The Press: Die Monstersinger

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Capp fills a niche in comics comparable to Gershwin's in jazz, or D. W. Griffith's in the movies. From an instrument which had seemed as crude and monotonous as a dime-store flute, he produces noisy bass blats of comedy, a skirling of irony and satire such as the comic page had never known.

Some of Capp's admirers go even further, and vow that he has not only created a genuine 20th-Century folk tale, but told it through a new kind of writing—a mixture of prose and hieroglyphics which simultaneously stings the mind of the intellectual and reduces the simple subway rider to coarse guffaws. The faithful number him among the great men of U.S. art & letters. Whether or not posterity will accept this thesis, the consensus of his contemporaries puts him high among the lively artists of the mechanical age.