Al Capp (1909–1979)

Wouldn't Al Capp have had fun in today's world? Of course, in today's world, newspapers and thus the comic strips found in newspapers have shrinking importance, so we should be glad Capp lived when he did (1909-1979). Still, it is interesting to wonder what he would have made of the soap opera that the national political scene has become.

Capp had a knack for making sharp political commentary while seemingly drawing his Li'l Abner comic strip about absurd happenings in a never-never land show more called Dogwatch. In “The Best of Li'l Abner,” a 1978 collection I just read again, we find tales about a girl called Boyless Bailey who because of a curse may remain boyless even with the Sadie Hawkins Day race approaching, another girl whose lips can fry a boy's brains and a plague of turnip termites that could bring starvation to Dogwatch. Yet Capp always managed to insert just enough mid-20th-century reality into these outlandish stories to make them read like current events.

"A satirist has only one gift," Capp wrote in an introduction, "he sees where the fraud and fakery are. I turned around and let the other side have it." For Capp, the "other side" often actually was the other side, not the conservatives who were usually the ones targeted by satirists but those on the left. This was especially true during the turbulent Sixties when he again and again targeted campus radicals and those college administrators who seemed willing to let them get away with anything.

Much of Capp's humor had to do with playing with names, which may seem like junior high school except that he did it so well. In this book we find a body builder named Stanley Strongnose, a plastic surgeon named Rex Moosehead, a Liberace-like pianist named Loverboynik, a long-haired singer named Hawg McCall, a cartoon busybody named Mary Worm, a chubby movie star named Anita Eatburg, a pork-and-bean executive named J. Roaringham Fatback, an Indian princess named Minihahaskirt, an advice columnist named Hazel Homewrecker (actually a bigamist named B. Fowler McNest), a wild boar named Porknoy (who naturally has a complaint) and a TV talk show host named Tommy Wholesome.

Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson and other political figures of the day made cameo appearances in the comic. It was all great fun. show less

With a bizarre introduction by [[Harlan Ellison]], this has the 1948 and 1959 Shmoo infestations of the U.S. of A. I was reminded of both what I like and what I didn't like about L'il Abner. And an interesting reminder that while we were in them, they weren't "the good old days." If you don't know shmoos, you should read this.

Weird that Al Capp chose these as his best. Very few of the strips feature Li'l Abner in any meaningful role, and the storylines often have gaps of missing strips. I'm confident there are better compilations out there.

Al Capp's memoirs, in a series of essays, with a foreword by John Updike. Capp was one of the more overrated cartoonists in American history, and obnoxious and reactionary as a political humorist, but he did have an undeniable impact on a large segment of America, and his strip, "Li'l Abner", was undeniably if inexplicably popular.