himself. The Capp-Fisher feud was well known in cartooning circles, and it became personal and vitriolic as Capp's strip eclipsed Joe Palooka in popularity. In the 1930s, to replace Capp, Fisher hired away Capp's top assistant, Moe Leff, along with Phil Boyle and a letterer. All three continued to work for Fisher for two decades. Fisher, Leff and Boyle all collaborated on the art, with Leff drawing the figures and Fisher doing the heads. Leff also contributed to scripting the strip. After Fisher underwent plastic surgery, Capp once included a racehorse in L'il Abner named Ham's Nose Bob. Traveling in the same social circles, the two men engaged in a 20-year mutual vendetta, as described in 1998 by Jay Maeder in the Daily News: "They crossed paths often, in the midtown watering holes and at National Cartoonists Society banquets, and the city's gossip columns were full of their snarling public donnybrooks." In 1950, Capp wrote an article for The Atlantic entitled "I Remember Monster". The article recounted Capp's days working for an unnamed "benefactor" with a miserly, swinish personality, who Capp claimed was a never-ending source of inspiration when it came time to create a new unregenerate villain for his comic strip. Retaliation Fisher retaliated clumsily, falsely accusing Capp of sneaking obscenities into his comic strip. Submitting examples of L'il Abner to United Feature Syndicate (Capp's syndicate) and to the New York courts, Fisher claimed pornographic images were hidden in the background art. Capp was able to refute the accusation by simply showing the original printed strips. According to the recollection of Fisher's friend Morris Weiss, "What Ham Fisher did was to take a lot of L'il Abner strips that were suggestive. In one case, he cut off the end of one strip, which made it look more suggestive than others. He did not doctor any art on the strips... The story that Ham doctored the artwork came from Al Capp, of course." Capp's brother Elliot Caplin recalls the doctored strips as having been drawn upon, with additions of lines and shadows intended to simulate body parts. In 1954, as Capp was applying for a Boston television license, the FCC received an anonymous packet of pornographic L'il Abner drawings. The National Cartoonists Society, an organization that Fisher had helped to found, convened an ethics hearing, and Fisher was expelled. Fisher became the only man ever sanctioned for "conduct unbecoming a