The Press: Lena v. Gravel Gertie

Cartoonists do not all belong to the same club. Cartoonists Alfred Gerald Caplin (Al Capp), who draws Li'I Abner, and Chester (Dick Tracy) Gould have never met. But Al Capp has been admiring Dick Tracy from afar. Five years ago Capp put "Fearless Fosdick" into his Li'l Abner strip, a detective whose hat brim snapped and jaw jutted just a bit more than Tracy's. The compliment has never been returned, because Tracy is too busy catching villains (Itchy, Shaky, B.O. Plenty, Pruneface, etc.) to go in for burlesque.

Last week Al Capp, whose funny-paper characters are busy just being funny, returned to his sharp satire on Gould, Tracy & Co. It began in 600-odd newspapers as suddenly as his casual lampooning of Orson Welles, Gone Wif the Wind, Frank Sinatra, Sewell Avery and Drew Pearson, with a scrawled appeal from hillbilly Li'l Abner Yokum (pattern: early Henry Fonda) to Cartoonist "Lester Gooch":

"Yo is the cree-ay-ter of the gratest comical stripp in all cree-ay-shun, naimly 'Peerless Fosdick,' who is mah ideel. . . . Lately, other comical stripp cree-ay-ters bin cree-ay-tin even more horibul cree-ay-shuns than yo Like ladys wif gravel in thar hare, mudd in thar eyes an who smells badd. Natcherly, the Americun public in-joys this vurry much. . . . Go to it, Gooch, whomp up a lady that is so itchy, so shakey, so smelly, an so onbarubbly disgustin thet once agin yo will be the king of the funny page. . . ."

Just to please Li'l Abner, Capp had Gooch come through. From "Frank Half-buck, the great explorer," he heard about "Lena, the hyena from Lower Slobbovia." Because the very sight of her turned men's spines to jelly, she had to be (so far, at least) an offstage horror. The trouble she would make only handsome, happy Al Capp, who makes more than $150,000 a year out of such antics, could tell.

Says Capp, who insists he really is a Tracy fan: "Anybody who says Gould isn't a great artist is just crazy. He sets out to tell an honest horror story and he does it, with force and a minimum of trouble. And it's just plain horrible. It's the only comic strip I read. ..."