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Schmoos, kigmies — figments of a wild imagination. What next?
by GEORGE E. JONES
DESPITE the handicap of only one leg, and after repeated failures, Al Capp, creator of the comic strip Li'l Abner, has become one of Ameri' ca's top cartoonists. Modestly, he be' lieves himself to be one of the two greatest contemporary comic strip artists in the world, the other being Milton Caniff. Caniff is the creator of the strip Steve Canyon, and was once a colleague of Capp s in the same office. Dark, heavy-set, brash, exuberant, witty, rowdy Capp makes, roughly, $250,000 a year before taxes, on the Li'l Abner strip. He also does the plotting and writes the dialogue for Abbie Slats, which appears in 130 daily and 80 Sunday papers. He receives $20,000 a year for this stint, although he's never mentioned as the author. Raeburn Van Buren is the artist.
The antics of Li'l Abner, and his hillbilly family. Mammy and Pappy Yokum, Daisy Mae, his girl-friend, and all the citizens of Dogpatch, Ken' tucky — a figment of Capp's imagination— the shmoos, the kigmies and the citizens of Lower Slobovia, are followed by 27 million readers in more than 600 newspapers throughout the United States and the world. The strip is a friendly — sometimes caustic — satire on people, customs and events in American life.
Capp's shmoo, which he declares is a cross between a pool ball and 20 shares of National Dairy Common Stock, is a quick-breeding animal, shaped like a bowling pin, which yields milk, eggs, cheesecake, and tastes hke chicken or steak, depending on whether it is fried or broiled. Five million shmoo balloons have been sold; Capp's book, "The Life and Times of the Shmoo," was a best seller. There are shmoo pencils and pencil boxes, key rings, ties, ash trays — altogether some 75 other shmoo items. Some critics, like Gilbert Seldes, for instance,