Word: comical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This odd marriage of attitudes, plus his endless 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...
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...
...comparing the average comic strip to Li'l Abner is like comparing an ordinary cocktail to a dipperful of Capp's own Kickapoo Joy Juice, a liquor of such stupefying potency that the hardiest citizens of Dogpatch, after the first burning sip, rise into the air, stiff as frozen codfish. Capp tries to give his readers not only a daily belly laugh, satirical Cappian comment on politics, sex, law enforcement, the housing situation and human rapacity, but surrealistic gobbets of action, mystery, horror and adventure as well...
...machinists have pooled their efforts in a United Labor League of Ohio which s working fiercely and spending lavishly to procure Ferguson's victory. Huge amounts of anti-Taft campaign literature--ranging from a 218-page "blackbook" summary of Taft's record in the Senate to a comic book denouncing the Republican--are being distributed daily. The whole election is being fought on the issue of Taft's rather than Ferguson. Ferguson has little concrete to sell except a policy designed for him by Charles West, a former Roosevelt assistant, and Henry Busch, a professor at Western Reserve...
...Brotherhoods had got together in a strictly political organization and dubbed it the United Labor League. The auto workers' Walter Reuther had invaded the state to denounce the author of the Taft-Hartley Act. From labor headquarters had rolled thousands upon thousands of pamphlets, posters, books, a lurid comic book (drawn by Al Capp's brother Elliott) attacking and lampooning Taft. A few of the attacks hit home, but some of the blows were foul, e.g., the insinuation that Taft was anti-Negro, that he was against a minimum wage. Other attacks were roundhouse swings, answerable only...