Word: abner
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Fans of the Li'l Abner comic strip last week recognized the unmistakable face of Frank Sinatra. He promised Daisy Mae Scragg that he would sing her song: Li'l Abner, Don't Marry That Girl. Objective: to prevent Abner Yokum from marrying Lena the Hyena from Lower Slobbovia. To Abner readers it was no more unusual than most of Creator Al Capp's fantasies -until Sinatra last week actually sang the song on his Wednesday night show...
...next day, big as life, Kate Smith popped up in the Abner strip. Later she too sang Don't Marry That Girl. Bob Hope, Jack Smith and Fred Waring followed. Within a week, listeners were humming Tin Pan Alley's latest...
Cartoonists do not all belong to the same club. Cartoonists Alfred Gerald Caplin (Al Capp), who draws Li'I Abner, and Chester (Dick Tracy) Gould have never met. But Al Capp has been admiring Dick Tracy from afar. Five years ago Capp put "Fearless Fosdick" into his Li'l Abner strip, a detective whose hat brim snapped and jaw jutted just a bit more than Tracy's. The compliment has never been returned, because Tracy is too busy catching villains (Itchy, Shaky, B.O. Plenty, Pruneface, etc.) to go in for burlesque...
...busy just being funny, returned to his sharp satire on Gould, Tracy & Co. It began in 600-odd newspapers as suddenly as his casual lampooning of Orson Welles, Gone Wif the Wind, Frank Sinatra, Sewell Avery and Drew Pearson, with a scrawled appeal from hillbilly Li'l Abner Yokum (pattern: early Henry Fonda) to Cartoonist "Lester Gooch...
Just to please Li'l Abner, Capp had Gooch come through. From "Frank Half-buck, the great explorer," he heard about "Lena, the hyena from Lower Slobbovia." Because the very sight of her turned men's spines to jelly, she had to be (so far, at least) an offstage horror. The trouble she would make only handsome, happy Al Capp, who makes more than $150,000 a year out of such antics, could tell...