Dennis the Menace vol. 5 and Searle in the Sixties

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, reviews of Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis the Menace 1959-1960 (volume five) (Fantagraphics, 2009) and Searle in the Sixties (Penguin, 1964).



A couple of weeks back, I was mentioning how Monkey Punch's linework on Lupin III in the sixties evoked both Hank Ketcham and Ronald Searle to me. And here are a couple of books from these two. Fantagraphics has been releasing Dennis the Menace in two-year volumes for a while now, and I said when they started, after having my mind blown by how remarkable the earliest stuff with this character was, that I doubted it would be worth following beyond the fifth book. Well, the fifth book is here, and I was mistaken. I should have stopped at four.

True, I laughed three or four times reading this, and there are certainly places where Ketcham kicks his reliably beautiful inking into overdrive and pulls out some eyepoppingly amazing work. I stared at a panel of Dennis and his dad fishing by a gnarled old tree for at least five minutes, marvelling at how gorgeous Ketcham made that scene look. But I also turned past several pages with my eyes rolled, not popped, as Dennis says his bedtime prayers and tells Mrs. Wilson how comfy her lap is. Dennis may have started his career so remarkably menacing that he'd have driven that British kid of the same name running in terror, but five books in and this little scamp is more Walter the Softy, to be blunt. Recommended for cartoonists and artists, and nobody else.



Ever since I read the complete St. Trinian's book (your Hipster Dad's Best Book of 2008), I've been keeping an eye out for old editions of Ronald Searle's work, and found this lovely Penguin paperback at the Book Eddy in Knoxville. This is one of my very favorite bookstores, and I'm already looking forward to stopping back by sometime in July. Searle in the Sixties is a collection of illustrations he'd done over a four-year period for magazines ranging from Punch to Sports Illustrated, ranging from bizarre caricatures to travelogues of everywhere from Las Vegas to Paris to Sanibel Island, of all places.

Searle's love of lines is evident in every picture, and I adore how his focus finds the most comical element of any situation and draws attention to it. A drawing inside a burlesque show is not about the topless cutie on the stage, but the table of old codgers with their noses in the air looking at her. The material from European travelogues and portraits is perhaps even more interesting. Even if I don't know who some of the players are, I really get the impression that Searle has illustrated the Swinging London of Ready, Steady, Go! and That Was The Week That Was better than anybody else.

This book is long out of print, and according to the back cover was never available in the US "for copyright reasons," but you can pick up a copy from used book dealers by clicking the picture above. If you like art or you like the sixties, I recommend you do so!

Chaos Edition with the Girls of St. Trinian's and Nemesis the Warlock

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



No, wait, forget what I said about America. Right here, this is the reprint book of the year, the book to beat. It completely surpassed my expectations, giving 176 pages of Ronald Searle's gleefully demented, mean-spirited drawings of little hellions murdering each other and passing out drunk. And only a few appear to be teenagers like in the films and the book's cover (she is a recurring character called Angela Menace), for the most part, the gags center around little kids who've transformed the school gym into a torture dungeon, take baths in the Trevi Fountain and catch fairies on flypaper. St. Trinian's was never a recurring strip or panel, and there are probably far fewer of them than readers might think; like Charles Addams' single-panel comics, they would appear as sidebar illustrations in magazines and occasionally readers might recognize some recurring characters or places in them. It's very like The Addams Family, in fact, only done with even more gusto and eye-popping shock. Highly, highly recommended... especially if you're that family of Mike Huckabee supporters across the street from me or that bunch that's afraid of Doctor Who behind me, because you're needing this badly.



In three large books, Rebellion has compiled the entire run of Pat Mills' Nemesis the Warlock. This last volume includes three long-form stories with art by David Roach, John Hicklenton and Henry Flint, along with supplemental art by several others, including Kevin O'Neill, who was working on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in late 1999 and was pulled away for the series' final episode, and Chris Weston, who contributes a fascinatingly ugly color story about the evil Torquemada's long-suffering wife Candida. This is all great stuff, free from the confusing "time loop" business that made the second book a bit of a head-scratcher, and Rebellion did an excellent job restoring the several color pages and reprinting them along with the black-and-white stuff. It must have been a production nightmare to put this volume together! Nemesis has aged very well, and depicts a "hero" whose contempt for his enemy isn't much like anything else in comics, and I certainly can't name two opponents who are each guilty of murdering the others' children. On the other hand, you don't often get the sense that Torquemada has the upper hand, but underestimating his power, and his hold over the bigotted, hateful, stupid human race depicted here is a mistake that Nemesis makes a time or two. Highly recommended.

(Originally posted April 28, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)