Word: shmoo
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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...
Super-Animal. The miracle of Dogpatch had become a greater national phenomenon than Lena the Hyena; 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...
...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...
...Shmoo was the creation of John Gregg and George Andrews. They believed they got a larger crowd by being outdoors, but said they were unable to give away all the Shmoo's products...