More than fifty years ago, America was taken by storm when Al Capp introduced the Shmoo in his comic strip Li'l Abner. The adorable squash-shaped character was so popular it immediately spawned the largest merchandising craze in the nation's history. In the words of Lifemagazine, the nation was "Shmoo-struck." The Short Lifeand Happy Times of the Shmoocollects, for the first time in one volume, Capp's essential comic strips about the Shmoo. This is Al Capp and his incisive social criticism at its best.

First appearing in Al Capp's Li'l Abner comic strip in August 1948, the oddly shaped (and happily edible) Shmoo creature became anovernight phenomenon, spawning an unprecedented merchandising frenzy in the late40s and 50s. As part of the Dark Horse Archives series, all Shmoonewspaper strip appearances and storylines are being collected for the firsttime ever in a deluxe, oversized hardcover.In addition to every weeklyand Sunday Shmoo newspaper appearance from 1948 to 1976, this collection alsofeatures rare Al Capp photographs and Shmoo illustrations from its marketingheyday. It also has a brand-new wraparound cover by renowned illustrator PetePoplaski, as well as an introduction and story annotations by certifiedShmoo-ologist Denis Kitchen.

More than thirty years have passed since Al Capp's death, and he may no longer be a household name. But at the height of his career, his groundbreaking comic strip, Li'l Abner, reached ninety million readers. The strip ran for forty-three years, spawned two movies and a Broadway musical, and originated such expressions as "hogwash" and "double-whammy." Capp himself was a familiar personality on TV and radio; as a satirist, he was frequently compared to Mark Twain. Though Li'l Abner brought millions joy, the man behind the strip was a complicated and often unpleasant person. A childhood accident cost him a leg-leading him to art as a means of distinguishing himself. His apprenticeship with Ham Fisher, creator of Joe Palooka, started a twenty-year feud that ended in Fisher's suicide. Capp enjoyed outsized publicity for a cartoonist, but his status abetted sexual misconduct and protected him from the severest repercussions. Late in life, his politics became extremely conservative; he counted Richard Nixon as a friend, and his gift for satire was redirected at targets like John Lennon, Joan Baez, and anti-war protesters on campuses across the country. With unprecedented access to Capp's archives and a wealth of new material, Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen have written a probing biography. Capp's story is one of incredible highs and lows, of popularity and villainy, of success and failure-told here with authority and heart.

And every week, there was the unspoken question, the one I didn’t know enough to ask myself : Have you found her yet? The one who reminds you of you? Twenty years after she lived at a homeless shelter for teens, Janice Erlbaum went back to volunteer. Now thirty-four years old and a successful writer, she’d changed her life for the better; now she wanted to help someone else–someone like the girl she’d once been. Then she met Sam. A brilliant nineteen-year-old junkie savant, the product of a horrifically abusive home, Sam had been surviving alone on the streets since she was twelve and was now struggling for sobriety against the adverse health effects of long-term drug abuse. Soon Janice found herself caring deeply for Sam, following her through detoxes and psych wards, halfway houses and hospitals, becoming ever more manically driven to save her from the sickness and sadness leftover from Sam’s terrible past. But just as Janice was on the verge of becoming the girl’s legal guardian, she made a shocking discovery: Sam was sicker than anyone knew, in ways nobody could have imagined. Written with startling candor and immediacy, Have You Found Her is the story of one woman’s quest to save a girl’s life–and the hard truths she learns about herself along the way. “A rich and compelling account . . . Ultimately this is a book about the narrator’s journey and the dangers that attend the urge within us all to believe we can save another soul. A terrific read.” –Cammie McGovern, author of Eye Contact

"Turning away from the hard angles and edges of conventional modernism, bliobjects are the design of now, and the future. Blobjects & Beyond is the first survey of the explosion of amorphic, organic, and curvaceous design. A formless from with roots in Surrealism and the kidney-shaped motifs of the 1950s, the ever more biological blobject has come into its own, embodying and reflecting the new international ethos of fluidity." "Authors Steven Skov Holt and Mara Holt Skov - curators of a major exhibition of blobjects at the San Jose Museum of Art - and contributors Phil Patton and Bruce Sterling, parse the various manifestations of the blobject, bringing together the realms of art, architecture, industrial design, graphics, digital design, furniture, and pop culture. As a counterpoint to the effusive popularity of the blobject, the authors also address more recent, post-9/11 forms that are mutated and disturbed, dangerous and intimidating - the dark side of the blobject." "A manifesto for fluidity across disciplines, cultures, and international boundaries, Blobjects & Beyond documents the first major design language to bridge the last millennium with the new one."--BOOK JACKET.