Strippers

"The very last outpost of fine, imaginative illustration in America is the comic strip. That's where all the great illustrators are."

The man who said that spoke from a natural bias. Nobody could accuse Al (Li'l Abner) Capp of disloyalty to his profession. Was there a shred of truth in his assertion? To prove that there might be, 100 topflight cartoonists were exhibiting their best work in Manhattan last week.

What the show did prove was that a cartoonist's best strips are apt to look much like his worst. Not one panel had the uniqueness that marks a "great" illustrator--a George Cruikshank or Gustave Dore. But in their own ways a handful of the strippers were mighty good:

P: Milton (Steve Canyon) Caniff has brilliantly adapted movie techniques to cartooning. Caniff moves around the scenes he invents as restlessly as a camera under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock, intercutting panoramic long shots with close-ups of action and expression. He stays well ahead of a host of imitators.

P: Harold (Prince Valiant) Foster has stuck by the older and less fashionable tradition of N. C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle. The bloody adventures of his Arthurian prince are crammed with careful details, less dramatic than Caniff's, but also richer.

P: Al Capp himself is more of a writer than an illustrator. Like most comics, his strips are stories with standard scenes and characters, and liberal slices of cheesecake on the side. But the profusion of bit parts in Capp's cast--Lonesome Polecat, Fearless Fosdick, Stubborn J. Tolliver and Skelton McCloset the murdering musician--are unforgettably pictured.

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