Comic strips

Marcus the Menace Maestro

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D. D. Degg May 15, 2019 1 minute 2 comments

Then one year later when he decided to go it alone as an independent freelance illustrator…The small company grew as he worked freelance for various magazines for many years.

Unfortunately, the rise of digital art, computer graphics put him out of business. “They wanted slick computer graphics instead, hand illustrations were no longer needed.” To pay the mounting bills, he ended up working at Walmart when he was 50.

The roller coaster career of Marcus Hamilton has been riding high for 25 years
as the daily cartoonist of the Dennis the Menace panel..

To produce the final product includes 12-15 freelance writers, they provide the captions, Hamilton selects the six he will use for the week and then designs his drawings around the captions. There are many steps in the drawing process which is still done by hand, the first step is the initial layout, second are thumbnail sketches, then begin to complete the process, the ink over works best with a blue pencil, then he creates and keeps a folder, when finished scans final drawings into the computer, finally size down to newspaper.

Marcus’s small town paper profiles the artist.

Hamilton wanted to thank the Mint Hill Times for continuing to run his “Dennis the Menace” panel in the local hometown weekly newspaper.