{"id":2507,"date":"2020-09-28T11:45:41","date_gmt":"2020-09-28T15:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/?p=2507"},"modified":"2020-09-28T11:45:41","modified_gmt":"2020-09-28T15:45:41","slug":"charlottes-creators-of-comic-strips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/blog\/2020\/09\/28\/charlottes-creators-of-comic-strips\/","title":{"rendered":"Charlotte\u2019s Creators of Comic Strips"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My love of comic strips goes back to my early childhood.\u00a0 When I was a boy, my father read aloud to my siblings and me.\u00a0 In addition to reading books aloud, he regularly read the Sunday comics to us.\u00a0 We always called them the \u201cfunnies.\u201d\u00a0 Every Sunday morning, before our mother got up, one of us would hand Dad the comics sections from our local newspaper, and he would start reading. \u00a0One Sunday, when I was around seven or eight, I decided to play a trick on him.\u00a0 I dug through the stack of old newspapers next to the fireplace, found the comics from the previous Sunday, and slipped them inside the current week\u2019s comics.\u00a0 Then, after Dad woke up, I handed him a double dose of comics to read aloud.\u00a0 He began by reading Dennis the Menace, <\/em>and then he turned the page and found another Dennis the Menace.\u00a0 <\/em>To my glee, he also read the second one.\u00a0 He went on to read both weeks\u2019 worth of every comic strip, never letting on that something was not quite right.\u00a0 Needless to say, I reveled in my own Dennis-the-Menace moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still regularly read Dennis the Menace <\/em>although nowadays I tend to identify more with the character of Mr. Wilson.  Given my long history with Dennis the Menace, <\/em>I was pleased to learn that one of the current creators of this comic strip is from the Charlotte area.  His name is Marcus Hamilton, and he has been creating the daily Dennis the Menace <\/em>comic strip since 1995. <\/em> Hamilton, however, is not the only creator of comic strips with Charlotte connections.  Charlotte can also claim Jim Scancarelli, the current writer and illustrator of Gasoline Alley<\/em>, and the late Doug Marlette, the writer and illustrator of Kudzu.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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photo by Chris Edwards<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Marcus Hamilton did not create the character of Dennis the Menace.\u00a0 That honor goes to Hank Ketcham, who started the Dennis the Menace <\/em>comic strip in 1951 and continued to write and illustrate it until the mid-1990s.\u00a0 When Ketcham began making plans to retire in 1993, he set out to find someone who could keep his comic strip going.\u00a0 Hamilton, a Charlotte-based illustrator, heard that Ketcham was looking for a successor, and the opportunity appealed to him.\u00a0 He contacted Ketcham, who was living in California at the time, and applied for the position.\u00a0 Ketcham liked Hamilton\u2019s style of illustration, so he flew Hamilton to California, and they spent three days working together on the comic strip.\u00a0 Hamilton later said, \u201cI learned more in those three days than I did in four years at college.\u201d\u00a0 Hamilton has been illustrating the daily panels of Dennis the Menace <\/em>ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jim Scancarelli, like Hamilton, worked as a freelance illustrator in Charlotte for years before entering the world of comic strips.\u00a0 In fact, both of them worked as artists for WBTV (Charlotte\u2019s CBS-affiliated television station) in the 1960s.\u00a0 Also like Hamilton, Scancarelli ended up taking over an existing comic strip. Gasoline Alley, <\/em>the comic strip that Scancarelli now writes and illustrates, debuted in 1918, making it the longest-running current comic strip in the United States.\u00a0 Frank King originated the strip and continued to produce it until the mid-1950s.\u00a0 King created a large cast of colorful characters who live in the fictional town of Gasoline Alley.\u00a0 In 1956, Dick Moores stepped in as the writer\/illustrator of the strip, and in 1979 Moores hired Scancarelli as his assistant.\u00a0 When Moores died in 1986, Scancarelli took over Gasoline Alley<\/em>.\u00a0 In commenting on this transition, Scancarelli recently said, \u201cWhen I came along, I put my own personality into it.\u00a0 The art is a little different.\u00a0 Dick had a certain way of doing the expressions, and I\u2019ve kept the characters in character but put my own swing to them.\u00a0 Now it\u2019s more fun because I don\u2019t have to sit there and emulate him as much as I did in the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For Doug Marlette, the creation of his comic strip Kudzu <\/em>was tied to his career as an editorial cartoonist.  Marlette worked as the cartoonist for The Charlotte Observer <\/em>from 1972 to 1987, and he launched Kudzu <\/em>during this time in his career.  Kudzu<\/em> ran from 1981 until 2007 when Marlette died in a car accident.  At its peak in popularity, the strip was syndicated in 300 newspapers nationwide.  Kudzu <\/em>is set in the fictional town of Bypass, North Carolina, and much of the humor relates to the tensions between the traditional South and the New South.  Although Kudzu <\/em>is no longer published in newspapers, there are several collections of the strips that are still available, including Gone with the Kudzu.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marcus Hamilton, Jim Scancarelli, and Doug Marlette are all major players in the world of comic strips.  It takes a special talent to be able to tell a story in just a few panels, and these three cartoonists excel at telling stories in this compressed format.  Their artistry, wit, and insights into human nature are reflected in their comic strips.  As I see it, their comic strips are delightful contributions to Storied Charlotte.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My love of comic strips goes back to my early childhood.\u00a0 When I was a boy, my father read aloud to my siblings and me.\u00a0 In addition to reading books aloud, he regularly read the Sunday comics to us.\u00a0 We always called them the \u201cfunnies.\u201d\u00a0 Every Sunday morning, before our mother got up, one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[134,133],"class_list":["post-2507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storied-charlotte","tag-comic-strips","tag-sunday-comics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2507"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2507\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2521,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2507\/revisions\/2521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}