but we can always pick up a Dennis the Menace #16 to read it in its entirety. Here's the link to the auction:

Al Wiseman Art Auction

Here's the page:

Bill, I've been checking in on the Al Wiseman blog every couple days and love the stuff you're posting. Please keep it up!

There's some interesting Dennis activity going on on eBay.

First, an auction for every Dennis book - first time on eBay all 48 books have been for sale all at once as a set:

48 Different Dennis books - eBay Auction

Next, some AMAZING prices paid for low-grade copies of early Dennis issues. These rarely or never appear for sale, but they just did, and check out these prices:

#1 in Fair Plus Condition - $300

Dennis #1 Link

#2 in Very Good Minus - $300

Dennis #2 Link

#4 in Very Good - $290

Dennis #4 Link

#6 in Very Good - $247.50

Dennis #6 Link

#10 in Very Good - $102.50

Dennis #10 Link

Bill A, the site looks GREAT! Congratulations on a great launch and for providing all of us Al Wiseman fans finally with some info and pictures of things we've never seen.

JRW, I'm glad to see your dad getting some long overdue recognition that he deserves. Fred Hembeck is right when he calls your dad one of the greatest comic artists ever.

Hey! To whomever I sold some Bethlehem Dennis giants, I found some more. I put one up on Ebay.

keith contarino

Keith, do us both a favor and pm me the ones you have and we'll cut a deal for the whole batch. You know I'm the only one that bids on them anyway!!!

Joe

Well kids, it has been placed on the release schedule - Volume 3 of the Complete Dennis the Menace:

 

Amazon.com listing

 

Put this on your Christmas list now and avoid the November rush!

This is amazing -- I was just on Amazon on Tuesday and checked, so it must have just been listed.

Bill, just curious if you got a copy of the second one yet? I got it and read it in one sitting. Absolutely awesome. I find it amazing how high the quality is on these day after day and also am surprised at how most of them were never reprinted at all after their initial appearance. Great art and very clever gags thoughout. I will post some favorites soon.

Another great SD cover:

And here's the last third of the strip. The art looks like it's all Ketcham and is just like the art in the first anthology (1951 to 1952). Interesting to note on the second panel in on the second row (in the above post) we see the famous "silhouette" panel that Ketcham and Wiseman both used so successfully, and we can see Ketcham was doing it before Wiseman ever arrived. This is what's so fascinating about studying the strip sequentially. In the new anthology, Wiseman will arrive on the scene, and it will be interesting to see how, when, and where the shift will occur in the art.

Here is the earliest one I've gotten my hands on. It's from 2-3-52, when the strip was not even a year old. I will have to do this in two parts because it's large. I'll do the top two rows in this post, then the bottom row in my next...

That's a hilarious image of him hammering those toys. A Dennis that is a true menace!

Here's another one, a really early one from January 18, 1953. The art looks exactly like the art from the first few issues of the comic and was probably drawn around the same time, with the comic coming out later that year. (Sorry the page came out a little crooked.) I assume it's early Al Wiseman:

Well, Bill, I hear you loud and clear that you want to see some 1950s Dennis cartoons, so here you go with a Sunday that I'll bet you've never seen. Few Sundays from the early days have been reprinted at all. When I find a batch on eBay I always try to win them. This one is from 10-7-56, courtesy of my legal-size scanner...

It looks to me in this strip that Wiseman or Holley drew the people and that someone else drew the animals and backgrounds. Possibly Ketcham?

Bill, it's good to see you posting again. The picture on the magazine is drawn by the Sunday artist Ron Ferdinand. He's actually been working on the strip since the either late 1970s or early 1980s. The change in Dennis's look goes way back to when Ketcham was still doing the strip. Like you, most people prefer the Wiseman, followed by the Lee Holley and Ketcham, versions of Dennis. At his best, it was hard to tell Holley apart from Wiseman. I would put the two current artists, Marcus Hamilton (dailies) and Ron Ferdinand (Sundays) right after them. Their style was fashioned and developed under Ketcham's eye for years before he handed over the strip to them with his blessing. It's certainly a different style, somewhat looser, than the tight style Wiseman was known for, but certainly not a worse one, just a different one. Seeing all the artists from Ketcham to even Frank Hill and Owen Fitzgerald, each artist developed a different style and drew the strip in his own distinct way, and Ketcham was the one who pushed for the looser style in the last twenty-five years of the strip, so I would think artists were hired who followed the style Ketcham was pursuing (speculation on my part). Personally, when looking at the whole range of fifty something years of the strip, I think it works fine, and there have been some great comics in the last year. In fact, the strip seems to be as successful as it's been in decades. I will have to say I have a lot more respect for the current artists developing the strip in their own styles than I would have for them if they were trying to ape Ketcham and Wiseman, sort of like how Don Rosa developed his own great style on the duck books instead of aping Barks. I believe some recent panels were even shared here for a bit a few months back. Just doing a quick search I found this one - certainly a more "menacing" Dennis than a sugar-coated one:

This panel works on all kinds of levels and to me is as funny as anything I've seen for a while. A lot of it comes down to taste, and I'm not trying to change your mind cause you know I respect your opinion, but I just hope you still read the strip cause it STILL IS GOOD!!! I'm also just glad to see Dennis alive and well and going strong.

Allen, thanks for posting that magazine. I will definitely keep an eye out for it!

Just curious, anybody get the new book yet? I'm sure we'll get this thread hopping again once the new book hits. I've still got tons of stuff to post here and will get back into it soon...

Great post, Brian! Civil discussion among rational people really is the best way to approach whatever problems arise. Disagreements will always arise, but it's nice to not lose friendships that have been made here over the course of years just cause people can't see eye-to-eye over every issue. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I wish Doug the best and hope that he can move on from this.