“I Don’t Like Shmoos”

[Jeff of Earth-J]

That’s the title of Al Capp’s infamous anti-Shmoo essay, but it also accurately describes how I personally feel about the critters. Nor am I particularly impressed by what I know of Al Capp as a human being. So why did I buy Al Capp’s Shmoo: The Complete Newspaper Strips? Simply put: curiosity and impatience. When my mother used to read Li’l Abner to me from the Sunday funnies, I didn’t quite understand it but she assured me it was funny. Years later, in 1988, when Kitchen Sink Press first undertook to reprint Li’l Abner in its entirety, I still wasn’t ready for it, but I read it anyway. Initially, Capp was very liberal in his political leanings, but I knew in later years he (and his strip) took a hard swing to the right. I was interested to observe that happen, but sadly KSP when out of business in 1998, at the 27th volume of the series (1961), some three or four years before the shift occurred. In more recent years, I have come to appreciate Capp’s expertise as a cartoonist, and I’m enjoying the IDW reprints (the third volume of which is overdue, BTW) more than I ever enjoyed the KSP reprints. Still, it’s going to be some time before IDW’s series (which includes the Sundays the KSP series didn’t) gets to the 1960s. Al Capp’s Shmoo: The Complete Newspaper Strips reprints stories spanning 1948 through 1976, so it is the curiosity reading of Capp’s swing to the right coupled with the impatience of waiting for IDW to reach that point which led me to buy this volume about the (ugh!) Shmoos. I almost wish I hadn’t. By Capp’s own admission, the strip became less and less funny. By 1970 Cap had given Abner a Mod/Beatles haircut, and by 1976 his once detailed artwork had deteriorated into a cartoonish parody of itself. According the Denis Kitchen, the former publisher of Kitchen Sink Press who wrote the introduction and annotations to this book, “Less than a year and a half after [the final strip in this volume], Capp retired Li’l Abner tired, ill, and bitter, and two years after that he died.”