Everything about Al Capp totally explained
Al Capp (
September 28,
1909 –
November 5,
1979) was an American
cartoonist best known for the
satiric comic strip,
Li'l Abner. He also wrote the comic strips
Abbie and Slats and
Long Sam. He won the 1947
National Cartoonist Society Reuben Award for the comic strip
Li'l Abner, and their 1979
Elzie Segar Award posthumously.
Early life
Born
Alfred Gerald Caplin of Jewish heritage, Capp was the eldest child of Otto and Tillie Caplin, and a native of
New Haven,
Connecticut. He lost his right leg in a trolley accident at the age of nine.
Capp spent five years at Bridgeport High School in
Bridgeport, Connecticut without receiving a diploma. The cartoonist liked to tell how he failed geometry for nine straight terms.
Ten years later, A. G. Caplin went to New York and found work drawing
Mister Gilfeather, a one-panel,
AP-owned property. He did this long enough to hate the feature and meet
Milton Caniff before leaving town abruptly, moving to Boston and marrying Catherine Wingate Cameron (whom he'd met earlier).
Leaving his new wife with her parents in
Amesbury, Massachusetts, he subsequently returned to New York. There he met
Ham Fisher, who hired him to help on
Joe Palooka.
During one of Fisher's extended vacations, Capp's
Joe Palooka story arc featured a stupid, strong hillbilly named Big Leviticus, a prototype for Li'l Abner. And, during this period, Capp was also working on samples for the strip that would become
Li'l Abner.
Leaving
Joe Palooka, Capp sold
Li'l Abner to the United Features Syndicate and the feature was launched on Monday August 13, 1934.
His younger brother
Elliot Caplin also became a comic strip creator, best known for writing the
soap opera strip
The Heart of Juliet Jones.
Li'l Abner
The comic strip starred Li'l Abner Yokum, the lazy, dumb, but good-natured and strong hillbilly who lived in
Dogpatch with Mammy and Pappy Yokum. Whatever energy he'd went into evading the marital goals of Daisy Mae, his well-endowed girlfriend, until Capp finally gave in to reader pressure and allowed the couple to marry. This was such big news that the happy couple made the cover of
Life magazine.
Abner's home town of Dogpatch was peopled with an assortment of memorable characters, including Marryin' Sam, Wolf Gal, Lena the Hyena, Indian Lonesome Polecat, and a host of others, notably the beautiful, full-figured women Stupefyin' Jones and Moonbeam McSwine. Perhaps Capp's most popular creations were the
Shmoo, creatures whose incredible usefulness and generous nature made them a threat to civilization as we know it. Another famous character was
Joe Btfsplk, who wanted to be a loving friend but was "the world's worst
jinx", bringing bad
luck to all those nearby. Btfsplk always had a small dark cloud over his head.
Li'l Abner also featured a comic-strip within the comic-strip,
Fearless Fosdick (a parody of
Dick Tracy).
The Dogpatch residents regularly combatted the likes of city slickers, business tycoons, government officials and intellectuals with their homespun wisdom and ingenuity. Situations often took the characters to other parts of the globe, including
New York City, tropical islands, and a miserable frozen land of Capp's invention, "Lower Slobbovia."
At its peak,
Li'l Abner was read daily by 70 million Americans (when the US population was only 180 million). Many communities, high schools and colleges staged "
Sadie Hawkins Day" events, patterned after the similar annual event in the strip.
The 1940s and 1950s
During and after
World War II, Capp worked without pay going to
hospitals to entertain patients, especially to cheer recent amputees and explain to them that the loss of a limb didn't mean an end to a happy and productive life.
In 1940, a
motion picture adaptation starred Granville Owen (later known as
Jeff York) as Li'l Abner, with
Buster Keaton taking the role of Lonesome Polecat. A successful musical comedy adaptation of the strip opened on
Broadway November 15,
1956 and had a long run of 693 performances. The stage musical was adapted into a
motion picture in
1959 by producer
Norman Panama and director
Melvin Frank with several performers repeating their Broadway roles.
In one run of strips in 1957, Capp lampooned the comic strip
Mary Worth as "Mary Worm", depicting the title character as a nosy do-gooder. Allan Saunders, the creator of the
Mary Worth strip, returned Capp's fire with the introduction of the character "Hal Rapp", a foul-tempered, ill-mannered cartoonist. Later, it was revealed to be a collaborative hoax that Capp and Saunders had cooked up.
(External Link
)
The '60s & '70s
Capp and a platoon of assistants kept the strip and all of its advertising, promotional, and specialty work going throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. No matter how much help he had, Capp insisted on drawing and inking the faces and hands- especially of Abner and Daisy Mae- himself, and his distinctive touch is often discernible. As is usual with collaborative efforts in comic strips, his name was the only one credited, although- sensitive to his own experience working on
Joe Palooka- Capp frequently drew attention to his own assistants in interviews and publicity pieces.
Frank Frazetta, later famous as a
fantasy artist, worked as a "ghost-artist" on the strips from 1955 to 1962, primarily tight-pencilling the Sunday pages from studio roughs. This work was recently collected by
Dark Horse Books in a four-volume hardcover series titled
Al Capp's Li'l Abner: The Frazetta Years. After 1962, Capp wanted to have Frazetta continue work on the strip for a pay cut of 50%. "[Capp] said he'd cut the salary in half. Goodbye. That was that.
I said goodbye." (Frazetta: Painting with Fire). Frazetta returned briefly a few years later to draw a public service comic book called "Li'l Abner and the Creatures from Drop-Outer Space".
In the '60s, Capp's politics swung from
liberal to
conservative, and instead of caricaturing big business types, he began spoofing
counterculture icons such as
Joan Baez (in the character of "Joanie Phoanie", a wealthy folksinger who offers an impoverished orphanage one million dollars' worth of "protest songs"
(External Link)). He also attacked student political groups, such as the
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) as "Students Wildly Indignant About Nearly Everything" (SWINE). He became a popular speaker on college campuses during the era, attacking anti-war protesters and demonstrators, including
John Lennon and
Yoko Ono at their
Bed-In for Peace.
(External Link) His increasingly angry ad libs at his campus speeches and during TV appearances cost him his semi-regular spot on
NBC's
Tonight Show. Another target was Senator
Teddy Kennedy, parodied as Senator O. Noble McGesture, resident of "Hyideelsport." The town name is a play on
Hyannisport, Massachusetts, where a number of the Kennedy clan have lived.
In 1968 a theme-park called
Dogpatch USA opened at
Marble Falls,
Arkansas based on Capp's work and with his support. The park was a popular attraction during the 1970s but was abandoned in 1993 due to financial difficulties. As of late 2005, the area once devoted to a live action facsimile of Dogpatch has been heavily stripped by vandals and souvenir hunters and is today slowly being reclaimed by the surrounding Arkansas wilderness.
In 1971, Capp was charged with attempted adultery by a female student at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. Capp pleaded
no contest to a reduced charge and withdrew from public speaking. The resulting bad publicity led to hundreds of papers dropping his comic strip
(External Link).
Years later on
Inside the Actor's Studio,
Goldie Hawn said that Capp had sexually harassed her during her auditions for the
1964 New York World's Fair. Other actresses who have made similar allegations include
Grace Kelly and
Edie Adams.
Li'l Abner lasted until 1977, when Capp retired. A lifelong smoker, Capp died two years later from
emphysema, at his home in
South Hampton, New Hampshire.
Besides his use of the comic strip to voice his opinions and display his humor, Capp was a popular speaker at universities and on television, including frequent appearances on
The Tonight Show from the
1950s to the
1970s. One memorable story, in conversation with
Johnny Carson, was about his meeting with then-president
Eisenhower. As he was ushered into the
Oval Office, his
prosthetic leg collapsed and he entered the room in a pile of mechanical rubble on the floor. The president immediately turned to an aide and said, "Call
Walter Reed (Hospital), or maybe
Bethesda," to which Capp replied "Hell no, just call a good local mechanic!"
For further reading
- Sheridan, Martin, Comics and Their Creators (1942)
Footnotes
Further Information
Get more info on 'Al Capp'.
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