Career
Ketcham started in the business as an animator for Walter Lantz and eventually Walt Disney, where he worked on Fantasia, Bambi and Pinocchio. During World War II, Ketcham was a photographic specialist with the US Navy Reserve. Also while in the Navy he began a camp newspaper strip, Half Hitch, which ran in The Saturday Evening Post beginning in 1943.
After World War II, he settled in Carmel, California, and began work as a freelance cartoonist. In 1951, he started Dennis The Menace, based on his own four-year-old son Dennis Ketcham. Ketcham was in his studio in October 1950, when his first wife, Alice Mahar, burst into the studio and complained that their four-year-old, Dennis, had wrecked his bedroom instead of napping. "Your son is a menace," she shouted. Within five months, 16 newspapers began carrying the adventures of the impish but innocent "Dennis the Menace." By May 1953, 193 newspapers in the United States and 52 abroad were carrying the strip to 30 million readers.
He made his first journey abroad, for an exchange of cartoons, to the Soviet Union in 1959. Learning of this trip, the Central Intelligence Agency enlisted him to draw anything that could be of use to the United States during those cold war days. If he saw something he would draw it in his sketch book, and if the flight attendant would happen to walk by, he would draw a big nose and eyes to disguise the sketch into a funny face. According to his recollection, this resulted in a sketchbook full of funny faces and undecipherable sketches.
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