Word: capps
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...this low prefatory note, Comic-Stripper Al Capp introduced his glorified comic book, The Life & Times of the Shmoo (Simon & Schuster; $1), published Dec. 2. By last week, The Shmoo had sold 133,752 copies. It was far outselling the No. 1 nonfiction bestseller, Robert E. Sherwood's Roosevelt & Hopkins-which cost six times as much and was at least six times as hard to read...
...shmoo is a friendly, fruitful, gourd-shaped animal that wandered into Al Capp's Li'l Abner last summer (TIME, Sept. 13). Its Life & Times was simply a reprint of funny-paper strips, plus a weekend's work by Capp on extra drawings to make Dogpatch only reasonably unintelligible to readers venturing there for the first time. Asking nothing of the world, the shmoo gave everything: butter, milk, eggs, boneless meat, building materials (of sliced shmoo), suspender buttons (of shmoo eyes). Wherever shmoos went-and they multiplied like speeded-up guinea pigs-no one had to work...
...culturally it had surpassed even Sadie Hawkins day. To New York Herald Tribune Radio Columnist John Crosby, who thought he detected a likeness between the whiskered shmoo and a certain Chicago newspaper publisher, the book was "one of the finest satiric creations since Gulliver's Travels." (No, said Capp modestly, that was overrating Dean Swift.) To Dr. Frederic Wertham, a Manhattan psychiatrist who crusades against comic books, the shmoo offered "a solution of human problems on the same spurious level as Nietzsche's superman or the Superman of the comic books. It is a super-animal...
Wrote an awed reviewer in the New York Times, with just a tongue-tip in cheek: "We should not be surprised to hear . . . that the intellectuals had discovered Mr. Capp's opera, and that words like dichotomy, plangent and ambivalent were being thrown at him, wrapped in pages from Kafka and Dostoevski . . . The Life & Times of the Shmoo is a cultural event of enormous significance...
Most of these serials deal with adventure ideas that have been worked to death already. But occasionally, script-writers emerge with some fortunate stroke that is worthy of Chester Gould, or possibly Al Capp. The Sword was such a creation, and anybody who cares to endure several dozen kiddie shows might find another. Incidentally, every program is running some sort of contest. Prizes are usually bikes or toy pistols, but once in a while a car or Bendix pops into the lineup. Such items are worth trying for. It means eating lots of Ralston and swilling Ovaltine, but the competitors...