Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years Chicago Cartoonist Russell Stamm, 40, drew his comic strip Scarlet O'Neil without attracting much attention. Then, two years ago, into the big-city adventures in the strip ambled Stainless Steel, a Texas sheriff far from home. He had flowing blond hair and the physique of a Michelangelo statue. "In general," drawled Stainless, "heroics is mah business." His business soon proved so successful that the number of papers taking the strip from the Chicago Sun-Times Syndicate rose from 126 to 148 (including 39 in foreign countries). This week Stainless Steel was getting ready to perform a most...
Sense of Duty. The reason for Stainless' popularity, says Cartoonist Stamm, is that he is all comic-strip heroes "rolled into one bundle" and a full-fledged satire on many of them. For example, when the police commissioner begged Steel to give up his spectacularly successful amateur detective work so that the police would have a chance to catch some crooks themselves ("Heroism at its greatest! To suffer silently without reward"), Stainless reluctantly agreed, rented a room in a quiet boarding house to rest. Not till three weeks later did he realize that his fellow boarders were all crooks...
...least one of Disney's 657 films, most of which are dubbed in 14 languages. And one taste of a Disney picture makes millions of moviegoers cry for more. Disney takes pleasure-and enormous profit, of course -in gratifying this hunger. Thirty million 10? copies of Walt Disney Comic Books are bought in 26 countries every month, and 100 million copies of more expensive editions (from 25? to $2.95) have been bought since 1935. Songs from Disney pictures sell $250,000 worth of records and sheet music annually. Since 1933 more than $750 million worth of merchandise featuring...
...past four years, I Love Lucy has been No. 1 on just about every rating poll. Last week, in the Trendex ratings for December, Lucy sagged to sixth place, and the No. 1 spot went to television's fastest rising comic, Jackie Gleason, who has abandoned most of his longtime characterizations (Reggie Van Gleason, Joe the Bartender, The Loud Mouth) to concentrate on The Honeymooners (Sat. 8 p.m., CBS), in which he is the embodiment of bustling inefficiency...
ONLY FADE AWAY, by Bruce Marshall (303 pp.; Houghton Mifflin; $3.50), shows how an Episcopal Scotsman can hopscotch his engaging way through a comic novel as if he were the hero of a minor Greek tragedy. The hero is Strang Nairne Methuen. As a young lieutenant, he is full of wide-eyed piety, but a shapely dish can stir up his belief in "tart for tart's sake." As a brigadier, he wears a monocle, but is intelligent enough to look at the world with both eyes open. His nemesis takes the repulsive form of Claude Hermiston, a bully...