Dennis the Menace

I don't normally do Unfunny Comic Strip of the Day on the weekends, but it seems a good time to educate you about the sordidness associated with Dennis the Menace.
In the late 1960s, Ketcham made an exception to his never-never-land rule. "Determined to join the parade led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.," he said, he introduced a black playmate for Dennis.

"I named him Jackson and designed him in the tradition of Little Black Sambo with huge lips, big white eyes, and just a suggestion of an Afro hairstyle," Ketcham wrote. "He was cute as a button, and in addition to being a marvelous graphic, he would reflect the refreshing, naive honesty of preschool children as yet unexposed to prejudice and rancor. It was a splendid opportunity to inject some humor into the extremely tense political climate. I urged my writers to give this priority and rolled up my sleeves with enthusiastic anticipation."

In the introductory cartoon, Dennis introduces Jackson to his mother, saying, "I’ve got a race problem with Jackson. He can run faster than me."

"A harmless little play on words," Ketcham thought. And so it was. But the uproar Jackson caused was not harmless. In St. Louis, rocks and bottles were thrown through the windows at the Post-Dispatch building. Delivery boys were assaulted in Little Rock. Newspaper editors in Miami were threatened.

Whenever you hear Republicans whining about how how everyone is too sensitive, and how they proudly consider themselves "Politically Incorrect," remember that they think "jokes" like this are funny. Racist asshole.

I did take perverse interest in this bio of Hank Ketcham's son, the real life Dennis the Menace:
Although Dennis may have been in storybooks, he did not lead a storybook life. As a boy, he had learning disabilities. His mother was an alcoholic, and his father's work schedule left little time for his son. In 1959, shortly after his mother filed for divorce, Dennis was sent to boarding school. A few months later Alice Ketcham died of an accidental drug overdose at the age of 41. Hank Ketcham remarried and moved Dennis to Switzerland. He had such a difficult time in Swiss boarding school that his father sent him to boarding school in America while he and his new wife remained in Europe.