Al Foster, who, as a bank official with the Merchants National Bank of Boston, worked with both Capp brothers, was exasperated.
“I certainly wish personalities on all sides could be postponed at least long enough to have a businessman’s final settlement,” he told Bence. “You may give me hell and say that I just do not understand. Well, maybe I do not. Therefore I am taking no sides, but what we do know and understand, Jerry, is that both sides always lose in such a case.”
Foster echoed Al’s concerns about how the fighting might affect Capp’s work and, by extension, his responsibilities.
“I can well imagine that this has been quite a strain on you and I know from personal observation what a terrific strain it has been on Al,” he said. “I just don’t know how he continues with the work. It is going to be just too bad for a lot of people if anything happens to Al or his work starts to slip because he cannot give it his undivided attention.”
Capp knew he had no choice but to carry on while lawyers and bankers and accountants sorted through the broken pieces of all that had, not so long ago, started out as a dream.
By late 1953, Capp and his three primary assistants were scrambling to shoulder the studio’s workload. “Li’l Abner” and Al Capp had become a cottage industry, a brand name roaring along at breakneck pace, and though Capp and his artists had little to do with the production of the constantly growing number of merchandising items—an Honest Abe doll, initially marketed as Mysterious Yokum before Abner and Daisy’s son was finally named, was among the new offerings on the market in 1954—their print media obligations kept them busy. Capp, Andy Amato, Walter Johnston, and Harvey Curtis had been working as a team since the late thirties, long enough to crank out the daily and Sunday strips like a General Motors assembly line turning out cars. The advertising commitments, however, cut into their time. “Li’l Abner” characters graced the pages of magazines, boxes of cereal, newspapers, posters, and signs, whether it was Fearless Fosdick hawking Wildroot Cream-Oil for hair or Li’l Abner starring in Cream of Wheat ads. There were ads for Grape-Nuts, Kraft caramels, Ivory soap products, Fruit of the Loom underwear, and General Electric lightbulbs. Keeping up with all the work was demanding. A steady stream of assistants and freelancers passed through the studio as the varying workload required. Milt Story was a particularly valuable fourth hand in the late forties and early fifties, while Stu Hample was integrally involved in the Fosdick ads.
When Capp decided to hire another assistant in 1954, he had one particular artist in mind. Some years earlier, Frank Frazetta was doing his own hillbilly comic, “Looie Lazybones,” which owed much to “Li’l Abner,” and from his work on other features, including his short-lived “Johnny Comet” strip, Capp concluded that Frazetta was not only very talented; he was also capable of mimicking a wide range of styles.
Later in his life, after achieving international fame as a fantasy and science fiction artist, Frazetta would say that he probably stunted his artistic growth by working for Capp, but he would also confess that he was naturally lazy and tempted by big-bucks-for-little-work offers. Capp was offering $500 a week, a large enough sum to convince a young artist to put his own interests on hold for a while. Jobs in the business were hard to find, especially with anticomics crusaders making enough of an inroad to eliminate many of the regularly produced comic books. Frazetta was especially pleased to learn that Capp had no problem with his freelancing elsewhere, as long as “Li’l Abner” remained his first priority. He agreed to the job, in spite of the fact that it involved commuting to Boston from his Brooklyn home.
Daisy Mae, drawn here by Frank Frazetta, an assistant added to Al Capp’s staff in 1954. Frazetta penciled the Sunday “Li’l Abner” strips for the better part of a decade. After leaving Capp’s employ, he went on to fame as a fantasy painter and illustrator.
Throughout 1954, Frazetta did much of the penciling on the daily “Li’l Abner” strips; he inked many of the strips as well. He could mimic Capp’s style so sharply that, aside from the heads, which Capp always inked, no one could positively say who was doing what. Before the end of the year, Capp trusted Frazetta enough to let him pencil the Sunday entries, a primary role that he soon settled into.
His most memorable work during that first year came about as the result of Capp’s assigning him a continuity in which he would inject his own distinct style into the strip. Capp wanted to do another movie parody, this one sending up producer Stanley Kramer’s The Wild One, the Marlon Brando–driven film about a motorcycle gang that menaces a small town. For the parody, Capp needed two distinct styles: the style he’d been using for years, plus a more sophisticated, detailed style for the biker antagonist, a Frazetta creation named, not coincidentally, Frankie. Frazetta, who would gain his reputation for his mastery of the disproportionate female form, would also be turned loose on Wolf Gal, a character who, some might have argued, needed no improvement. In Frazetta’s hands, the feral character became even sexier and more menacing.
The sequence was much more ambitious than the typical “Li’l Abner” parody. A new, continuing character—Li’l Abner’s fifteen-and-a-half-year-old brother, Tiny, who appeared out of nowhere in Dogpatch—was an integral part of the continuity. Tiny Yokum was drawn like a Dogpatcher, and his interactions with Frankie, a Frazetta self-portrait drawn more realistically, produced an effect not unlike plopping Felix the Cat down into a Milton Caniff strip.
The syndicate hated it. This was not the “Li’l Abner” that readers picked through the papers to see. Capp listened to the complaints and agreed to return to the time-tested style.
Frazetta lasted the year before requesting that he be allowed to work out of his home in Brooklyn. Capp agreed, and a new process was put in motion. Capp would mail four weeks’ worth of Sunday strip roughs to Frazetta, who would tightly pencil the strips and send them back. This method took full advantage of Frazetta’s undeniable skills on the highest-circulation “Li’l Abner” strips, yet largely sublimated Frazetta’s distinctive style to the house brand. Frazetta loved the arrangement.
“The pay was wonderful and it took me only a day to pencil his Sunday page and I had the rest of the week off!” he remembered. “What more could I ask for? On a couple of occasions, I went up to his Boston studio and he paid me $100 a day, which was really big money back then.”
The long-distance working relationship would last into 1962, with less than optimal results. Frazetta had early on been an integral part of the story meetings that developed and refined the continuities in “Li’l Abner,” but with him away in New York, there was such a disconnect that Capp, in later years, couldn’t remember how long Frazetta had actually worked for him.
“This claim that he worked for me for several years—it may have seemed like several years, but in reality it was for under a year,” Capp would say. “Oh, he may have come back for two months at one point, that kind of thing.” Capp’s limited recollection of Frazetta’s tenure was probably disingenuous, out of resentment that a former assistant was eclipsing his own fame.
Frazetta was too talented to stay in Capp’s employ indefinitely. He wanted to paint, and he was good enough to work in the highly competitive field of commercial illustration. When Frazetta approached Capp for a raise in the early sixties, Capp was ready to sever ties. Times were tough, he told Frazetta; he was losing newspapers and, as a result, he was making less from the syndicate.
“Instead of getting a raise,” Capp told Frazetta, “you should take a pay cut, like me.”
As Capp himself had left Ham Fisher, the assistant left his mentor largely over issues of money. Capp had gone on to make his name on his own. Frazetta would do the same.
Comics opponents never relented in their efforts to eliminate, or at the very least regulate the content of, comics they deemed to be too violent or sexually suggestive for young readers. The horror and crime genres were especially vulnerable to attack. Protective parents cringed when their children passed newsstands or drugstore rack
s displaying such titles as Crime Does Not Pay or Shock SuspenStories. Even less openly objectionable titles, such as Batman or Wonder Woman, had hidden messages, the former suggestive of homosexuality, the latter of lesbianism and sadomasochistic sexuality.
Newspaper comic strips generally escaped close scrutiny, but an artist like Al Capp, with his buxom women and adult plotlines, had to be careful. There could be only so much cleavage in the funny papers. Over the first two decades of “Li’l Abner,” Capp’s syndicate editors, citing client newspaper editors’ complaints, had regularly asked Capp to tone down the sex and violence in the strip. He would comply for a short period of time, but he’d soon be presenting a new continuity steaming with scantily dressed women and charged with sexual energy barely hidden beneath the surface of a story.
The bombshell hit in the spring of 1954, in what Capp might have labeled a double whammy: Just days before Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent arrived in bookstores, yet another Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency convened to examine the possible relationship of comics to youthful misbehavior and crime. Not surprisingly, Wertham was invited to testify at the hearings.
Wertham was a natural storyteller, and Seduction of the Innocent was a magnum opus of pop psychology. Wertham wasn’t willing to say that comics led to juvenile delinquency, but he was prepared to detail his position that comics filled young readers’ heads with all the wrong messages; in the wrong heads, comics could encourage antisocial or criminal behavior.
Wertham became a star witness at the Senate subcommittee hearing in New York, held in the same courtroom where the Kefauver Committee had convened four years earlier. Kefauver was present for these hearings, which promised to be every bit as spirited and controversial. Wertham, who used his appearance as a platform for hawking Seduction of the Innocent, testified that the comic book industry made Hitler look like a novice when it came to teaching children racial hatred. As an example, he pointed to a seven-page story, “The Whipping,” published by EC Comics, in which a racist murders his daughter because she is attracted to a Mexican—a story more readily interpreted as a lesson on racial tolerance.
Al Capp was neither present at the hearings nor invited to testify, but his work was once again under scrutiny. As in the 1950 hearings, the committee members had received photostats of “Li’l Abner” strips that the anonymous donor deemed to be pornographic. Nothing had changed. These were the same examples, with similar notations in the margins, that Ham Fisher had submitted to the earlier subcommittee.
Nothing came of Fisher’s latest attempt to discredit his rival, other than its riling up Capp for another round of battles. Infuriated, Capp decided to take action.
In 1955, seven years after he had created the shmoo, and six years after the kigmy, Al Capp tried again to create a cuddly creature that might capture the public’s imagination and simultaneously reinvigorate Capp Enterprises’ lagging merchandise revenues. The bald iggle, an import smuggled from Lower Slobbovia, was a small round character with birdlike feet and a bald spot on top of its otherwise furry body. Its key characteristic was its large, brown, and irresistible eyes. Any human looking into the bald iggle’s eyes was compelled to tell the truth. Like the shmoo, a creature so good for humanity that it proved bad for humanity, the bald iggle as a truth machine threatened the underpinnings of relationships, politics, and business, and like its earlier strip counterpart, it ultimately had to be exterminated.
The bald iggle story was collected as a book by Simon & Schuster in 1956, no small accomplishment, but it did not inspire merchandise like its predecessors and was to be Capp’s last serious effort at inventing a character than might rival the overnight popularity of the shmoo. In retrospect, what is perhaps most significant about the bald iggle episode is the satirist’s prophetic observation about himself a decade ahead. A journalist interviews “a leading critic of the younger generation,” asking him what’s wrong with students today. The growling curmudgeon begins to answer, “All they’re interested in is FUN, FUN!! Now when I was young …” Then a bald iggle suddenly looks into the critic’s eyes, forcing him to blurt out, “Really, the only thing I have against the younger generation is that I’m too old to be one of ‘em!! (sob!! sob!!).”
The Al Capp–Ham Fisher feud, two decades running, came to an abrupt ending on December 27, 1955, when Fisher was found dead in his New York office, a sleeping pill bottle and suicide note nearby. He was fifty-five.
To Capp, Fisher’s death was a personal victory, and he’d go as far as to state that driving Fisher to suicide was his greatest accomplishment.
Once again, Capp exaggerated. It was true that the feud weighed heavily in Fisher’s demise, but when Fisher was discovered on his office couch, he had died a lonely man, all but friendless, an outcast in the comics world, blaming everyone but himself for his troubles, lost in a haze of paranoia from which he could not escape. Capp’s role in all this was significant, but it was not the sole reason.
Fisher’s final year had been extremely difficult. A storm destroyed his Wisconsin summer home. His health began to slide. Most significantly, early in the year, in February, he had been banned from the National Cartoonists Society (NCS), an organization he’d cofounded. He had brought his dismissal upon himself when he anonymously sent photocopies of “Li’l Abner” strips to the Senate subcommittee and, more recently, to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which was considering Al Capp’s application for a permit for part ownership of a Boston television station. It was the same approach Fisher had taken with the New York State Joint Legislative Committee to Study the Publication of Comics. These earlier attempts to ruin Capp had been messy affairs, widely reported in the media. Embarrassed, the NCS admonished Fisher, and for a while he had avoided further public conflict—until the spring of 1954. The fact that he’d anonymously submitted the “Li’l Abner” strips fooled nobody: it was Ham Fisher’s modus operandi.
Capp seethed. Fisher had gone too far when he submitted the photostats to the FCC. Not only could his actions have a grave effect on Capp’s hopes of securing a permit for a small share of the television station; it also affected the lives of other investors. Capp’s group, the Massachusetts Bay Telecasters, was competing with a second group for the franchise. When attorneys from that second group suggested at the FCC hearings that Capp, as a pornographer, might not be a suitable buyer, Capp decided to take action. He instructed his attorney to find a handwriting authority to prove that it was Fisher who had written comments in the margins of the photostats.
The FCC hearings, which received nearly a full page of coverage in Time magazine, went poorly for Capp. His tongue-in-cheek remarks about his youthful drawing in Miss Mandelbaum’s class, published in his New Yorker profile—“I became an expert in pornography”—had come back to haunt him. When Capp attempted to inform the FCC that the New Yorker writer was a humorist, and that his statements were supposed to be exaggerations, he found no sympathizers. When confronted with Fisher’s photostats, Capp lost his composure.
“These are forgeries,” he insisted. “We conducted our investigation of the source of the forgeries. We are in the last stage of finding the forger.”
This 1948 daily supports critics’ claims that the shmoo was intentionally phallic. Further supporting such a reading, Abner calls the suggestively positioned shmoo a “Benedick” Arnold. Verbal and visual double entendres were common in the strip.
The FCC didn’t have time to wait.
Capp had no choice but to withdraw from the buying group. He did not let the issue go. He approached the National Cartoonists Society and demanded that it examine what one of its members was doing to another cartoonist.
Another blatant example of sexual innuendo in a 1951 daily, with another phallic form, the “Dogpatch ham.”
The NCS had reached the end of its patience with the public bickering between Ham Fisher and Al Capp. It brought the wrong kind of attention to the group at a time when comics artists and writers were u
nder intense scrutiny. While Capp and his lawyers set out to positively identify the source of the most recently submitted batch of “offensive” strips, the NCS looked for a way to squelch the fighting, once and for all.
Walt Kelly, creator of “Pogo,” a satirical strip owing much to “Li’l Abner,” sent a letter to Capp detailing the NCS’s difficulties.
“To be quite blunt, I feel, as President of the National Cartoonists Society, that the continued brawl between you and one of our members is not only hurting the ‘good name’ of cartooning but has become a distinct pain in the derriere to me in particular,” Kelly wrote. He was outraged that anyone might alter another cartoonist’s artwork in an effort to discredit him, and felt that anyone doing such a thing should be forced to leave the NCS. Yet Kelly also pointedly reminded Capp that Fisher was a current member of the NCS and Capp, who had left the organization, was not. Kelly had little doubt that Capp’s work had been altered in some way or another, but until a name could be attached to the misdeed, the public squabbling had to cease.
“We cannot entertain any foggy accusations and we will not listen to vituperation,” Kelly scolded. “In the name of all we hold dear, I feel this damned foolish harmful affair should come to an end. I am hopeful that you, with restraint, will bend every effort, including making a full report to us, toward making an end to this nonsense. As cartoonists, and especially as syndicate men, we absolutely cannot afford to have it go on.”
Capp’s own attorney urged him to exercise restraint while an expert in handwriting matched the writing in the margins of the photostats with samples of Ham Fisher’s writing.
“Be careful that you do not stoop for even a second to the level of your maligner,” he warned. “If it were not for the potential harm he might do you, he should be treated with pity as a pathological case.”
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