Dennis the Menace and Peanuts have a lot in common. The two popular kid-lead features started within six months of each other. They had a lot of differences as well, in style, in format, in creation (while Schulz did all the strips for the entire run of Peanuts, Hank Ketcham has “assistants” who did some of the work (most notably the Sunday strips) even before he retired, and his strip continues to have new material and decade and a half after his death.

Among the things they had in common, Schulz and Ketcham were both golfers (Ketcham probably the more avid of the two; his autobiography spends far more time on The Time He Played Golf With Bing Crosby than on things like shipping off his kid Dennis to boarding school and the death of his son’s mother in a haze of drugs.) Both contributed cartoons to the programs for the Crosby Pro-Am golf tournament for decades.

To the best of my awareness, the two cartoonists only collaborated twice, and they were on similar pieces: double-width images of their characters playing golf for the covers to golf publications. One was the cover for the 1990 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, which was just the renaming of the Crosby; you can see me discussing that cover here. The other was the cover to the March/April, 1982 issue of Golf Journal, published by the United States Golf Association. I finally got myself a copy of that.

The Ketcham characters take the forefront in both shops, but from a design consideration, that makes sense; the Dennis panels were always a more three-dimensional world than Peanuts, and by putting the Peanuts characters up-stage, they can face front and be in more of their standard look.

While the Journal does have cartoons inside, none of them are by Schulz or Ketcham; the cover is the only thing you get… but that’s quite something on its own!

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