The Dennis the Menace article in The Beano and Dandy Collector's club news sheet said the best era was 1952-1955.
The fan of Dennis said he found the later ones became stiffen...less interesting..compositiion of the frames became bleak with empty landscapes...less background detail. Law's drawing began to deteriorate..his line so clean became scribbled. The advent of Dennis back on the cover after Jonah brought colour and tended to mute the imperfections of the drawing and gave the characters a new lease of life.
I actually like his later work more bacause its loose...free...I like his longness of the characters and simple backgrounds...
His big pictures in the annuals are wonderful and much better expressivly...
More action and fun...
So I prefer 1955-1969...
I think it's the early years - through the Fifties. I grew up reading the first Dennis Annuals which my older brother had got from somewhere, which collected end to end the strips from the Fifties and they're terrific, especially some of the full-page sets from 1953 and 1954. I think that's the peak period.
I don't think the later years with those elongated characters and the simpler look are as good. I do still like a lot of them though; it was still such a distinctive style and a lot of fun.
I agree with Raven, I loved Davey Laws amazing early work best, although I wasn't around when he drew like that (or at least I wasn't aware of him then) - I remember as a kid (reading his more elongated artwork and stories in the Beano) being given an early Dennis annual with his early work- amazing tracvked down a couple of really early Bertyl the Peril strips in that style the looked fantastic as well - very talanted cartoonist no matter what - always found "Corporal Clott" a strange but facinating children strip
I'm afraid I'll have to agree with Peter on this; Law just seemed to get better and better. This detail from a mid-sixties Dandy Annual double-page splash features one of the best-drawn comic tigers I've ever seen IMHO!
I'm unusual in my choice inasmuch I prefer the latter LAW work: the scripts were also often outrageous and vividly memorable in the '66-'69 period: ie the one in which DENNIS adds colour paint into his family b/w telly to great comic effect.
GNASHER also came onto the scene in the later LAW years, and the very early version of the TRIPEHOUND was a gleefully anarchic mass of wiry 'muttsmanship.'
philcom55 wrote:I'm afraid I'll have to agree with Peter on this; Law just seemed to get better and better. This detail from a mid-sixties Dandy Annual double-page splash features one of the best-drawn comic tigers I've ever seen IMHO!
Phil R.
Now somebody needs to post a stunning full-pager from 1953 and say "Ah, but look at THIS!"
Actually, I like Davey Law's latterday horses, too.
I would view it more as an evolution and I doubt that it was a case of him getting sloppy and scribbly. By all accounts he was a great perfectionist, this can be seen in his originals with all the layers of white out and extra bits of paper over other characters. Personally I preferred the later stuff although by the time I got around to dennis the menace Sutherland was doing it in Laws style. I loved the low angles though as Nick Park pointed out on the comics britannia documentary, you were on the same level as the characters, its all good!
Steve Henderson wrote:I would view it more as an evolution and I doubt that it was a case of him getting sloppy and scribbly.
I don't think it was an evolution - but nor that he ever got 'sloppy' on purpose. I think Leo Baxendale got it right when he said in his autobiography that Law's style was "distorted by the pressure of a non-stop production line." As he put it, "Davey was overworked."
I'm inclined to think the late 60s style was a result of a couple of decades working non-stop on that relentless weekly production line. The pressures often showed in the work - but he still seemed to try to put something extra into it whenever possible.
I think I would have to come down on the side of the early 'little gargoyle' Dennis for personal preference although Davey Law's artwork full of jangling energy and nervous exhuberance from any era is a joy to behold.
He was at the opposite end of the spectrum from his near contemporary at Thomsons Dudley Watkins (Davey was born in 1908 and not 1906 as stated in the article) in that Dudley seemed to have an implacable, unperturbable personality that didn't enter into and colour his artistic technique in anything like the way it did with Davey whose nervous persona positively spilled out in his penmanship.
Agreed, kashgar....after DAVEY departed this mortal coil in 1970, there was a void left on the 'BEANO' back page that was never filled. Dave Sutherland was miles ahead of LAW in the draughtsmanship stakes, but his 'DENNIS' work just doesn't haunt my memory to anywhere near the same extent as the definitive original still continues to do so......and I continued to buy the BEANO for a good few years after the LAW 'DENNIS' departed.
Law's amazing work surely merits a collected hardback edition spanning Dennis, Beryl and Clott. Plenty of US newspaper and classic strips are doing it, and I bet we'd all happily pay £45 for a sumptuous well designed substantial overview of his career and best work.
This is way before my time, but looking at classic strips I'd say the Davy Law strips on the back cover (1963-1970) were the best. The style was loose and creative but it still looked right. I quite like the squat, neat characters in the early strips as well, but I'm less fond of the 'stretched' Dennis in the later 1950s. I agree that it made him look less menacing.
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