Happy Birthday Hank Ketcham, creator of Dennis the Menace, born on this date in 1920! Of course I’m thrilled by the reprinting of the complete Dennis the Menace that Fantagraphics is doing. The first volume of the 1951-1952 panels is a stunner and we’ll see that Ketchum gets better and better as the years progress. We based the look the Dark Horse statue we sculpted for the Classic Comics Character Series on the late 1950’s period, my personal fave time for Dennis (when I, like Patrick McDonnell’s experience related in his intro, was getting the paperbacks in my Christmas stocking).

But today I want to share some illustrations from the much less common book I Wanna Go Home which was a 1965 travelogue by Ketcham when he took his first trip outside of the U.S. The cartoonist took his sketchbook to Prague to Paris and Moscow, Denmark, Vienna and beyond and recorded his impressions in text and pics. Click on the cover below for a slide show.

(click for a slideshow of selected images from this book)

(click for a closer look)