Dark Horse Comics issued a limited edition Fearless Fosdick statue in 2001 (complete with a cannonball-sized hole through his midsection), #17 in their line of Classic Comic Characters figures. Various nostalgic reproductions of Wildroot advertising tin signs have also been recently available. Influence and legacyFearless Fosdick was almost certainly Harvey Kurtzman's major inspiration for creating his irreverent Mad magazine, which began in 1952 as a comic book that specifically parodied other comic books and strips in a similar style and similarly subversive manner. By the time EC Comics published Mad #1, Capp had been doing Fearless Fosdick for nearly a decade. Parallels between Li'l Abner and the early Mad are unmistakable: the incongruous use of mock-Yiddish slang terms, the nose-thumbing disdain for pop cultural icons, the rampant and pervasive sick humor, the pointedly subversive tone, the total disregard for sentiment and the extremely broad visual styling. Even the trademark comic signs that clutter the backdrops of Will Elder's panels would seem to have a precedent in Li'l Abner, in the headquarters of Dogpatch entrepreneur Available Jones. Tellingly, Kurtzman resisted parodying either Li'l Abner or Dick Tracy in the comic book Mad, despite their prominence. (Both Li'l Abner and Dick Tracy were later satirized in EC's Panic, "the only authorized imitation of Mad," edited by Al Feldstein.) Elements of Fearless Fosdick can be gleaned in Bob Clampett's classic Warner Bros. cartoon The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946), as when avid "fan" Daffy Duck makes a panicked dash to the mailbox to retrieve the latest comic book, just like Li'l Abner often did. Later, after Daffy portrays his alter ego "Duck Twacy" in a manic nightmare sequence (complete with bullet-riddled corpses and "impossible" villains with names like "Jukebox Jaw," "Pickle Puss," "88 Teeth" and "Neon Noodle"), he "wakes up" in a rural, Dogpatch-like setting—on a pig farm. Cartoonist/illustrator Frank Cho, a Li'l Abner fan, occasionally references Fearless Fosdick in his comic strip Liberty Meadows in the guise of "Fearless Detective Richard Stacey." Fosdick has also turned up in Zippy the Pinhead by Bill Griffith. Johnny Hart, creator of B.C. and The Wizard of Id, also cited Fearless Fosdick as one of his early inspirations. Comedian Chuck McCann portrayed a decidedly Fosdick-like Dick Tracy parody character, complete with stage makeup, named "Detective Dick H. Dump of Bunko Squad" on his irreverent WNEW-TV kids show in the sixties. Beyond the strip-within-a-stripFearless Fosdick invaded the