Dennis the Menace

Dennis the Menace, American comic strip character, a five-and-a-half-year-old boy whose curiosity continually gets him in trouble.

Dennis Mitchell, nicknamed Dennis the Menace, has messy blond hair with a characteristic cowlick in the back. He was initially depicted as a defiant child who deliberately sought out mischief, but over the years his personality softened considerably. He does not mean any real harm, yet he cannot help creating a racket or a mess at home, making a scene in public, and driving his parents, Alice and Henry Mitchell, to distraction.

The most frequent target of Dennis’s mischief is George Wilson, an older neighbour whom Dennis seldom allows a moment of peace, having adopted him as a surrogate grandfather. Wilson’s wife, Martha, obligingly behaves like an indulgent grandmother. Among the minor characters in the strip are Dennis’s shaggy dog, Ruff, and his toddler sidekick, Joey McDonald. Dennis’s nemesis is the slightly older and gratingly superior Margaret Wade, and he harbours a secret crush on the tomboyish Gina Gillotti.

Cartoonist Hank Ketcham (1920–2001) created Dennis the Menace as a daily comic panel in 1951; by the end of the decade, it was syndicated in more than 1,000 newspapers. Ketcham received the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 1952. A live-action situation comedy starring Jay North as Dennis ran on television from 1959 to 1963, followed over the years by a number of animated specials and series and a 1993 live-action movie featuring Walter Matthau and Joan Plowright as the Wilsons. After Ketcham’s death, the daily panel and Sunday strip were carried on by his assistants, Marcus Hamilton and Ron Ferdinand, to whom he had turned over the cartoon’s creation in 1994.