Word: abner
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...Capp, the cartoonist-creator of Li'l Abner, probably has a sharper eye for slobs, monsters, hags and fiends than anyone alive. This means that his eye is very sharp indeed, for the modern slob seldom slobbers and in the 20th Century even monsters are apt to use both Vitalis and Zip, grease themselves liberally with Mum or Dew, and consult a dentist twice a year. Capp is not fooled. At times, in fact, he seems to suspect that the world is peopled exclusively by bloated big businessmen, brainless editors, venal politicians, sadistic cops, cruel stepmothers and shambling, leaping...
...enchantment with yokels and pretty girls, has made him one of the best-read, best-paid and most widely celebrated humorists in U.S. history. His comic strip is a rarity among the "comics" in being really, and deliberately, funny. At 41, after 14 years of drawing Li'l Abner, Capp makes $300,000 a year, is read by 38 million fans in 700 U.S. newspapers, and has been favorably compared not only to such classic cartoonists as Rube Goldberg, but to such writers as Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens and Voltaire...
Smoke-Bursts & Soot-Falls. As a comic strip, Capp's Li'l Abner is not the most popular in the U.S.: it can be accurately described only as one of the top five-a group which also includes Little Orphan Annie, Blondie, Dick Tracy and Joe Palooka. At least two of them, Blondie and Dick Tracy, claim more readers, but the promotion departments of national syndicates fire off such billowing smoke-bursts of conflicting claims that the truth of the matter has long since been buried under a soot-fall of verbiage...
...missing Capp sequence concerned one Happy Vermin, the self-described "world's smartest cartoonist," who had hired Li'l Abner to draw Vermin's comic strip in a dimly lighted closet. Instead of using Vermin's tired characters, Li'l Abner had inventively peopled the strip with hillbillies. Cried bighearted Vermin to his slaving assistant: "I'm proud of having created these [hillbilly] characters!! They'll make millions for me!! And if they do-I'll get you a new light bulb...
Among Li'l Abner fans, it is common knowledge that Capp and Cartoonist Ham Fisher, who draws Joe Palooka, have long feuded. One of the big Capp-Fisher arguments concerns the birth of Li'l Abner: Fisher charges that Capp stole the idea from a Palooka sequence involving a hillbilly named Li'l David; Capp says he invented the hillbillies while working as Fisher's assistant on the Palooka strip...