Ham Fisher

Hammond Edward Fisher (September 24, 1900 (some sources indicate 1901) – December 27, 1955) was an American comic strip writer and cartoonist who signed his work Ham Fisher. He is best known for his popular long-run on Joe Palooka, which was launched in 1930 and ranked as one of the top five newspaper comics strips for several years.

Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Ham Fisher dropped out of school at the age of 16 to work as a brush peddler and truck driver before finding employment as a reporter and ad salesman for the Wilkes-Barre Record and then moving on to a job with the New York Daily News.

In 1920, Fisher put together a sample package of Joe Palooka (then titled Joe the Dumbbell) but was unable to attract interest. By 1927, he was working as a traveling strip salesman for the McNaught Syndicate. However, Fisher also hawked his own unpublished, unsold strip.

In 1928, after he secured over 20 sales, including to New York's Daily Mirror, Fisher informed his managers at McNaught, who decided to give Joe Palooka a trial run. The comic strip soon became a national success. The strip helped to solidify the word “palooka” as a boxer who lacks grace or ability, although the character Joe Palooka was the heavyweight champion. A dozen low-budget film adaptations of Joe Palooka appeared from the 1930s into the 1950s. Comic books featuring Joe Palooka began in 1933 and continued through the 1950s.

Searching for assistants to work on the strip, Fisher hired (among others) Al Capp, who later achieved fame as the writer-cartoonist of Li'l Abner. While ghosting on Joe Palooka, Capp claimed to have created the storyline about a stupid musclebound hillbilly named “Big Leviticus”, who was an obvious prototype for the Li'l Abner character. When Capp quit Joe Palooka in 1934 to launch his own strip, Fisher badmouthed him to colleagues and editors, claiming that Capp had stolen his idea. For years, Fisher would bring the characters back to his strip, billing them as “the Original Hillbilly Characters” and advising readers not to be “fooled by imitations”.

It has long been taken for granted that the hillbilly-characters in Joe Palooka were the creations of Capp while he was ghosting Fisher's strip, and that Fisher's later denial of Capp's involvement in the strip was the result of professional jealousy. However, while there is no doubt that Capp did a substantial amount of work on Joe Palooka for several months, as an artist and probably also to some degree a writer, comics historians Denis Kitchen and Michael Schumacher have recently made a case that there is no way of knowing whether Capp or Fisher invented the hillbillies, in their biography Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary (Bloomsbury USA, 2013). They do suggest, however, that there is reason to doubt that Capp ghosted several weeks of Joe Palooka-strips entirely by himself.

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