In December of 1959 Li’l Abner gathered his family to read a Christmas tale. Cartoonist Al Capp used his Li’l Abner comic strip to create a seasonal story leading up to the holiday. The eleven strips ran on Saturday December 12, then continued daily from December 14 to December 19, finishing in the December 21 to December 24, 1959 strips.
The following year Al Capp and United Feature Syndicate gathered those strips plus an edited version of the 1959 Christmas Day strip and issued them as a December 1960 package to newspapers under the title “The Adorable Snowman.” This was a separate entity from the regular, coexistent syndicated December 1960 Li’l Abner daily comic strips.
The Al Capp Studio in 1959 included Al Capp, Andy Amato, Walter Johnson, Lee Elias, Bob Lubbers, Creig Flessel, and Frank Frazetta. At least a few of those worked on “The Adorable Snowman.”
The papers were left to run the strips as they deemed suitable though they were certainly meant to be run one a day with the story ending on Christmas Eve and the edited Christmas strip to run on 1960’s Christmas Day. The Charlotte News made a special feature of the material running two strips a day and creating an “island” on a page with decorative borders. That is the version we present below.
The Roseville Press-Tribune ran all 12 strips on one page on December 13, 1960 …
… while The Des Moines Register created a title panel and dropped the Christmas Day strip, running the entire Slobbovian Tale on about three-quarters of a page very early on December 8, 1960.
© UFS and/or Capp Enterprises
This seems to be a lost feature. There are references to the original 1959 Li’l Abner story of
The Adorable Snowman, but none that I’m finding of this 1960 repackaged presentation.
Thanks for that. A lot.
Yes, thank you!