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22 Comic-Book Kids (and One Who Wasn’t) Inspired by Hank Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace

To be clear, there were kids in the comics long before Dennis the Menace made his debut on March 12, 1951. The Peanuts gang came along in 1950, Marge Henderson’s Little Lulu first showed up in a 1935 issue of The Saturday Evening Post… heck, you can even go back to the 19th century’s Yellow Kid and Katzenjammer Kids if the topic of rambunctious comic-strip youngsters is on the table.

But Hank Ketcham’s strip about a troublesome but good-hearted kid (inspired by his own young son, Dennis, after his wife cried “Your son is a menace!” in a moment of exasperation) was a major hit right out of the gate, going from 16 newspapers in 1951 to 245 newspapers — carrying the strip to 30 million readers — just two years later (at the time of Ketcham’s death in 2001, that number was closer to 1,000 newspapers in 48 countries and 19 languages). Ketcham received the National Cartoonists Society’s prestigious Reuben Award for the strip in 1953, and over the years Dennis the Menace has inspired many TV shows, films, comic books, paperbacks, and pieces of merchandise.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Dennis should feel very flattered by all the sincerity that has been chucked his way. Not long after the strip debuted, comic publishers (always on the hunt for the next big trend) came out with a plethora of pint-sized punks to grab a piece of that market for “brat humor” for themselves. Some succeeded but most didn’t, and I have a theory as to why that was the case.

Dennis the Menace was a multimedia star, but he is first and foremost a star of the newspaper comic page. He was created by Ketcham, a parent, for the delight of other parents — of which there were many in those baby boom years. Small wonder he found a huge audience for his strip, given the number of new parents back then who could laugh at the antics of a young child who no doubt reminded them of their own little terrors at home.

Comic books, though, are not comic strips. In those days, comic books were seen as entertainment for children, which is why the anti-comics activists had an easy time playing to parental fears about what their kids were seeing in the industry’s crime and horror titles. And while a lot of parents back then could chuckle at Dennis’s antics in the family newspaper, they probably didn’t approve of their children reading about and possibly emulating other mischievous kids in their comics — especially those who didn’t arrive with a stamp of approval from a “respectable” media outlet like their local paper. This also helps explain how Dennis the Menace was able to maintain a near-continuous comic-book presence from 1953 to 1982 while so many of his would-be competitors failed to pass the double-digit mark with their own titles.

What did some of those other mini-sized menaces look like, you ask? Kind of like these kids here…

1. Pat the Brat (1955)
By the mid-1950s, Archie Comics was the undisputed heavyweight champion of teen humor comics (not that it stopped other companies from vying for the title), and so it’s a good bet no one was surprised when they tried their hand at stories starring slightly younger protagonists than the kids at Riverdale High. What was surprising was how brazenly similar to Dennis the Menace their own Pat the Brat turned out to be. Both were young boys with a preference for overalls, both were the only children of long-suffering parents (Oswald and Mary Smith, in Pat’s case), both were known as “[Name] the [rhyming word that’s a synonym for a bad kid]”… as if to drive the point home further, the covers for his first four issues in 1955 featured single-panel cartoons (much like the Dennis the Menace daily strips) with gags that could easily have been snatched from Ketcham’s doodle pad. Pat’s first four issues ran quarterly for about a year; the title then inexplicably jumped from #4 to #15 and carried on for another 19 issues until 1959. Credits for those early stories are hard to pin down, but Archie artists Bill Woggon and Bob Bolling are among the creative staff known to have put in time on Pat the Brat (time that Bolling, in particular, would use to hone his craft for a later, more successful kiddie comic). Since then, sightings of Pat the Brat have been sporadic; Archie released a Pat the Brat digest in 1980, and he’s been seen here and there whenever an Archie comic needs some filler material.

2. Pipsqueak (1959)
When Pat the Brat ended its run with issue #33, The Adventures of Pipsqueak picked up the baton with #34 and kept going (this was a common practice back in the day when postal regulations made it more cost-effective for comic publishers to continue the numbering of cancelled titles instead of create new No. 1 issues for new ones). Pipsqueak (if he goes by another name, I can’t find it) was a kid with a penchant for mischief and oversized hats; he was often seen with his dog, whose thoughts were frequently put on display for the reader (much like Charlie Brown’s Snoopy, who started sharing his thoughts in 1952; why swipe from one successful comic strip when you can swipe from two?). His stories stood out by having art resembling that of a daily newspaper strip more than the Archie house style, and it’s easy to imagine cartoonist Walt Lardner had dreams of going in that direction. Alas, it wasn’t to be; Pipsqueak lasted just six issues in his own book (1959-1960) before shuffling off to join Pat the Brat as filler material providers for other books in the Archie Comics machine.

3. Li’l Jinx (1956)
Though Archie’s L’il Jinx first appeared in an issue of Pep Comics four years before Dennis the Menace debuted, there’s no denying the impact his popularity had on her career. In that first story by Joe Edwards (who would go on to do the majority of Li’l Jinx strips), she was the fiercely tomboy daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Bubblegum and drawn in a manner reminiscent of a Tex Avery cartoon; by the time she got her own comic in 1956, she was de-aged by a few years, became the only child of Hap and Merry Holliday, and her strip’s art style was a little closer to Pat the Brat and other kiddie comics of the day. (One interesting tidbit: her father was presented as a comic fan, pulling out some old back issues in one story to show L’il Jinx. No surprise, he didn’t have much in the way of DCs or Marvels, but he was keen to share with her comics starring heroes from the MLJ/Archie Golden Age years.) Her first series ran bimonthly for six issues, after which she found herself popping up wherever an Archie comic needed a page or two of filler material. In 1971, the 11-issue Li’l Jinx Giant Laugh-Out series offered a mix of reprints and new stories before she went back to being a reliable supporting player in Archie’s line of digests. More recently, Archie has aged her and her friends up to their teen years, allowing Li’l Jinx — sorry, just Jinx now — to have adventures more in line with what most fans of Archie Comics have come to expect from the king of teen humor.

4. Little Archie (1956)
With all the effort that Archie Comics was putting into cornering the kiddie-comic market in the 1950s, the only real question behind the creation of Little Archie is why they didn’t get to it sooner. As the legend goes, Archie publisher John Goldwater was playing poker with some other publishers one night when they started kidding him about his company’s output. “Here we publish all types of comic books and you make an empire just out of Archie. All your books are Archie this or Archie that or Big Archie or Little Archie…” and that was all it took for Goldwater to add Little Archie to the line-up in 1956. Bob Bolling (who had been working on Pat the Brat) was tapped to do the strip, which saw Dennis-sized versions of the Archie gang (along with brand-new characters like Fangs Fogarty and Li’l Ambrose) bedevil younger versions of their parents and teachers (who were transferred to Riverdale Elementary School for the purpose of the strip). One significant difference between Little Archie and other comic-book kids was Bolling’s gradual introduction of adventure elements into the strip, with many of them involving fantastical elements like a pair of Martians, Abercrombie and Stitch (who returned, Great Gazoo-like, for regular visits with Little Archie), and Dr. Doom… no, the other Dr. Doom who, with his dimwitted nephew Chester, continually hatched wild mad-scientist schemes that only the plucky Little Archie could foil. I’d like to see Dennis try that.

5. Melvin the Monster/Peter the Little Pest (1956/1969)
On the night of his death (June 7, 1958), comic artist Joe Maneely had dined with his fellow laid-off Atlas colleagues in Manhattan before taking the commuter train home to New Jersey. At some point during the ride, he went outside to get some air between the cars and fell between them to his death. He was 32. His death was a tragedy for both his young family and his colleagues, and also for the many fans of his work in the Atlas line of war, humor, superhero, Western, horror, romance, crime, and science-fiction books. “He would have been another Jack Kirby,” Stan Lee once said about him. “He would have been the best you could imagine.” Maneely’s versatility was on full display in Melvin the Monster, a comic starring a young hellion whose crimes against humanity included walking in wet cement, putting bubbles in his father’s pipe, and using a wire brush to clean the family car. (Oh, and blowing up-slash-burning down the house when the mood suits him.) Where Dennis could have his moments of empathy or innocently cause trouble by not knowing the unspoken rules of society, Melvin really was a monster through and through, and his permanent scowl made it hard to sell him as a likable character. Marvel’s editors must have felt the same way; 12 years after his sixth and final issue, Melvin was brought back in Peter the Little Pest, a short-lived revival that saw him get a new name, hair color, and outlook on life thanks to someone retouching Maneely’s original art to make the former Melvin appear less scowly.

6. Little Zelda (1956)
At least Melvin the Monster’s wanton destruction and hooliganism occasionally does some good, like the time he went to a museum and accidentally captured a famous thief while he was stuck inside a suit of armor. Little Zelda is just plain unpleasant. Whether it’s the grocery store workers who yell “Battle stations!” as soon as she arrives, the put-upon piano teacher who’s physically assaulted while trying to teach her, or the neighborhood kids she terrifies with her love of weaponry, it’s hard to find anyone who has a nice thing to say about this little terror. What made her even more exasperating was her tendency to take everything literally, like in this story where her father’s directive to lower the flame on the stove is heard by Zelda as “lower yourself down to the floor,” or the time when she interpreted “march upstairs to the sink” as just that and stands in the bathroom waiting for her hands to magically become clean. (Speaking as a parent, I can confirm this kind of literal compliance is one of the most efficient methods that kids have for driving us insane.) Another creation credited to Stan Lee and Joe Maneely, Little Zelda appeared in back-up strips during Melvin the Monster’s six-issue run; she wasn’t invited back when Melvin became Pete for his revival series. I have a few guesses as to why.

7. Willie the Wise-Guy (1957)
So which is it, guys? We’ve got Willie the Wise-Guy front and center on the cover but Willie the Wiseguy up in the corner. Regardless of what kind of wiseguy, wise-guy, or wise guy he was, Willie only got the one issue to strut his stuff before it was cancelled and his remaining adventures hustled over to Cartoon Kids, a comic that brought together strips starring Melvin, Zelda, and Willie and… also only saw the one issue go out. This likely had less to do with the marketability of Marvel’s kiddie comics at the time and more about the demise of the company’s distributor, forcing Marvel to abide by the constraints imposed on it by its new distributor, Independent News — a wholly owned subsidiary of National Periodical Publications (AKA the future DC Comics). In his first story (credited to Stan Lee and Fred Kida), a very confident Willie Woople introduces himself to the neighborhood kids (“no applause, please… it only embarrasses me”), makes fun of the fat kid in the group, and offers to buy the gang a soda (but just the one, which they share with five straws). Unlike the more combative Melvin or Zelda, his brand of brattiness was more about displaying excessive self-confidence and putting one over on everyone else — that is, when he wasn’t fainting from a groaner punchline as only a kid in a substandard comic would.

8. Dexter the Demon (1957)
Here’s how I think it went in the offices of Atlas Comics back in the day. “Well, this Melvin the Monster comic didn’t sell as well as we hoped. What do you think went wrong? Maybe we made our obvious Dennis the Menace knock-off a little too mean?” “Nah, that can’t be it. Slap a new name on him and let’s see if that makes a difference.” And so was born Dexter the Demon, a single issue that was a continuation of Melvin the Monster right down to the same type of single-panel gags and a Little Zelda back-up story. I really can’t say for sure why Lee and company did the title change for what would have been Melvin’s seventh and final issue, but I enjoy the irony of rebranding a book starring a kid who’s so incorrigible that changing his name and going into witness protection wouldn’t be out of the question for his future adult self. Something else I like is how in one story Dexter gets into a fight with beanie-wearing kid named Butch who looks a lot like the Butch that Zelda tussles with in one of her stories from an issue of Melvin the Monster, opening up the possibility of a shared cinematic universe starring all of Marvel’s kiddie-comic stars. And now I’m thinking if someone ever uses Melvin, Willie, and Zelda as Easter eggs in a future MCU film I just might pinch myself.

9-10. Sugar and Spike (1956)
While still in his teens, Sheldon Mayer started working for National Allied Publications (Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson’s initial company, later known as DC Comics) shortly after it was founded in 1935, becoming one of the first contributors of original material to comic books. Two decades later, the industry legend and humor comics mainstay was asked to come up with a comic to help DC get in on the kiddie humor craze sparked by the success of Dennis the Menace; his Sugar and Spike was the result. As Toonopedia’s Don Markstein put it: “Mayer said he got his inspiration for the two toddlers the same way Hank Ketcham got his for Dennis — by watching real-life kids. In Mayer’s case, it was old home movies of his own children. One thing that struck him — and that strikes many people who watch pre-verbal youngsters — was that when they babbled at each other, it looked for all the world like they were communicating. In Sugar & Spike, they were communicating — but in a language known only to babies.” In the comics, this language was represented as consonant-laden gibberish whenever adults were listening to the pair, but as perfect English when Sugar Plumm and Cecil “Spike” Wilson talked to each other (even as their speech reflected their toddler perspective, calling a playpen “the pokey” and such).  The long-running series (1956-1971) only stopped because Mayer’s health problems made it difficult for him to keep drawing the strip, and he had an agreement with DC that he would be the only one ever to write and draw those characters. Later DC writers and artists have still found ways to honor his work, though, including a 2016 update that re-imagined the duo as adults who worked as private investigators handling problems and mysteries that the superheroes can’t handle themselves.

11. The Brain (1956)
First coined sometime in the early 1900s, the term “egghead” originally referred to a bald person, but by the early 1950s it had morphed into an unkind description for an intellectual type who was deemed out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people, or who lacked any common sense or practicality because of their academic pursuits. Reading issues of Dan DeCarlo’s The Brain, you can see how he decided to go with an egg-shaped head for young Benjamin Bang; though he’s a bright lad, a lot of his “brainstorms” don’t turn out well for his parents or anyone else who happens to be nearby (like the time he figured he could clean the top of his mother’s china cabinet faster if he used a pogo stick). On the other hand, his Rube Goldberg-like devices to help him wake up or pull the bath plug never fail to entertain (plus kids were invited to write in with their own “brainstorms” for new inventions). First published by Magazine Enterprises in 1956, The Brain rain for seven issues until 1958, at which point I.W. Publishing picked up the title and published nine issues of reprints between 1958 and 1963. Art for most stories was by Dan DeCarlo, which explains why the Brain would look right at home in Riverdale giving Dilton Doiley a run for his money.

12. Pete the Panic (1955)
In the short time (1951-1956) that Stanley Morse’s Key Publications was in business, it published comics under the imprints Aragon Magazines, Gillmor Magazines, Medal Comics, Media Publications, S.P.M. Publications, Stanmor Publications, and Timor Publications. Why so many names? His titles often changed publishers from one issue to the next as he dodged creditors or changed partners, which also helps explain the number of mailing addresses that appeared in his books. One of the company’s bigger hits was Mister Mystery, a pre-Code horror book featuring early art by the likes of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, but Morse was amenable to anything that sold: crime, war, romance, Westerns, funny animals, you name it. Closer to the Peter Cottontail and Animal Adventures side of the company’s line-up was Pete the Panic, a one-issue series published by Stanmor in the summer of 1955. Created by artist Leon Winik (who signed his work “Win”), who also worked on Archie’s Pat the Brat and Billy the Kid for Toby Press, there’s very little that distinguishes Pete from the rest of the 1950s Brat Pack, unless you count his penchant for jokes that were corny even back then (in one strip, he wins a bet by showing how he can jump higher than the Empire State Building… and you already know where this is going). After just the one issue, Pete the Panic disappeared the same way Morse did whenever he heard someone was looking for their money: without a trace.

13. Li’l Menace (1958)
Oh, come on now. At least try to hide your intention to swipe from someone else, Fago Magazines! Not that Li’l Menace was the first time Al Fago tried his hand at the time-honored craft of filing the serial numbers off of someone else’s idea; he also came up with Timmy the Timid Ghost, a ghost who sported the letter T on his chest and therefore was nothing like a certain other friendly apparition, and Li’l Ghost, the specter of a dead child so generic he couldn’t even be bothered with having a descriptive adjective other than “Li’l.” Distinguished by his comically undersize bowler hat and working-class dialect (“He doesn’t reckenize his friend!”), Li’l Menace fell more on the “boisterous but well-meaning” side of the brat spectrum, but that was all that was needed for everyone around him to call him a menace to his face. (My favorite story of his starts with his own dad saying, “What’s the matter with our Li’l Menace lately?” When his wife says their child is brooding because everyone calls him Li’l Menace, the dad says “Did you explain to him that it’s just a nickname? That it’s all in fun?” I’m starting to think the problem here isn’t with the kid being bratty, Dad.) Total output: just three issues, plus a few back-up strips in Li’l Ghost. It was probably the best a little menace could hope for.

14. Little Angel (1954)
Speaking of terrible parenting. In the first issue of Standard Comics’ Little Angel (which happens to be issue #5; I’m guessing the first four issues starred someone else), Little Angel’s ranting father threatens to have her thrown in jail for pretending she’s a steamroller on a neighbor’s flower garden. That kind of talk doesn’t impress Officer Flanagan, who happens to be riding by at the time, and he upbraids Mr. Higgins for using the police as a threat (“You gotta teach kids that cops are their friends!”). He’s singing a different tune after an offer to take Little Angel for a ride doesn’t go exactly as planned because holy crap how did this kid get hold of the officer’s gun so fast??? Fun fact: the ensuing killing spree by this young girl single-handedly brought the Comics Code Authority into existence, and all her follow-up issues were forced to display the CCA seal. (No, that’s not really true… though the issue shown above, her first ever, is one of the last pre-Code comics to appear before the CCA took effect.) The artist behind Little Angel was Bill Williams, who bounced between Dell (Henry Aldrich, Kookie, Dunc and Loo), Charlton (Popeye, Speed Buggy, Teen-Age Love), and other publishers in the 1950s and ’60s; he also did work for Marvel’s Millie the Model in the late ’60s.

15. Super Brat (1954) / Li’l Genius (1955)
“What if Dennis the Menace had super powers?” That’s it, that’s the whole sales pitch. Debuting in 1954, Harry Betancourt’s Super Brat was Ollie Orwell, your typical rambunctious eight-year-old who lived in “a peaceful little house in a peaceful American suburb” when one day, while banished to the attic for bratty behavior, he found a filthy, worn-out old cape that conferred super powers upon its wearer. Where did it come from? How did it end up in his parents’ house? Why was it child-sized for maximum plot convenience? These questions did not bother little Ollie one bit, as the instantly muscular child rushed to test whether he was bulletproof with his air rifle (he was) and to see if he could fly (he could but decided he had to watch out for telephone wires next time). Resisting the urge to fight crime or any of that other do-gooder stuff, Super Brat instead plays pranks and occasionally does secret good deeds for his parents that don’t always have the desired effect, but everything works out fine in the end. Super Brat ran for four issues, after which Toby Press (where Betancourt did the majority of his cartooning) got out of the comics business and the character was picked up by Charlton Comics. Curiously, while Charlton continued the issue numbering from the Super Brat series, it renamed the book L’il Genius, even though he was still referred to as Super Brat inside; even more curious is how a few issues later Ollie seemed to forget he ever had super powers and the book became yet another comic starring a hyperactive kid who drove his parents to drink. (Not that they could show that what with the Comics Code in force, but still. You could tell.) Charlton continued to publish L’il Genius for the next decade with the help of regular artists like Frank Johnson and Jon D’Agostino; the final issue was #63 (October 1965). Why didn’t Charlton keep this brat super? If I had to guess, they were probably more interested in having a knock-off Dennis the Menace of their own than a kid superhero at a time when there was less of a market for that sort of thing. No doubt the “genius” part was a salute to whichever lawyer kept Charlton from getting sued.

16. Li’l Tomboy (1956)
From 2020’s Funny Girls: Guffaws, Guts, and Gender in Classic American Comics by Michelle Ann Abate: “Released by Charlton Comics from 1956 through 1960, [Li’l Tomboy] did far more than simply challenge traditional female gender roles in the 1950s; it also challenged the newly established Comics Code. In numerous issues, the title character engages in behaviors that could easily be regarded as delinquent: she commits petty theft, intentionally destroys private property, and sasses adult authority figures, including police officers. Moreover, Li’l Tomboy engages in these activities not simply under the watchful eye of the Comics Code Authority, but, astoundingly, with their official seal of approval. During a time when the censors employed by the Authority office were at their most powerful and restrictive, Li’l Tomboy engaged in antics that far exceeded those that had been forbidden in other publications.” Sounds like my kind of gal. Created by Frank Johnson, who also worked on Li’l Menace and Li’l Genius (as well as several newspaper strips), Li’l Tomboy continued the numbering from Charlton’s Funny Animals to run for a respectable 16 issues, not counting her team-up with Li’l Genius in the 13-issue Li’l Rascal Twins.

17. Angel (1955)
You know how some really large guys have the ironic nickname “Tiny,” or how some pet owners get a kick out of calling their toy poodles “Killer”? Yeah, it’s like that. Mel Casson’s Angel ran as a newspaper panel for 13 years from 1953 to 1966; a typical newspaper gag saw her standing over a broken vase while the arms of her clearly exasperated mother reach for her from off panel: “Oh oh, my intuition tells me the jig’s up!” Like other newspaper comic stars of the time, she got a chance to strut her stuff in a comic published by Dell, which was the king of licensed comics in the 1950s. After a tryout in Dell’s Four Color Comics (#576) in 1954, she received her own ongoing series (starting with #2 as the tryout issue was considered her #1) in 1955; it ran for 15 issues with the last one appearing in 1959. What’s interesting about Angel is how angelic her cover appearances made her out to be, with images of her knitting tiny clothes for forest animals or playing dress-up with her mother’s jewelry, while the stories inside showed her taking cookies without permission, kicking another kid in the butt to protect her picnic basket of sandwiches, and breaking her parents’ water main with a pick-axe while digging to make a well. Dell always traded on its wholesome reputation to stay ahead of the anti-comics parents on the 1950s; it’s not impossible that some editor decided to keep Angel’s less angelic side off the covers and inside the comic books to play it safe.

18. Beanie the Meanie (1959)
Beanie the Meanie fascinates me. The kid is clearly a comic-book knock-off of Dennis the Menace and he lasted for all of one issue before Fago Magazines (a fly-by-night outfit that put out a grand total of 10 issues across five titles) pulled the plug, and those are literally the only facts I can find online about it. I have so many questions. Is Beanie his real name? Why is he called a meanie when his boisterous but generally good-natured behavior doesn’t seem to warrant it? Why did he last for just one issue? Why was that one issue numbered #3? What’s the deal with his eyebrows? Why does his dog look so happy to be entombed alive? Did Al Fago see Beanie as perhaps his ticket to something bigger, or was he always destined to be a one-issue wonder? Do you think he got the nickname “Meanie” because it looks like “Menace” if you squint a certain way? Were young children in the 1950s often left to their own devices around docks, construction sites, and other unsafe places, as Beanie is shown in his stories? Why don’t we see any other children in his stories? Did Beanie eliminate his competition to solidify his power? (I didn’t say they were all good questions.)

19. Little Eva
“Do turkeys have beard stubble?” Now there’s a Google search that’s going to haunt me someday. The New York City-based St. John Publishing Company did a tidy business publishing a mix of original (Atom-Age Combat, Authentic Police Cases, Teen-Age Romances) and licensed titles (Heckle and Jeckle, Abbott and Costello Comics). When Harvey Comics won the right to publish books based on Paramount Pictures’ Famous Studio cartoons, it meant that St. John had to stop printing comics starring Casper the Friendly Ghost and Little Audrey; it’s easy to see Little Eva as St. John’s attempt to fill the void left by Little Audrey’s departure. From the internets: “While basically good-natured and innocent, Eva isn’t above scamming other children for their pocket money or playing pranks on disapproving adults. Occasionally, her hi-jinks backfire completely, landing her in trouble with her long-suffering parents and other authority figures. Despite sometimes ending up with ‘egg on her face,’ Eva is utterly irrepressible, usually bouncing back from each pratfall with twice as much enthusiasm as before.” Known accomplices include Clarence, a young inventor whose get-rich-quick schemes often end in disaster, and Puddy, a local stray dog that Eva takes in. As Dennis clones go, Little Eva had a fairly successful career, with 31 issues of her own book from 1952 to 1956, plus two issues of Little Eva 3-D when 3-D films and comics were all the rage. In 1957, there were two issues of Eva the Imp published by Decker, a fly-by-night publisher of kiddie comics that put out 12 issues across 8 titles; I couldn’t say for sure if those reprints were authorized, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Oh! Because “Eva” sounds like “evil.” Now I get it!

20. Little Ike (1953)
Another St. John property, Little Ike started out as Little Joe before he changed his name for his second issue. Why the change? Beats me, but I’m almost positive it had something to do with the popularity of President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower back then. Another obscure character about whom it’s hard to find much information, Little Ike enjoyed all of four issues to strut his stuff, not counting the occasional side gig as a backup strip character in other St. John titles like Little Eva and Fritzi Ritz. While his bushy blond hair and adorable green beanie might suggest a little cherub, the evidence suggests otherwise; witness, for example, the story in which he gets back at a school bully by tricking him into tying himself to a speeding delivery van holy crap kid — and suddenly that whole Comics Code Authority thing makes a lot more sense.

21. Calvin (1970)
The early 1970s were turbulent times for Marvel. Even though it pulled ahead of rival DC Comics in 1972 in terms of sales numbers, a combination of market and economic factors hit all comic publishers during that time, with Marvel and DC in particular experimenting with pricing and format changes — as sure a sign as any that the business model was due for a change. This was also a time when Marvel branched out from its mainly superhero output of the previous decade to appeal to fans of horror, science fiction, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, and anything else that might grab readers’ attention. Into this let’s-see-what-sticks era of experimentation came books like Peter the Little Pest (see above) and Li’l Kids, a 1970 series that featured reprints of Timely/Atlas’s kids’ strips from the 1940s and ’50s — with one exception. The tenth issue introduced Calvin, a young African-American boy and budding football player with a large Afro who lived in an unspecified hometown with his friends Darrell, Terrie, Boo-Boo and Fat Fillmore. Created by artist Kevin Banks, Calvin and his friends had typical adventures in between some true groaners of strips (“Hi, Calvin! Why are your eyes closed?” “I keep seeing purple spots.” “Have you seen a doctor?” “No, just purple spots.”). While it seemed as if Marvel had high hopes for Calvin at a time when publisher was making an effort to reach out to Black readers, he appeared in all of three issues of Li’l Kids before the title was cancelled with issue #12 and hasn’t been seen since.

22. Bart Simpson (1987)
“But who’d want to hurt me? I’m this century’s Dennis the Menace!” Always nice to see a character pay proper respect to the reason why they exist. As Simpsons creator Matt Groening put it in an essay that appeared in a 1996 issue of Bongo Comics’ The Simpsons, on the night of Oct. 4, 1959, he was a “twitchy, quivering five-year-old” excitedly waiting for the premiere of Dennis the Menace, a sitcom based on the comic strip character. Finally, he thought, a show about a kid he could relate to. A kid with a slingshot! Who sassed back to grown-ups! And didn’t do his chores! The animated opening credits promised as much, with a whirling tornado causing destruction wherever it went, but then… “But then the story started, and with it the came big letdown.” This TV Dennis was a far cry from the delinquent in the strip, thought Groening, at best being “mildly vexing to adults, mainly because he talked a little too loud.” He never forgot that feeling of disappointment, and when he got the chance to create his own cartoon for TV many years later he came back to that moment filed away in his brain: “Hmm, I pondered… Tornado-boy… naughty punk… spiked hair… slingshot… here comes trouble… a brat… a brat who’s actually a brat… I think I’ll call him… transpose a couple letters… and voila! Bart!” As Chief Wiggum might say, that story checks out. Bake him away, toys! (“What’d you say, chief?” “Do what the kid says.”)

-1. Dennis the Menace (UK) (1951)
And now for a comic-strip kid who definitely wasn’t inspired by Dennis the Menace, despite sharing the exact same name. In one of the wilder coincidences in comic history, both characters debuted on the exact same day (March 12, 1951), with Ketcham’s Dennis appearing in 16 U.S. newspapers and the British Dennis appearing in the comic magazine The Beano (to avoid confusion, both strips undergo a name change when they appear in each other’s domestic markets). Always dressed in his distinctive red-and-black striped jumper (or “sweater” if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic) and accompanied by his faithful canine Gnasher, spiky-haired Dennis — “the world’s wildest boy” — was the star of the first of the “naughty kids” strips (The Bash Street Kids, Minnie the Minx, Beryl the Peril, Roger the Dodger) that revitalized British comics in the 1950s. He remains the longest-running strip in The Beano and one of the most popular British comic book characters, with numerous shout-outs in British pop culture a testament to his enduring popularity (for instance, in 2020 the Alan Moore/Mick Jenkins film The Show featured a protagonist named Fletcher Dennis who wears the character’s iconic red-and-black striped sweatshirt and wields a slingshot as a weapon; UK audiences easily made the connection). In 2009, the strip’s creators kicked up some controversy by redesigning Dennis as more naively troublesome than intentionally so; citing concerns about children imitating his antics, the artists also had him give up his signature slingshot while Gnasher was forbidden to bite people. The changes were roundly criticized with even the daughters of original Dennis the Menace artist David Law saying their father would be horrified with the “bland” and “ordinary” redesign — which, as it turned out, lasted only a year before Dennis reverted to his impish ways. Some days, you just can’t keep a bad kid down.