It was also very funny. Readers in Philadelphia or New York or Kansas City could look at the strip, work their way through the mangled dialogue, issue their belly laughs, and feel superior to the knotheads from Dogpatch—until they realized, as happened on so many occasions, that the joke was on them.
United Feature and Capp worried, at least in the strip’s early days, how those calling the South their home might react to the bastardization of their idiom and lampooning of their culture, so no attempts were made to market the strip in the southern states. But after a southern editor, while on a trip to the North, saw “Li’l Abner” in a newspaper, judged it to be unbearably funny, and signed on for the strip in his own paper, the floodgates opened. Papers from all over the South started subscribing, and, to Capp’s surprise, there were no letters threatening his good health. The South, he surmised with great pleasure, found the strip as funny as readers elsewhere. Encouraged by the response, he invented even more outrageous new words and expressions.
His characters’ faces were also unforgettable. Capp had a keen interest in faces from his earliest days as an art student, and when he drew them he more than adequately compensated for whatever he lacked as a draftsman drawing backgrounds, machinery, animals, or even human figures. He molded them carefully and thoughtfully. Capp openly admitted that the models for some of his characters were actual people, some of them celebrities, some just people he saw on the street. Their expressions, however, came from an almost scientific understanding of the connection between facial muscles and emotion. Even with first-rate assistants, Capp insisted on drawing his characters’ faces. He kept a mirror affixed to his drawing table, and whenever in doubt about how to capture a facial expression, he’d look in the mirror and contort his face to reach the desired effect.
Capp improved as an artist over the long run of the strip, and he was always his own best audience: if he could laugh at what he created, he felt confident that others would, too. The strip’s rapid rise toward the top in circulation numbers convinced him that he was correct.
One syndicated comic strip was not enough for Capp. Ideas rampaged through his mind; “Li’l Abner” could not accommodate all the stories and adventures. Capp and his staff stayed busy with the daily and Sunday strips, but Capp’s ambitions would not be harnessed. In 1936 he ghostwrote scripts for “Joe Jinks,” a strip originated in 1918 but abandoned in the early 1930s by Vic Forsythe. Capp’s earnings from that freelance assignment for United Feature Syndicate augmented his growing revenue from “Li’l Abner,” but “Joe Jinks” was not a property he was emotionally invested in, nor did his ghosting give him any meaningful leverage with United Feature. He wondered what kind of money he might be earning if he created another successful, nationally distributed strip of his own. He began plotting ideas.
In 1936 Capp had also hired a trio of assistants, Walter Johnston, Andy Amato, and Harvey Curtis. Johnston’s salary started at forty dollars a week, Amato received thirty-five, and Curtis, whose role was much more limited, started at ten. They would remain loyal to Capp for decades, both because close relationships developed between them, and because Capp, unlike many other bosses of the day, provided incentives and bonuses for his key employees.
Key assistants Walter Johnston, left, and Andy Amato mockingly disapprove their boss’s gag in this posed photo. Al Capp was relatively generous with his core staff, and they remained loyal for many years.
All three were the kind of characters Capp might have created for “Li’l Abner.” Amato was the most versatile of the group, and he had the storytelling ability to have created his own strip, if he had been so inclined. Always armed with an inexpensive cigar, a quip for any occasion, and the ability to add wild details to Capp’s stories, Amato became Capp’s right-hand man. Johnston, the best pure draftsman, was invaluable because of his ability to draw nearly any kind of machine, vehicle, or gadget. Unlike Amato, whose manic energy fueled the studio, Johnston was quiet and serious. Curtis, who lived with his mother and had a gun fetish, had a skepticism that Capp could admire; his job was to work on backgrounds, do the lettering, draw borders, fill in blacks, and sign Capp’s name to the strip. Capp always wrote the scripts, penciled the preliminary layouts, stressing the primary bodies, and inked the main characters’ heads. He had the final say on the continuities.
Even with the three new men on board, Capp was realistic enough to admit that he and his assistants would not be able to produce yet another feature running daily and Sundays. It was simply too much work. He had to find someone else to team up with.
Capp pondered the possibility of dividing the duties: he would provide the scripts, and someone else could produce the art. He put together several weeks’ worth of scripts and contacted Raeburn Van Buren, a first-rate magazine illustrator living on Long Island. Capp had seen Van Buren’s work in the Saturday Evening Post, and it captured both the humor and the drama that he envisioned for the strip. The two agreed to meet in New York City.
Van Buren had grown up in Kansas City, Missouri, and had worked as a sketch artist for the Kansas City Star. The demands of the job forced him to learn to sketch very quickly, whether he was depicting a courtroom scene or a raging industrial fire. In a half hour, he could do a pen-and-ink sketch that would take others hours to finish. In addition to this, the Star’s art director, Harry Wood, had taught him how to draw comics.
This was not how Van Buren hoped to use his artistic talents, though. He moved to New York and attended the Art Students League, but soon discovered that, because of his time at the Kansas City Star, he was much further along in his education than his fellow students. He found freelance work illustrating for the pulp magazines, earning a pittance but gaining a fortune in experience. He then moved on to more prestigious publications such as Red Book and Collier’s, and eventually found regular assignments with the Saturday Evening Post, Life, and other magazines. It was a living, but a tough one requiring a lot of hustling in a very competitive field. He yearned for a single, stable source of income.
Still, when he met Al Capp, he wanted nothing to do with his comic strip proposal. Capp tried to persuade him that moving away from magazine illustration would be an intelligent decision.
“He emphasized that radio and eventually TV would kill the fiction magazines that I’d been working for,” Van Buren explained in a 1980 interview. “He claimed that now was the time to get into something that wouldn’t be hurt by the coming changes.”
Unfazed by Van Buren’s initial rejection, Capp continued to develop the strip, hoping to impress him with more material. His premise for the strip was simple: Aubrey Eustace Scrapple—“Slats”—was a tough, streetwise kid from New York, recently orphaned and shipped to the small, fictitious town of Crabtree Corners, where he would be living with his much older cousin, Abigail “Abbie” Scrapple. Capp wrote the scripts for fourteen weeks’ worth of strips and shipped them to Van Buren.
Van Buren liked what he read. He returned a batch of sketches of the primary characters, and over the next couple of months, he and Capp honed the artwork, characters, and storyline into something they could present to a syndicate editor. The two exchanged letters about the strip’s direction and the way the characters should look, but Capp left most of the decisions about the art to Van Buren. Capp told Van Buren that he initially intended the strip to focus on the Abbie character, but the longer he worked on the script, the more appealing the Slats character had become. This, he claimed, was the way it had gone with “Li’l Abner.”
“When the idea for working on the strip ‘Li’l Abner’ first dawned on me,” Capp wrote in a letter to Van Buren, “there was no Li’l Abner at all. The central character was ‘Daisy Mae’—a dumb, beautiful blonde hillbilly. Li’l Abner himself was injected to provide love interest.”
Capp never repeated this account in any interviews or other letters, so it very well could be that he was fabricating a story to give Van Buren the feeling that the strip, which he was calling “Abbie an’ Slats,�
�� could evolve into something as successful as “Li’l Abner.”
Neither Capp nor Van Buren was satisfied with the length of time the development process took, but they were eventually confident that their proposed strip was ready to show to one of the syndicates.
“We took them over to King Features, where we asked to see the legendary Joe Connolly,” Van Buren recalled. “However, he was out so Al said, ‘United Feature has been pretty good to me with “Li’l Abner”—let’s go over there.’ Fortunately, United gobbled it up right away.”
“Abbie an’ Slats,” running Monday through Saturday, hit the newspapers on July 7, 1937, to very enthusiastic response. The strip carried only Van Buren’s name, at the demand of United Feature. The syndicate wanted two separate entities, and would complain from time to time when storylines in the two strips were too similar to each other. The new strip was a success in its own right, and the number of subscribing newspapers grew. A Sunday version of “Abbie an’ Slats” debuted on January 15, 1939.
Capp would stay with “Abbie an’ Slats” until 1945, writing all the continuities for the daily and Sunday strips, though he was chronically late getting scripts to an increasingly irritated Van Buren. “Li’l Abner” always came first. When he finally stepped away from “Abbie an’ Slats,” he turned his writing duties over to someone he already knew and trusted: he handed the job to his brother Elliott. After college, Elliott was constantly trying to break into the comics business, with little success. “Abbie an’ Slats” offered him an entry.
On Saturday, November 13, 1937, Capp ended his week of “Li’l Abner” strips with the customary cliffhanger. In this case, it also signaled the beginning of a new story cycle. Capp promised a story about a “strange mountain custom—Sadie Hawkins Day.” Li’l Abner, away from Dogpatch through the last story cycle, felt honor-bound to return to his home for the event.
“I would always begin my stories with ‘What if …?’ ” Capp explained later. “What if there were a special day in Dogpatch in which any bachelor, caught by any lady before sundown, must marry her (except for ladies over a hundred, who are entitled to any boy they want)? What if we all know that Daisy Mae is incurably smitten with Abner and will die if anyone else nabs him?”
Capp offered the history of the tradition in six panels, beginning in the Monday, November 17, strip and concluding the following day. According to the legend, Sadie Hawkins had been the extremely plain, if not downright ugly, daughter of Hekzebiah Hawkins, one of the first settlers in Dogpatch.
As the years passed and Sadie was still living at home, with no prospects of dating, let alone marrying, Hekzebiah hatched a plan: all the single men in Dogpatch would gather in the town square, and a race would be staged. The men would be given a fair head start, and then Sadie would be allowed to pursue them. If she caught one of the eligible bachelors, she could marry him. Sadie Hawkins had snared her man, and the event became an annual affair, staged every November for all single men and women.
The Sadie Hawkins Day tradition debuted in “Li’l Abner” in November 1937. This fictional event immediately spawned hundreds of actual Sadie Hawkins Day celebrations across America.
Readers loved it. These were days long before women’s liberation, when custom largely dictated that a woman should passively wait for a man to express interest in her; the idea of turning the tables on the men was enormously appealing. Letters poured in, with readers demanding to know more about the Dogpatch festivities. The University of Tennessee staged its own event, based on the strip, in which students, dressed up like “Li’l Abner” characters, participated in a foot race, and if a coed caught a young man, he was obliged to take her to the newly minted Sadie Hawkins dance. Such events soon spread to other schools.
In the years ahead, Capp would reprise the Sadie Hawkins race in “Li’l Abner” at about the same time every November, though there was never a specific date assigned to the festivities. Li’l Abner had his close calls, but he always managed to escape Daisy Mae’s clutches.
“We would always find a way to get him out of it,” he said, “but one time there was no way to get him out. No human way. We sat around, paralyzed—until it came to me. ‘This is our world,’ I cried. ‘We can do anything we want. If human ways won’t work—let’s try a SUPERHUMAN way!’ From there our endings came a lot easier.”
Over the years, the Sadie Hawkins parties grew larger and more complex, and expanded to include high schools and church groups. Life magazine noted that 201 colleges in 188 cities held Sadie Hawkins Day in 1939, a mere two years after the original comic strip was published. The numbers grew from there. United Feature Syndicate, recognizing the marketing possibilities, offered Sadie Hawkins kits and handouts suggesting ways of making the parties more successful.
Capp found it all very “amoozin’ and confoozin’,” to borrow one of his favorite “Li’l Abner” expressions. Every year, he would be invited to participate in Sadie Hawkins events on campuses across the country. He would be asked to act as master of ceremonies at the dance or serve as a judge at the Sadie Hawkins beauty pageant. One such contest gave Capp his favorite Sadie Hawkins story—another tale that’s as entertaining as it is unlikely.
As he told it, it happened at a large midwestern university—he’d never say which one. Among the winner’s prizes donated by local merchants were a full wardrobe, a modeling job, and a mink coat; the mayor would be giving her the keys to the city. At the ceremonies in the university’s gym, Capp looked over the five finalists and privately selected the winner. Just as he was about to announce her name and present her with her trophy, the state’s new governor-elect, a bit tipsy from the drinking throughout the festival, rushed up and put Capp on the spot by asking if could make the presentation. Capp told him the winner and watched as the politician walked across the stage. Flashbulbs went off, the assembly roared its approval, and the mayor presented the lucky girl with the keys to the city.
“I was so ashamed of myself I wanted to hide,” Capp recalled. “There wasn’t a single thing for me to do. I couldn’t tell the truth and humiliate the winner. I could only promise myself never to forget what had happened when I let another man do my job.
“He had given the trophy to the wrong girl.”
The Sadie Hawkins story represented a breakthrough for Capp, solid proof that he had a powerful understanding of what his readers would appreciate. In the early days of “Li’l Abner,” the strip’s storylines had been touch and go. Capp would come up with an idea for a specific continuity, submit it to United Feature for approval, rework it if the editors deemed it necessary, and finally get around to creating the actual art. He had been given more leeway as the strip’s popularity grew, but he was still closely supervised, mainly because nothing like “Li’l Abner” had ever been attempted before, and there were no established guidelines for how to present satire and adult material on a page usually devoted to adventure or humor. United Feature monitored readers’ and subscribing papers’ responses. Editors were particularly sensitive about sexual or violent content in the strip, especially as Capp and his assistants became bolder in the content of their stories.
“Let’s keep the strip free of degenerate or vicious elements, no matter how funny they may strike you at the time,” William Lamb, Capp’s managing editor at United Feature, wrote in a letter typical of his attempts to placate readers’ and editors’ objections to material in “Li’l Abner.” “Make it burlesque, but not risqué,” he admonished Capp on another occasion.
Capp reacted to these letters by backing off—but only for a short period. If United Feature complained that the action in the strip was too intense or violent, he would create an especially soft story for the strip’s next continuity, but soon enough he would be pushing his limits once again, if for no other reason than to avoid becoming too predictable or, often as not, to amuse himself and avoid becoming bored with his work.
There would be occasions during the strip’s long life when a newspaper refused to
publish a strip or series of strips, perhaps the best known taking place in 1947, when Capp was needling corrupt politicians in one of his more pointed sequences. Capp had lampooned politics through the portrayal of Jack S. Fogbound, the senator from Dogpatch, and in this continuity, he had the senator offering to sell his deciding vote on a piece of legislation to the person willing to pay for the erection of a university in his name. In the past, Capp had presented the senator as “Fogbound,” but in order to achieve a quick laugh and have the university known as “P.U.,” he changed the spelling to “Phogbound.” The senator’s first name and middle initial were another joke, meaning “jackass.” In his artistic renderings of the politician, Capp really cut loose, picturing him with a racing form peeking out of one of his coat pockets and a sleazy magazine, French Models, poking out of the other.
The Pittsburgh Press, irked by what the editors believed was a tone too disrespectful of those serving in Congress, refused to run the story.
“They said I implied that some U.S. Senators are ignorant, boorish, and dishonest,” Capp said. “Me, all I ever knew about Senators came from reading the columns of the Pittsburgh Press.”
Capp responded to the widely reported rejection by consulting with his friend Drew Pearson, the muckraking syndicated columnist (“Washington Merry-Go-Round”) and radio commentator (for whom Capp would occasionally substitute over the years when Pearson vacationed). After hearing Capp’s story, Pearson went on the air and talked about this case of censorship; if any listeners in Pittsburgh wondered what was happening in “Li’l Abner” during its absence from the Pittsburgh Press, all they had to do was send Capp a letter and he would supply the missing strips.
Al Capp Page 10