The Miracle of Dogpatch

You are about to enter Dogpatch, an average stone-age community, It nestles in a bleak valley, between two cheap and uninteresting hills . . .

On 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.

The 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 any more. Capitalists thought this a menace, so Pork Tycoon J. Roaringham Fatback sent "shmooicide squads" to wipe out the shmoo. They succeeded, except for two shmoon (pl.), boy & girl, which Li'l Abner saved for Capp's future use.

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's superman or the Superman of the comic books. It is a super-animal."

Wrote an awed reviewer in the New York Times, 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."

In his Boston studio, Cartoonist Capp, a sort of Rabelais in modern dress, pretended that these enormous implications were lost on him. "My first sensation," he said, "was just the joy of having made the shmoo. Then came a feeling of annoyance. I've been subjected to all the shmoo jokes in the world, like 'there's good shmoos tonight,' and I mustn't say go-to-hell to anybody. Now I'm delighted again, having read that the shmoo has all sorts of economic meanings."

Super-Salesman. Al Capp understands his economic meanings as well as the next $250,000-a-year man. Through Capp Enterprises, Inc., he 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.

In the corner of his mind and drawing board, Cartoonist Capp is toying with an anti-shmoo. The horrid animal "might very possibly" come from Lower Slobbovia to exterminate the shmoo, and "might very possibly" be called the "nogudnik." But as long as The Life & Times of the Shmoo is a bestseller, the nogudnik will doubtless stay put under the Lower Slobbovia snow.

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