Word: comically
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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What is often comic, but always instructive about this book is Author Davenport's way of reversing the normal scale of values. No matter how largely they may figure, art, literature, history, the soul of man itself here becomes secondary to the prime concern-surface appearances. When Author Davenport looks at a medieval painting of the martyrdom of Saint Alban, she merely observes, with an artist's pure detachment, that the saint's collar "shows the new interest ... in the vertical line and in the center-front." In another such painting, Job's boils are ruthlessly...
There is nothing crisp and original in "The Paleface," just the old tried and true western cliches dressed up and put forth flawlessly. But in this case the result is a tremendous burlesque of all western epics, both serious and comic, with Bob Hope as the stalwart hero and Jane Russell as the prim heroine. Hope is a coward, and Miss Russell is hardly prim...
...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...
...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...
...stands to make an extra $100,000 from the book and 26 licensees who are busily turning out shmoo balloons, ashtrays, dolls, scarves, banks, soaps and suspenders. In a couple of months Toby Press, one of the mushrooming Capp enterprises, will take over Li'l Abner comic books, previously farmed out to publishers...