As if to prove his point, Capp created “Fearless Fosdick,” a recurring “Dick Tracy” parody that would serve him well in years to come. Fosdick, Capp’s version of the Dick Tracy character, turned up for the first time in the August 30, 1942, Sunday strip. Comics enthusiasts would have no trouble identifying the target of the parody. Fosdick had Tracy’s lantern jaw, fedora hat, and impeccable suit; he was all business in his pursuit of such aptly and humorously named villains as Stoneface and Rattop, who, not at all coincidentally, bore monikers similar to Gould’s Pruneface and Flattop. In time, Capp assigned Fosdick a love interest, the ever-suffering Prudence Pimpleton, a woman possessing an unfortunate jawline even more square and pronounced than Fosdick’s, a totally devoted fiancée doomed to an eternal engagement with no wedding on the horizon. “His relations with Prudence Pimpleton, his veteran fiancée, are so Pure that to use the word ‘relations’ seems unnecessarily lurid,” Capp joked in the preface to a 1956 book-length compilation of “Fosdick” episodes.
“Fearless Fosdick” ran for decades as a strip-within-a-strip in “Li’l Abner.” It included a running gag about the long-suffering detective’s meager salary of $22.50 per week—the same salary Capp earned as Ham Fisher’s assistant.
The first “Fearless Fosdick” continuity ran four consecutive Sundays. Capp employed a comic-strip-within-a-comic-strip format, which he would use to lead into the “Fosdick” stories for more than three decades. Lil’ Abner would get a copy of the newspaper, usually dropped off in Dogpatch by train, and he’d feverishly search for the comics section. He’d begin reading “Fearless Fosdick,” and from that point on, “Li’l Abner” readers would be treated to a strip alternating between the adventures of the world’s most dim-witted detective and the reactions of his dim-witted hillbilly reader. Li’l Abner would emulate Fosdick to the extent that he would put his own life in peril if it reflected Fosdick’s adventures.
In the first story, Fosdick was dropped from an airplane, tightly bound and free-falling headfirst toward the pavement ten thousand feet below. The inescapable situation baffled some of “Fosdick’s” biggest fans, including President Franklin Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, and the strip’s own mousy creator, Lester Gooch. They, like Li’l Abner when he reached the strip’s weekly cliffhanger ending, could think of no way to save Fosdick from certain death.
The action in the strip reflected a common problem faced by Al Capp and his assistants. Quite often, they would discuss the ideal setup for a “Li’l Abner” story, only to run into an assortment of problems in following through to a suitable ending. A story could take a hilarious, meandering route, only to wind down to an illogical conclusion. In his initial “Fearless Fosdick” installments, Capp not only lampooned Chester Gould’s famous detective; he created a wicked commentary on his own problems as a comics artist. If that weren’t enough, Capp made a point of having one of his characters reading and ridiculing a strip peopled by “stoopid iggorant hill-billies.”
In the first “Fearless Fosdick” sequence, Li’l Abner, fearful of his hero’s fate, sent a letter to Lester Gooch, stating that he admired Fosdick and wished he could put himself in Fosdick’s place in some of his adventures. Gooch, sensing a solution to his problems, hired a pilot to fly him to Dogpatch. Li’l Abner, Gooch discovered, was a man of his word. He allowed himself to be trussed up and dropped from a plane in the same manner as Fosdick. He escaped death and injury when he landed on his head, “whar nothin’ kin harm me!!” Gooch adapted the same solution to Fosdick’s plight, and the character—and fictitious comic strip—escaped to turn up at a later date.
The story set the tone for the future. Fosdick, Capp explained, was “without doubt the world’s most idiotic detective. He shoots people for their own good, is pure beyond imagining, and fanatically loyal to a police department which exploits, starves and periodically fires him.” More than willing to take a bullet for the cause, Fosdick was often pictured full of bullet holes of various sizes, making him look like a walking, talking, human-shaped block of Swiss cheese. Easily the world’s worst marksman, Fosdick shot innocent bystanders in alarming numbers, but, as Capp explained, the loss of an unwitting civilian—or ten—was a small price to pay for a better world.
“Fosdick’s duty, as he saw it,” Capp quipped, “is not so much to maintain safety as to destroy crime, and it’s too much to ask any law-enforcement officer to do both, I suppose.”
“Fearless Fosdick” became immensely popular, especially among male readers of “Li’l Abner,” and what began as a burlesque evolved into one of Capp’s most enduring features. It gave Capp the opportunity to be sublimely absurd, such as in the episode in which a vicious but stupid crime gang is run by a chair. (The chair, in the continuity’s conclusion, gets the chair.) Fosdick would be featured for years in Wildroot Cream-Oil advertisements, and for a brief period in the early 1950s he would have his own television program.
If Chester Gould objected to being the target of the longest-running parody in comics history, he kept it to himself. (“I’m getting quite a kick out of both,” he told Newsweek, referring to seeing himself and his comic strip victimized in a competing strip.) Capp, enjoying the benefits of bolstering his own strip at the expense of another, praised Gould and “Dick Tracy” often enough to keep his readers from calling him mean-spirited.
“Because I am kidding Dick Tracy, I do not want to create the impression that I am not a Dick Tracy fan,” he insisted. “I am a hell of a Dick Tracy fan.”
Fearless Fosdick was not the only popular recurring character to make an initial appearance in “Li’l Abner” in 1942. Available Jones, whose motto, “If It’s Too Unpleasant for You to Do—I’m Available,” led him to every type of task imaginable, turned up on January 3, and Joe Btfsplk, the man with the perpetual rain cloud over his head and the biggest jinx to humankind, whose last name was best pronounced with a Bronx cheer, walked on in the July 11 strip. Both would rank among the most popular “Abner” characters during the strip’s forty-three-year run.
In October 1942, Capp received a call from a John Marsh, an Atlanta attorney and advertising executive who took exception to a “Li’l Abner” story, “Gone wif the Wind,” an obvious parody of the Margaret Mitchell bestseller, Gone with the Wind. In the Capp story, Li’l Abner played a character named Wreck Butler, and Daisy Mae appeared as Scallop O’Hara. Marsh informed Capp that he and his wife had seen the Sunday strip and had taken great exception to it. Capp, accustomed to calls and letters from disgruntled readers, tried to make light of the complaint. He suggested that the Marshes read “Rex Morgan, M.D.,” a popular melodramatic strip, until the “Li’l Abner” sequence concluded.
Marsh was not disarmed by Capp’s humorous response to his complaint. His wife, he insisted, would not be mollified unless Capp immediately canceled the remainder of the “Li’l Abner” story. Capp patiently tried to explain that this was not possible, that the rest of the strip was already submitted and prepared for publication.
In recalling the story, Capp embellished his account with typical bravado.
“He kept nagging,” he said of Marsh, “but as I had to go back to work, I ended the conversation with a short Anglo-Saxon phrase of two words. It’s very useful for getting rid of pests—and for the beginning of law suits.”
Marsh, Capp learned later, was more than a mere pest; his perturbed wife was, in fact, Margaret Mitchell herself. After Capp’s rude termination of their conversation, Marsh called United Feature Syndicate and reregistered his complaint, this time more emphatically. Mitchell was prepared to sue United Feature and Al Capp jointly for copyright infringement. The suit would demand a settlement of one dollar for every reader of every newspaper publishing the parody. This translated into roughly $76 million.
Capp couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about. Gone with the Wind had been a phenomenal success, sitting atop the bestseller lists for what seemed like an eternity and winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. Two years later, a film adapt
ation of the book had set box office records, eventually winning an unprecedented ten Academy Awards. How could Mitchell feel remotely threatened by a comic strip parody?
United Feature examined copyright law and determined that there was a strong chance that Mitchell would win. This was years before Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad and other publications stretched the boundaries and set broader legal precedents for satire. The comics syndicate struck a deal with the novelist: Al Capp would drop the story and issue a public apology in his strip, and Mitchell would drop the lawsuit. Capp reluctantly agreed and devoted two panels of the following Sunday’s strip to his apology.
Capp would shrug it all off in future interviews, as if none of it mattered. He’d made sure that influential news sources knew about Mitchell’s objections and lawsuit threat, and while it’s unlikely that Margaret Mitchell’s reputation and public appeal suffered as a result of an account published in Time magazine, Capp and his comic strip enjoyed a boost in publicity.
To Capp, this was of utmost importance. Few other comic artists in history craved attention the way Al Capp did. Creating a daily comic strip was a demanding occupation involving creativity and hard work under tight deadlines—work conditions that literally drove more than a few artists to drink. Comic strip artists worked long hours and tended to be solitary figures, far removed from the publicity machine.
Al Capp and his syndicate would face the threat of an expensive lawsuit from Margaret Mitchell when he parodied Gone with the Wind in a series of 1942 Sunday strips. Capp was forced to apologize in a subsequent strip.
Capp differed greatly from this image. He was loud and aggressive; he didn’t drink; he worked relatively regular hours; he had a boisterous office with at least three assistants at a time. He thrived in the spotlight, which gave him the opportunity to expound on topics he found interesting and hot-button issues in his strip. And he would employ any measure, including the use of parodies and the creation of prearranged feuds, to haul in as much publicity as he could muster.
Over the years, his competitive drive compelled him to take on Chester Gould (“Dick Tracy”), Harold Gray (“Little Orphan Annie”), Allen Saunders (“Mary Worth”), and Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”). His feuds might have appeared to be friendly and light, but there was a darker, self-serving element to them as well.
His 1947 “feud” with Will Eisner was a prime example. Although slightly younger, Eisner had been in the business almost as long as Capp, first as a comics packager and later as the creator of “The Spirit,” a sort of hybrid detective/superhero that was syndicated in the papers from 1940 to 1952. Eisner was greatly admired as an artist, and the Spirit stories, many written by future Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer, ranked among the most intelligent comics in the papers. Eisner and “The Spirit” were not direct competition to Capp and “Li’l Abner,” but that didn’t prevent Capp from trying to find a way to sling a few arrows at Eisner while generating publicity for himself.
“Sometime in late May or early June of 1947, the phone rang at the studio, and the caller was, believe it nor not, Al Capp,” Eisner recalled in an interview forty years later. “He had this booming voice that came out of a leonine head. He said, ‘Hi, Will,’ and after the preliminary compliments about the work, he said, ‘How about you and me having a little feud?’ “
Eisner was game. He deeply admired “Li’l Abner,” and by his own admission he was starstruck by Capp’s call.
Capp set the terms for the feud. Eisner would fire the first shots by creating a “Li’l Abner” parody in “The Spirit.” Capp would feign anger at the parody and respond in kind, with a parody of “The Spirit” in “Li’l Abner.” The press would eat it up, readers would be held in suspense over what would happen next in the feud, and the two comic strips and their creators would benefit from a spike in publicity.
Will Eisner’s The Spirit was an unusual syndicated comic book insert in newspapers. Eisner was flattered when Capp suggested in 1947 that they parody each other’s strips as a publicity stunt, and complied with “Li’l Adam, the Stupid Mountain Boy,” by “Al Slapp.” Capp never reciprocated.
If nothing else, Eisner’s contribution, “Li’l Adam,” proved his mastery of the parody. In his “Spirit” Sunday newspaper insert published on July 20, 1947, Eisner told the story of the attempted murder of cartoonist Al Slapp, creator of “Li’l Adam: The Stupid Mountain Boy.” The prime suspects were Elmer Hay (Harold Gray) and Hector Ghoul (Chester Gould). Eisner worked in a variety of inside jokes, known only to cartoonists working in the business, along with a biting commentary on the comics syndicates. He even worked in a comic strip within a comic strip, drawn by Feiffer—a funny parody of “Fearless Fosdick,” Capp’s own parody of “Dick Tracy.”
In the period between Eisner’s creating the story and its publication, a reporter from Newsweek called Eisner and asked what he was working on. Eisner told the reporter that he was feuding with Capp and had created a parody.
“When the article came out,” Eisner said of the Newsweek piece, “I suddenly realized that Al had somehow heard about it and correctly figured it was a way to get a free ride. He had connections in all these places. But I was still so entranced by the fact that someone in his league had called me that I wasn’t fully aware of what he was doing.
“What happened was he never honored the agreement. He never did anything in his strip about ‘The Spirit.’ I kept watching and waiting, and nothing happened. I then realized that he had euchred me into doing a parody of ‘Li’l Abner’ which Newsweek picked up, and he had been given a run of publicity. I was simply being used as a tool.”
Thirty-nine years after the one-sided feud, Eisner continued to stew.
“I always harbored a kind of anger at him for doing something like that,” the usually mild-mannered Eisner said. “He was always offering something interesting that never materialized.”
10 Greetings from Lower Slobbovia
Capp might not have integrated the war into “Li’l Abner,” but he was very active in the war effort. He managed to continue the strip without interruption, largely because of an agreement with the government. Although all three of his assistants were draft eligible, Capp used his influence to keep them stateside. He not only needed them for his own work, he argued, but he wanted to use them to help with all that he would be doing for the government.
The work was copious. When the United States entered the war, Capp joined the effort to promote war bonds. He and his staff developed a color Sunday feature initially called “Small Fry,” after the diminutive lead character, but soon changed to “Small Change,” a comic strip dedicated to publicizing war bonds. The public service strip ran on alternating Sundays for three years. As an honorarium for his efforts, Capp received an annual salary of one dollar.
He also contributed informational posters for those fighting the war. This proved to be more challenging than the weekly “Small Change” strip, not because Capp wasn’t up to the art or the message, but because he was often dealing with serious matters that young soldiers, familiar with “Li’l Abner,” might not take as seriously as the military brass intended. Capp breezed through a very large poster that explained why and how soldiers saluted one another, but a poster addressing venereal disease was shot down by the chief of chaplains for being racy.
As Capp and other cartoonists would learn, the military could be very squeamish about how sexuality was addressed. It would have been unrealistic to treat soldiers as an army of virgins, yet the depiction of condom use by comic strip artists was problematic. Nobody wanted the comics to become pornographic.
Physically handicapped, Al Capp could not serve in the military in World War II, but he provided considerable patriotic services. Here, in March 1943, he meets an army public relations staff.
Capp, who had used Li’l Abner—called “Private Li’l Abner”—in other army posters, struggled with using his comic strip’s main character in a poster warning about the dangers of casual sex.
In the strip, Li’l Abner could barely bring himself to kiss a woman.
“I couldn’t very well point up the horrors of venereal disease without having somebody catch one,” Capp recalled a few years later. “But I was damned if I’d destroy the technical perfection of my boy, even for my country.”
Capp created another character, Bud Beargrease, to take Li’l Abner’s place in the VD posters. Bud chased around an amply endowed woman named Anytime Annie, and the implications took off from there.
“It was wonderful,” Capp remembered. “People who read it were as excited over whether Bud would or would not catch anything as they usually were over whether or not the buzz saw would cut Daisy Mae in half.”
Capp’s characters found their way into the war in other ways, too. Li’l Abner, Daisy Mae, Moonbeam McSwine, Wolf Gal, Sadie Hawkins, and others—even Fearless Fosdick—were painted on the noses of bombers, a tradition that would continue when the United States entered the Korean conflict.
Capp’s biggest contribution was far more personal. Military hospitals in the United States housed countless soldiers seriously wounded overseas, many returning as amputees. Capp, having lost his leg at nine, knew of the anger and despair that these young men were just beginning to deal with. Capp had used the loss of his leg as motivation, and he wanted to motivate others.
By his own count, Capp visited nearly five hundred veteran hospitals throughout the war, always with the knowledge that he would have to win over each one of the amputees, none, under the circumstances, particularly caring about Capp’s celebrity.
Capp’s message—that the loss of a leg wouldn’t prohibit you from doing almost anything a two-legged man could do—required him to address his own difficulties. He’d never learned to walk comfortably on his wooden leg; it was clear to anyone watching him that he was an amputee. He’d walk awkwardly, swinging his artificial limb forward in a manner that would embarrass him throughout his life. He couldn’t very well convince others that they could look normal with artificial limbs if he staggered on his own.
Al Capp Page 13