Word: abner
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...Part. All this wealth, recognition and acclaim is in dramatic contrast to the record of Capp's earlier years. Li'l Abner's creator, who was born Alfred Gerald Caplin in New Haven, Conn., in 1909 (he shortened his name to Capp in signing the strip, changed it legally in 1949), grew up amid a ferocious struggle with poverty. His father, Otto Caplin-a glib, cheerful, optimistic man who studied law at Yale, had a dilettante's interest in art and nursed continual schemes for making his fortune-managed to eke out only the barest living...
Success, his boundless faith in himself, and his instinct for defending Li'l Abner to the death, involved him in another conflict-a remarkable feud with his former employer Ham Fisher. Capp parted from Fisher with a definite impression, (to put it mildly) that he had been underpaid and unappreciated. Fisher, a man of Roman selfesteem, considered Capp an ingrate and a whippersnapper, and watched his rise to fame with unfeigned horror...
Quick, Henry, the Flit! As the feud developed, Fisher-apparently by studying Li'l Abner with a magnifying glass-decided that it contained minuscule Rabelaisian detail calculated to undermine the morals of American youth. He caused certain frames of Abner to be enlarged and reprinted, and, after ringing suspicious portions in red, sent them to publishers, urging them to drop Capp's strip...
Capp sniped at Fisher through Li'l Abner. When Fisher had his nose remodeled, Capp gleefully insinuated a horse named "Ham's Nose-bob" into the strip. Last April he wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly about a cartoonist who had once employed him. He named no names, simply titled his piece, "I Remember Monster." The sound of battle finally became too loud, and the respective syndicates called for a peace treaty-which was gravely consummated last August by proxies for each side...
Capp Enterprises not only licenses the manufacture of such direct offshoots of the strip as Shmoos and Kigmies, but more than a hundred other products, including Li'l Abner orangeade, Daisy Mae blouses, Li'l Abner corncob pipes and Li'l Abner skonk hats. A good guess at the gross profit...