Al Capp

Alfred Gerald Caplin (September 28, 1909 – November 5, 1979), better known as Al Capp, was an American cartoonist and humorist best known for the satirical comic strip ''Li'l Abner'', which he created in 1934 and continued writing and (with help from assistants) drawing until 1977. He also wrote the comic strips ''Abbie an' Slats'' (in the years 1937–45) and ''Long Sam'' (1954). He won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award in 1947 for Cartoonist of the Year, and their 1979 Elzie Segar Award, posthumously for his "unique and outstanding contribution to the profession of cartooning". Capp's comic strips dealt with urban experiences in the northern states of the USA until the year he introduced "Li'l Abner". Although Capp was from Connecticut, he spent 43 years writing about the fictional Southern town of Dogpatch, reaching an estimated 60 million readers in more than 900 American newspapers and 100 more papers in 28 countries internationally. M. Thomas Inge says Capp made a large personal fortune through the strip and "had a profound influence on the way the world viewed the American South".

Early life

Capp was born in New Haven, Connecticut, of East European Jewish heritage. He was the eldest child of Otto Philip Caplin (1885–1964) and Matilda (Davidson) Caplin (1884–1948). His brothers, Elliot and Jerome, were cartoonists, and his sister, Madeline, was a publicist. Capp's parents were both natives of Latvia whose families had migrated to New Haven in the 1880s. "My mother and father had been brought to this country from Russia when they were infants", wrote Capp in 1978. "Their fathers had found that the great promise of America was true – it was no crime to be a Jew." The Caplins were dirt-poor, and Capp later recalled stories of his mother going out in the night to sift through ash barrels for reusable bits of coal.

In August 1919, at the age of nine, Capp was run down by a trolley car and had his left leg amputated above the knee. According to his father Otto's unpublished autobiography, young Capp was not prepared for the amputation beforehand; having been in a coma for days, he suddenly awoke to discover that his leg had been removed. He was eventually given a prosthetic leg, but only learned to use it by adopting a slow way of walking which became increasingly painful as he grew older. The childhood tragedy of losing a leg likely helped shape Capp's cynical worldview, which was darker and more sardonic than that of the average newspaper cartoonist. "I was indignant as hell about that leg", he revealed in a November 1950 interview in ''Time'' magazine.

"The secret of how to live without resentment or embarrassment in a world in which I was different from everyone else", Capp philosophically wrote (in ''Life magazine'' on May 23, 1960), "was to be indifferent to that difference." The prevailing opinion among his friends was that Capp's Swiftian satire was, to some degree, a creatively channeled, compensatory response to his disability.

Capp's father, a failed businessman and an amateur cartoonist, introduced him to drawing as a form of therapy. He became quite proficient, advancing mostly on his own. Among his earliest influences were ''Punch'' cartoonist–illustrator Phil May and American comic strip cartoonists Tad Dorgan, Cliff Sterrett, Rube Goldberg, Rudolph Dirks, Fred Opper, Billy DeBeck, George McManus, and Milt Gross. At about this same time, Capp became a voracious reader. According to Capp's brother Elliot, Alfred had finished all of Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw by the time he turned 13. Among his childhood favorites were Dickens, Smollett, Mark Twain, Booth Tarkington, and later, Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman.

Capp spent five years at Bridgeport High School in Bridgeport, Connecticut, without receiving a diploma. He liked to joke about how he failed geometry for nine straight terms. His formal training came from a series of art schools in the New England area. Attending three of them in rapid succession, the impoverished Capp was thrown out of each for nonpayment of tuition—the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and Designers Art School in Boston—the last before launching his career. Capp already had decided to become a cartoonist. "I heard that Bud Fisher (creator of ''Mutt and Jeff'') got $3,000 a week and was constantly marrying French countesses", Capp said. "I decided that was for me."

In early 1932, Capp hitchhiked to New York City. He lived in "airless rat holes" in Greenwich Village and turned out advertising strips at $2 each while scouring the city hunting for jobs. He eventually found work at the Associated Press when he was 23 years old. By March 1932, Capp was drawing ''Colonel Gilfeather'', a single-panel, AP-owned property created in 1930 by Dick Dorgan. Capp changed the focus and title to ''Mister Gilfeather'' but soon grew to hate the feature. He left the Associated Press in September 1932. Before leaving, he met Milton Caniff and the two became lifelong friends. Capp moved to Boston and married Catherine Wingate Cameron, whom he had met earlier in art class. She died in 2006 at the age of 96.

Leaving his new wife with her parents in Amesbury, Massachusetts, he subsequently returned to New York in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression. "I was 23, I carried a mass of drawings, and I had nearly five dollars in my pocket. People were sleeping in alleys then, willing to work at anything." There he met Ham Fisher, who hired him to ghost on ''Joe Palooka''. During one of Fisher's extended vacations, Capp's ''Joe Palooka'' story arc introduced a stupid, coarse, oafish mountaineer named "Big Leviticus," a crude prototype. (Leviticus was much closer to Capp's later villains Lem and Luke Scragg than to the much more appealing and innocent Li'l Abner.)

Also during this period, Capp was working at night on samples for the strip that eventually became ''Li'l Abner''. He based his cast of characters on the authentic mountain-dwellers he met while hitchhiking through rural West Virginia and the Cumberland Valley as a teenager. (This was years before the Tennessee Valley Authority Act brought basic utilities such as electricity and running water to the region.) Leaving ''Joe Palooka'', Capp sold ''Li'l Abner'' to United Feature Syndicate (later known as United Media). The feature was launched on Monday, August 13, 1934, in eight North American newspapers—including the ''New York Mirror''—and was an immediate success. Alfred G. Caplin eventually became "Al Capp" because the syndicate felt the original would not fit in a cartoon frame. Capp had his name changed legally in 1949.

His younger brother, Elliot Caplin, also became a comic strip writer, best known for co-creating the soap opera strip ''The Heart of Juliet Jones'' with artist Stan Drake and conceiving the comic strip character ''Broom-Hilda'' with cartoonist Russell Myers. Elliot also authored several off-Broadway plays, including ''A Nickel for Picasso'' (1981), which was based on and dedicated to his mother and his famous brother.

''Li'l Abner''

What began as a hillbilly burlesque soon evolved into one of the most imaginative, popular, and well-drawn strips of the twentieth century. Featuring vividly outlandish characters, bizarre situations, and equal parts suspense, slapstick, irony, satire, black humor, and biting social commentary, ''Li'l Abner'' is considered a classic of the genre. The comic strip stars Li'l Abner Yokum—the simple-minded, loutish but good-natured, and eternally innocent hayseed who lives with his parents—scrawny but superhuman Mammy Yokum, and shiftless, childlike Pappy Yokum.

"Yokum" was a combination of ''yokel'' and ''hokum'', although Capp established a deeper meaning for the name during a series of visits around 1965–1970 with comics historians George E. Turner and Michael H. Price:

"It's phonetic Hebrew—that's what it is, all right—and that's what I was getting at with the name Yokum, more so than any attempt to sound ''hickish''. That was a fortunate coincidence, of course, that the name should pack a backwoods connotation. But it's a godly conceit, really, playing off a godly name—''Joachim'' means 'God's determination', something like that—that also happens to have a rustic ring to it."

The Yokums live in the backwater hamlet of Dogpatch, Kentucky. Described by its creator as "an average stone-age community", Dogpatch mostly consists of hopelessly ramshackle log cabins, pine trees, "tarnip" fields, and "hawg" wallows. Whatever energy Abner had went into evading the marital goals of Daisy Mae Scragg, his sexy, well-endowed, but virtuous girlfriend, until Capp finally gave in to reader pressure and allowed the couple to marry. This newsworthy event made the cover of ''Life'' on March 31, 1952.

Capp peopled his comic strip with an assortment of memorable characters, including Marryin' Sam, Hairless Joe, Lonesome Polecat, Evil-Eye Fleegle, General Bullmoose, Lena the Hyena, Senator Jack S. Phogbound (Capp's caricature of the anti-New Deal Dixiecrats), the ''(shudder!)'' Scraggs, Available Jones, Nightmare Alice, Earthquake McGoon, and a host of others. Especially notable, certainly from a G.I. point of view, are the beautiful, full-figured women such as Daisy Mae, Wolf Gal, Stupefyin' Jones, and Moonbeam McSwine (a caricature of his wife Catherine, aside from the dirt), all of whom found their way onto the painted noses of bomber planes during World War II and the Korean War. Perhaps Capp's most popular creations were the Shmoos, creatures whose incredible usefulness and generous nature made them a threat to civilization as we know it.

Another famous character was Joe Btfsplk, who wants to be a loving friend but is "the world's worst jinx", bringing bad luck to all those nearby. Btfsplk (his name is "pronounced" by simply blowing a "raspberry" or Bronx cheer) always has an iconic dark cloud over his head.

Dogpatch residents regularly combat the likes of city slickers, business tycoons, government officials, and intellectuals with their homespun simplicity. Situations often take the characters to other destinations, including New York City, Washington, D.C., Hollywood, tropical islands, the moon, Mars, and some purely fanciful worlds of Capp's invention, including El Passionato, Kigmyland, The Republic of Crumbumbo, Skunk Hollow, The Valley of the Shmoon, Planets Pincus Number 2 and 7, and a miserable frozen wasteland known as Lower Slobbovia, a pointedly political satire of backward nations and foreign diplomacy that remains a contemporary reference.

According to cultural historian Anthony Harkins:

"Indeed, ''Li'l Abner'' incorporates such a panoply of characters and ideas that it defies summary. Yet though Capp's storylines often wandered far afield, his hillbilly setting remained a central touchstone, serving both as a microcosm and a distorting carnival mirror of broader American society."

The strip's popularity grew from an original eight papers to eventually more than 900. At its peak, ''Li'l Abner'' was estimated to have been read daily in the United States by 60 to 70 million people (the U.S. population at the time was only 180 million), with adult readers far outnumbering children. Many communities, high schools, and colleges staged Sadie Hawkins dances patterned after the similar annual event in the strip.

Li'l Abner has one odd design quirk that has puzzled readers for decades: the part in his hair always faces the viewer, no matter which direction Abner is facing. In response to the question "Which side does Abner part his hair on?", Capp would answer: "Both." Capp said he finally found the right "look" for Li'l Abner with Henry Fonda's character Dave Tolliver in '' The Trail of the Lonesome Pine'' (1936).

In later years, Capp always claimed to have effectively created the miniskirt, when he first put one on Daisy Mae in the 1930s.

Parodies, toppers, and alternate strips

''Li'l Abner'' also features a comic strip-within-the-strip: ''Fearless Fosdick'' is a parody of Chester Gould's ''Dick Tracy''. It first appeared in 1942, and proved so popular that it ran intermittently during the next 35 years. Gould was parodied personally in the series as cartoonist "Lester Gooch"—the diminutive, much-harassed and occasionally deranged "creator" of Fosdick. The style of the ''Fosdick'' sequences closely mimicks ''Tracy'', including the urban setting, the outrageous villains, the galloping mortality rate, the crosshatched shadows, and even the lettering style. In 1952, Fosdick was the star of his own short-lived puppet show on NBC, featuring the Mary Chase marionettes.

Besides ''Dick Tracy'', Capp parodied many other comic strips in ''Li'l Abner''—including ''Steve Canyon'', ''Superman'' (at least twice; first as "Jack Jawbreaker" in 1947, and again in 1966 as "Chickensouperman"), ''Mary Worth'' as "Mary Worm", ''Peanuts'' , '' Rex Morgan, M.D.'', ''Little Annie Rooney'', and ''Little Orphan Annie'' (in which Punjab became "Punjbag," an oleaginous slob). ''Fearless Fosdick''—and Capp's other spoofs such as "Little Fanny Gooney" (1952) and "Jack Jawbreaker"—were almost certainly an early inspiration for Harvey Kurtzman's ''Mad Magazine'', which began in 1952 as a comic book that specifically parodied other comics in the same distinctive style and subversive manner.

Capp also lampooned popular recording idols of the day, such as Elvis Presley ("Hawg McCall", 1957), Liberace ("Loverboynik", 1956), the Beatles ("the Beasties", 1964)—and in 1944, Frank Sinatra. "Sinatra was the first great public figure I ever wrote about," Capp once said. "I called him 'Hal Fascinatra.' I remember my news syndicate was so worried about what his reaction might be, and we were all surprised when he telephoned and told me how thrilled he was with it. He always made it a point to send me a spent condom whenever he happened to see me in a restaurant..." (from ''Frank Sinatra, My Father'' by Nancy Sinatra, 1985). On the other hand, Liberace was "cut to the quick" over Loverboynik, according to Capp, and even threatened legal action—as would Joan Baez later, over "Joanie Phoanie" in 1967.

Capp was just as likely to parody himself; his self-caricature made frequent, tongue-in-cheek appearances in ''Li'l Abner''. The gag was often at his own expense, as in the above 1951 sequence showing Capp's interaction with "fans" (see excerpt), or in his 1955 Disneyland parody, "Hal Yappland". Just about anything could be a target for Capp's satire—in one storyline Li'l Abner is revealed to be the missing link between ape and man. In another, the search is on in Dogpatch for a pair of missing socks knitted by the first president of the United States.

In addition to creating ''Li'l Abner'', Capp also co-created two other newspaper strips: ''Abbie an' Slats'' with magazine illustrator Raeburn van Buren in 1937, and ''Long Sam'' with cartoonist Bob Lubbers in 1954, as well as the Sunday " topper" strips ''Washable Jones'', ''Small Fry'' (a.k.a. ''Small Change''), and ''Advice fo' Chillun''.

Critical recognition

According to comics historian Coulton Waugh, a 1947 poll of newspaper readers who claimed they ignored the comics page altogether revealed that many confessed to making a single exception: ''Li'l Abner''. "When ''Li'l Abner'' made its debut in 1934, the vast majority of comic strips were designed chiefly to amuse or thrill their readers. Capp turned that world upside-down by routinely injecting politics and social commentary into ''Li'l Abner''. The strip was the first to regularly introduce characters and story lines having nothing to do with the nominal stars of the strip. The technique—as invigorating as it was unorthodox—was later adopted by cartoonists such as Walt Kelly Pogo''.html"_;"title="Pogo_(comics).html"_;"title="'Pogo_(comics)">Pogo''">Pogo_(comics).html"_;"title="'Pogo_(comics)">Pogo''and_Garry_Trudeau.html" ;"title="Pogo_(comics)">Pogo''.html" ;"title="Pogo_(comics).html" ;"title="'Pogo (comics)">Pogo''">Pogo_(comics).html" ;"title="'Pogo (comics)">Pogo''and Garry Trudeau">Pogo_(comics)">Pogo''.html" ;"title="Pogo_(comics).html" ;"title="'Pogo (comics)">Pogo''">Pogo_(comics).html" ;"title="'Pogo (comics)">Pogo''and Garry Trudeau [''Doonesbury'']", wrote comic strip historian Rick Marschall. According to Marschall, ''Li'l Abner'' gradually evolved into a broad satire of human nature. In his book ''America's Great Comic Strip Artists'' (1989), Marschall's analysis revealed a decidedly misanthropic subtext.

Over the years, ''Li'l Abner'' has been adapted to radio, animated cartoons, stage production, motion pictures, and television. Capp has been compared, at various times, to Mark Twain, Dostoevski, Jonathan Swift, Lawrence Sterne, and Rabelais. Fans of the strip ranged from novelist John Steinbeck—who called Capp "possibly the best writer in the world today" in 1953 and even earnestly recommended him for the Nobel Prize in literature—to media critic and theorist Marshall McLuhan, who considered Capp "the only robust satirical force in American life". John Updike, comparing Abner to a "hillbilly Candide", added that the strip's "richness of social and philosophical commentary approached the Voltairean". Charlie Chaplin, William F. Buckley, Al Hirschfeld, Harpo Marx, Russ Meyer, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ralph Bakshi, Shel Silverstein, Hugh Downs, Gene Shalit, Frank Cho, Daniel Clowes, and (reportedly) even Queen Elizabeth have confessed to being fans of ''Li'l Abner''.

''Li'l Abner'' was also the subject of the first book-length scholarly assessment of an American comic strip ever published. ''Li'l Abner: A Study in American Satire'' by Arthur Asa Berger (Twayne, 1969) contained serious analyses of Capp's narrative technique, his use of dialogue, self-caricature, and grotesquerie, the place of ''Li'l Abner'' in American satire, and the significance of social criticism and the graphic image. "One of the few strips ever taken seriously by students of American culture," wrote Professor Berger, "''Li'l Abner'' is worth studying ... because of Capp's imagination and artistry, and because of the strip's very obvious social relevance." It was reprinted by the University Press of Mississippi in 1994.

The 1940s and 1950s

During World War II and for many years afterward, Capp worked tirelessly going to hospitals to entertain patients, especially to cheer recent amputees and explain to them that the loss of a limb did not mean an end to a happy and productive life. Making no secret of his own disability, Capp openly joked about his prosthetic leg his whole life. In 1946, Capp created a special full-color comic book, ''Al Capp by Li'l Abner'', to be distributed by the Red Cross to encourage the thousands of amputee veterans returning from the war. Capp also was involved with the Sister Kenny Foundation, which pioneered new treatments for polio in the 1940s. Serving in his capacity as honorary chairman, Capp made public appearances on its behalf for years, contributed free artwork for its annual fundraising appeals, and entertained crippled and paraplegic children in children's hospitals with inspirational pep talks, humorous stories, and sketches.

In 1940, an RKO movie adaptation starred Granville Owen (later known as Jeff York) as Li'l Abner, with Buster Keaton taking the role of Lonesome Polecat, and featuring a title song with lyrics by Milton Berle. A successful musical comedy adaptation of the strip opened on Broadway at the St. James Theater on November 15, 1956, and had a long run of 693 performances, followed by a nationwide tour. The stage musical, with music and lyrics by Gene de Paul and Johnny Mercer, was adapted into a Technicolor motion picture at Paramount in 1959 by producer Norman Panama and director Melvin Frank, with a score by Nelson Riddle. Several performers repeated their Broadway roles in the film, most memorably Julie Newmar as Stupefyin' Jones and Stubby Kaye as Marryin' Sam.

Other highlights of that decade included the 1942 debut of Fearless Fosdick as Abner's "ideel" (hero); the 1946 Lena the Hyena Contest, in which a hideous Lower Slobbovian gal was ultimately revealed in the harrowing winning entry (as judged by Frank Sinatra, Boris Karloff, and Salvador Dalí) drawn by noted cartoonist Basil Wolverton

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