Number 736


Dennis, Henry and Li'l Pappy in the Fun House


To help prove my personal theory that everything I needed to know I learned from comic books, comes this funny story that in 1955 taught me about the fun house. Dad and Mom gave me 35¢ for admission to said palace of pain at a local amusement park. I found out that the fun house was exactly as writer Fred Toole and artist Al Wiseman had shown me in Dennis the Menace #13. The difference was no ghost with a taser, as in the story (imagine someone coming up to you and administering an electric shock, no matter how mild; where's my lawyer?) and something my youthful and budding prurient eye noticed: girls in skirts walking over a screen in the floor got a blast of air which blew their skirts above their waists. Wow! Great fun! I didn't see THAT in a Dennis the Menace story! It's hard to imagine nowadays that something like that was allowed to happen, or even that there was a time when a female would go to an amusement park in a dress.*

The rest of it, the moving stairs--brilliantly pictured by Wiseman--the barrel, the slide, the room of mirrors, was all there. Who says comic books aren't educational?

Click on the Dennis the Menace link at the bottom for more Dennis.









*Here's an example of the fun house air blast.