) Two years later, Capp's studio issued Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a 1958 biographical comic book distributed by The Fellowship of Reconciliation.

The characters also sold chainsaws, underwear, ties, detergent, candy, soft drinks — including a licensed version of Capp's moonshine creation, Kickapoo Joy Juice — and General Electric and Procter & Gamble products, all requiring special artwork.

Fearless Fosdick — and Capp's other spoofs like " Little Fanny Gooney " ( 1952 ) and " Jack Jawbreaker "— were almost certainly an early inspiration for Harvey Kurtzman's Mad Magazine, which began in 1952 as a comic book that specifically parodied other comics in the same distinctive style and subversive manner.

" Just about anything could be a target for Capp's satire — in one storyline Li ' l Abner is revealed to be the missing link between ape and man.

But in 1952, when General Motors president Charles E. Wilson, nominated for a cabinet post, told Congress "... what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa ," he inspired one of Capp's greatest satires — the introduction of General Bullmoose, the robust, ruthless, and ageless business tycoon.

It was Capp's finely tuned sense of the absurd, his ability to milk an outrageous situation for every laugh in it and then, impossibly, to squeeze even more laughs from it, that found such favor with the public ," ( from Don Markstein's Toonopedia ).

" The article recounted Capp's days working for an unnamed " benefactor " with a miserly, swinish personality, who Capp claimed was a never-ending source of inspiration when it came time to create a new unregenerate villain for his comic strip.

According to one anecdote ( from Al Capp Remembered, 1994 ), Capp and his brother Elliot ducked out of a dull party at Capp's home — leaving Walt Kelly alone to fend for himself entertaining a group of Argentine envoys who didn't speak English.

Although Capp's endorsement activities never rivaled Li ' l Abner's or Fearless Fosdick's, he was a celebrity spokesman in print ads for Sheaffer Snorkel fountain pens ( along with colleagues and close friends Milton Caniff and Walt Kelly ), and — with an irony that would become apparent later — a brand of cigarettes, ( Chesterfield ).

With Ben Oakland and Milton Drake, Berle wrote the title song for the RKO Radio Pictures release Li ' l Abner ( 1940 ), an adaptation of Al Capp's comic strip, featuring Buster Keaton as Lonesome Polecat.

From a recommendation, writer Jerry Caplin, a. k. a. Jerry Capp, brother of Li ' l Abner creator Al Capp, invited Adams to draw samples for Capp's proposed Ben Casey comic strip, based on the popular television medical-drama series.

The character is also licensed as the mascot for a line of snack foods ( Andy Capp's fries ) and a defunct chain of miniature golf courses in Brevard County, Florida.

Though his uncle Tiny was perpetually frozen at 15½ " y ' ars " old, Honest Abe gradually grew from infant to grade school age, and became a dead ringer for Washable Jones — the star of Capp's early " topper " strip.

Part of a virtual goon squad of comic mobsters that inhabited Li ' l Abner and Fearless Fosdick, the oafish Stanislouse alternated with other all-purpose underworld thugs, including " the Boys from the Syndicate " — Capp's euphemism for The Mob.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, the strip became a forum for Capp's increasingly conservative political views.

Supposedly done in retaliation for Capp's " Mary Worm " parody in Li ' l Abner ( 1956 ), a media-fed " feud " commenced briefly between the rival strips.

After Capp's death, the Shmoo was used in two Hanna-Barbera produced Saturday morning cartoon series for TV.

The actual origin of Capp's word " shmoo " has been the subject of debate by linguists for decades, leading to the misconception that the term was derived from " schmo " or " schmooze.

This nostrum was the inspiration for Al Capp's " Kickapoo Joy Juice ," featured in the comic strip, " Li ' l Abner ".

... Mr. Kidd has caught the spirit of Dogpatch civilization brilliantly enough to suggest that ballet is a more suitable medium than words for animating Al Capp's cartoon drawings ".

Holt was the visual inspiration for Chester Gould's " Dick Tracy " and Al Capp's " Fearless Fosdick.

During his twenties, he worked for Al Capp and his brother Elliott Caplin at the Capp family-owned Toby Press, which published Al Capp's Shmoo Comics, among other titles.

Mencken ( 1880-1956 ) credited the mania for adding "- nik " to the ends of adjectives to create nouns to Al Capp's American comic strip Li ' l Abner ( 1934-77 ) rather than to the influence of " Sputnik ", first recorded in 1957, or " beatnik ", first recorded in 1958.

The Capp-Fisher feud was well known in cartooning circles, and it grew more personal as Capp's strip eclipsed Joe Palooka in popularity.

— as well as some purely fanciful worlds of Capp's imagination:

Examples of other media which take part in metafictiveness are Al Capp's Fearless Fosdick in Li ' l Abner, the Tales of the Black Freighter in Watchmen, or the Itchy and Scratchy Show within The Simpsons, as well as the computer game Myst in which the player represents a person who has found a book named Myst and been transported inside it.

College students — who had made Capp's invented idea of the Sadie Hawkins dance a universally adopted tradition — flocked to the Shmoo as well.

The Capp-Fisher feud was well known in cartooning circles, and it became personal and vitriolic as Capp's strip eclipsed Joe Palooka in popularity.

Capp's parents were both natives of Latvia whose families had migrated to New Haven in the 1880s.

" It was the prevailing opinion among his friends that Capp's Swiftian satire was, to some degree, a creatively channeled, compensatory response to his disability.

Capp's father, a failed businessman and reportedly an amateur cartoonist, introduced him to drawing as a form of therapy.

According to Capp's brother Elliot, Alfred had finished all of Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw by the time he turned 13.

During one of Fisher's extended vacations, Capp's Joe Palooka story arc introduced a stupid, coarse, oafish mountaineer named " Big Leviticus ," a crude prototype.

( Leviticus was actually much closer to Capp's later villains Lem and Luke Scragg, than to the much more appealing and innocent Li ' l Abner.

Capp peopled his comic strip with an assortment of memorable characters, including Marryin ' Sam, Hairless Joe, Lonesome Polecat, Evil-Eye Fleegle, General Bullmoose, Lena the Hyena, Senator Jack S. Phogbound ( Capp's caricature of the anti-New Deal Dixiecrats ), the ( shudder!

Perhaps Capp's most popular creations were the Shmoos, creatures whose incredible usefulness and generous nature made them a threat to civilization as we know it.

Situations often take the characters to other destinations, including New York City, Washington, D. C., Hollywood, tropical islands, the Moon, Mars, and some purely fanciful worlds of Capp's invention.

" Yet though Capp's storylines often wandered far afield, his hillbilly setting remained a central touchstone, serving both as a microcosm and a distorting carnival mirror of broader American society.

The gag was often at his own expense, as in the above 1951 sequence showing Capp's interaction with " fans " ( see excerpt ), or in his 1955 Disneyland parody, " Hal Yappland.

Li ' l Abner: A Study in American Satire by Arthur Asa Berger ( Twayne, 1969 ) contained serious analyses of Capp's narrative technique, his use of dialogue, self-caricature and grotesquerie, the place of Li ' l Abner in American satire, and the significance of social criticism and the graphic image.

" One of the few strips ever taken seriously by students of American culture ," wrote Professor Berger, " Li ' l Abner is worth studying ... because of Capp's imagination and artistry, and because of the strip's very obvious social relevance.

The controversy, as reported in Time, centered on Capp's portrayal of the United States Senate.

" This character, along with the Shmoos, helped cement Capp's favor with the Left, and would increase their outrage a decade later when Capp, a former Franklin D. Roosevelt liberal, switched targets.

It wasn't the setting that made Capp's strip such a huge success.

Fisher hired away Capp's top assistant, Moe Leff.