The Press: Sacking of the Shmoo

Except for Chic Young's Blondie and Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, no U.S. comic strip has ever scored a solid hit in Britain. But when the lid was taken off newsprint last winter, the London Sunday Pictorial jumped to sign up Al Capp's Li'l Abner. Editor Harry Guy Bartholomew, whose knowing tabloid touch had built the London Daily Mirror (circ. 4,400,000) into the world's biggest daily, thought that his even bigger weekend Pictorial audience (4,800,000) would eat up Capp's super-edible Shmoos as hungrily as U.S. readers had done.

Heralded by front-page blurbs (THE SHMOOS ARE COMING!), Li'l Abner, Daisy

Mae and their rotund, accommodating little friends made their debut in March. Sailors on H.M.S. Ganges formed a Shmoo club, English farmers reported that hens were laying Shmoo-shaped eggs, and subscribers sent Shmoo-shaped potatoes. But the postman also brought a mailbag of protests. Reader R.E. Wilkinson thought Shmoos were definitely un-British. Wrote he: "The Shmoos are encouraging the very characteristics that are ruining this country ... lazy-mindedness and the deliberate pursuit of everything that is slovenly and American." A Mrs. Collins found the drawing "ridiculous" and the language "unintelligible."

Largely as a promotion stunt for the new strip, the newspaper ran a voting blank asking SHALL WE SACK THE SHMOOS? Results of the poll last week swept the Shmoos out of Britain and back into the Valley of the Shmoon. For the Shmoo: 3,750. Against the Shmoo: 7,552. Admitted the Pic: "We dropped a brick. We pulled a boner, made a howler, a bloomer." For the benefit of true-blue Shmoo-lovers, the newspaper ran a synopsis of the unpublished part of Capp's Shmoo sequence. It also printed a perplexed farewell: "Critics have called the Shmoos 'the greatest satire since Swift's Gulliver's Travels . . .' It's odd that, though [the U.S. and Britain] share the same language, we don't share each other's jokes."