“When the editors once again publish comic strips large enough for those with normal eyesight to see them,” he predicted, “this will bring an enormous surge of added readership to the comic page and added circulation to the newspaper with readable comics.”
The shrinking conic strip had been on Capp’s mind for a long time. When he was initially designing “Li’l Abner,” he’d tried to find a little edge, here or there, on the competition. As a draftsman, he couldn’t compete with the cartoon realism of the likes of Alex Raymond, Milton Caniff, or any number of others, and since it was the art that caught the eye and drew readers into the strip, Capp sought ways to underplay his artistic shortcomings and still make “Li’l Abner” visually striking. While his natural style leaned toward the humorous and even grotesque, Capp’s long hours attending art and anatomy classes paid off: as his drawing technique matured in the strip, he came to draw what many regarded as the sexiest females in comics and typically draped them in the most minimal attire that family newspapers could tolerate.
Capp also found his answer in being creatively loud. He used a lot of black in the strip, often showing characters in silhouette; he perfected the employment of different styles and sizes of lettering, incorporating as much boldface as possible. Emotional exclamations—SOB!!!, GASP!!!, EEK!!!, almost always presented in bold type—burst out of dialogue bubbles, punctuation marks running amok.
Those not-so-subtle touches set “Li’l Abner” apart from the competition. The strip screamed off the page. It promised something bold, maybe even aggressive, something no other strip was going to deliver, and readers noticed.
Reducing the size of the strip robbed “Li’l Abner” of its advantage. The letters shrank; the panels seemed top-heavy with dialogue. “Li’l Abner’ had always featured more dialogue than the typical strip, but in a smaller format, the dialogue overwhelmed the art. It was not a good idea to make a reader strain to see the finer details. But this was a fight Capp was destined to lose. He would have to adjust to the new reality.
When Capp offered his observations about how the 1960s might affect his profession, he had no idea how history itself would change it. The 1950s had been all about Ike, the New York Yankees, finding a piece of real estate in the newly created suburbs, Elvis Presley, a young midwestern actor named Marlon Brando replacing the rebellious persona of James Dean, the Beat Generation, the spread of Communism, and the usual variety of hostilities between nations, including, for the United States, a Korean conflict in the early years of the decade. A space race was just starting up, and televisions glowed in more households than ever. The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision had begun a long-overdue movement toward racial equality.
Capp had seen fit to comment on much of it in “Li’l Abner,” though he had avoided being too overtly political. He could savage pop culture, but McCarthyism had ruined careers, and Capp, despite his bluster, had been frightened.
Capp Enterprises continued to steadily move ahead. There seemed to be “Li’l Abner” tie-ins at every turn. By the mid-1960s, there would even be a Kickapoo Joy Juice soft drink, capitalizing on the mysterious, potent drink cooked up by Hairless Joe and Lonesome Polecat and used to stir up all kinds of mayhem in Dogpatch. Mammy Yokum and friends would be serving fried chicken in new restaurant franchises. The endorsement and merchandizing deals, coupled with the nine-hundred-plus newspapers subscribing to “Li’l Abner,” were almost enough to make Capp forget that Charles Schulz and the kids in his strip, “Peanuts,” were now capturing the public’s fancy in a new way, as the Yokums had at the start. When Capp celebrated his strip’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1959, he could rest assured that he was still a major force in the world of comic strips.
What lay ahead was a wealth of material too vast even for Capp, a massive shift in culture that left Capp—who’d always had his finger on the pulse—suddenly at odds with a large portion of his readership. The sixties would rank among the most turbulent decades in American history, with social and political movements so divisive that one could not switch on the television without seeing disturbing reports about death, destruction, and violence on the American streets or in the battlefields of Vietnam. Capp abhorred violence, especially when it upset what he felt was a comfortable status quo. He supported equality for African Americans but preferred the tactics of Martin Luther King Jr.—about whom his studio produced an educational comic book—and demonized those of Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers. He did, however, support the war and detested those who undermined the effort. He would never cotton to the demonstrations, protests, and theatrics of the antiwar movement. Folksingers made his flesh crawl; hippies, descendants of the beats, were examples of bad hygiene and disobedience. The Beatles offended his musical sensibilities.
His attitudes about all this and more would make their way into “Li’l Abner” continuities, but he also found other outlets for his opinions, of which there had never been a shortage. He had been seen regularly on television during the 1950s, but his appearances in the 1960s would signal a steady shift from being a cartoonist in the public eye to being a strong-willed, outspoken commentator on anything striking his fancy.
Capp joked that his opinions were strictly limited to “life, death, love, economics, the arts, man’s inhumanity to man, metaphysics, cybernetics, and atomic fission.” He was an authority on everything and nothing. Fortunately, he found different mass media sources receptive to his thoughts and audiences hooked on his opinions. When a strike affected New York’s newspapers in 1963, Capp stepped in as a theater critic for the New York Standard, one of the alternate papers springing up to fill the void. His lifelong love of plays might have made him an ideal replacement critic, but his reviews were impossibly mean-spirited. His magazine pieces, published more frequently than ever, were entertaining at the beginning of the decade and infuriating by its end. The same could be said about his guest spots on television. He’d been on The Tonight Show back when Steve Allen and Jack Paar were hosting it; Johnny Carson made him one of his most frequent guests on the show but soured on him as the decade wore on. According to legend, Carson gave up on him after Capp announced that he loved Easy Rider because of its happy ending.
Capp seemed to be everywhere at once. He had radio commentaries on both sides of the ocean—on This Week in England and on NBC’s weekend Monitor program. A TV series adaptation of “Li’l Abner” and an Al Capp television show, were in development.
As the mayhem of the 1960s bothered him more and more, Capp slid further toward conservatism, and the shift would only become more noticeable when Capp discovered the ultimate target for his commentary: the college campus and the students he’d bait until his own missteps brought him down.
As late as the fall of 1964, Al Capp was still a bona fide liberal, publicly campaigning on behalf of Lyndon Johnson in the presidential election, lampooning Barry Goldwater’s propensity for pushing nuclear buttons, and mocking Goldwater’s running mate William Miller for his advocacy of morality in government. But Capp’s shift toward conservatism crystallized during the following year and was on full display in a lengthy, freewheeling interview published in Playboy in December 1965. The interview, conducted by Alvin Toffler over eleven hours of questioning, covered a wide range of topics, from politics to “Li’l Abner,” from college campuses to his fellow comic strip artists.
Wally Wood, a cartoonist famous for his work in early MAD and EC science fiction comic books, parodied Al Capp’s multiplatform career (and close friendship with Milton Caniff) in his 1964 Pageant strip.
As engaging as he could be, Capp only showed flashes of it in the interview. In his New Yorker profile of eighteen years earlier, he had been occasionally edgy but funny; in the Playboy interview, he came across like a humorless grump—the type you might find sitting on a porch and shaking his fists at kids stepping on his lawn.
“Under today’s corruption of welfare,” he groused, “any slut capable
of impregnation is encouraged to produce bastards without end.” In discussing youth and parenthood, he was even nastier. “Nobody cares enough to take the trouble to point out to kids how revolting they are to us. That’s why they grow into savages. The only reason we don’t murder them in their teens is that we’re willing to wait for a crueler revenge—the day when the little bastards become parents themselves.”
The idea was not a new one for Capp. Seven years earlier, newspaper columnist Art Buchwald had quoted Capp on teenagers in a similar way: “Teen-agers are repulsive to everybody except each other. We all know that children pass through various stages of insanity, so why try to understand them.”
Capp, who described himself to Toffler as “cheerfully angry,” was less contentious when discussing his career, and there were moments when the old humor beamed through. However, more often than not Capp’s remarks reflected the expanding gulf between two generations, one that had fought in World War II and one that was beginning to protest the Vietnam War, a gulf that would become known as the Generation Gap. Capp’s opinions reflected a polarization that would ultimately erupt in violence on college campuses across the country.
14 In the Halls of the Enemy
Capp rang in 1967 with a parody that expressed his contempt for the protests and student demonstrations he was seeing on college campuses throughout the United States. Folk and agitprop music had enjoyed an explosion of popularity over the past four or five years, acting as a lightning rod for the civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam. Guitar-strumming songwriters, much to Capp’s disgust, had become spokespeople for America’s youth, wielding great influence in generational battles. Songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “We Shall Overcome,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” and “If I Had a Hammer” had become anthems in the push for change.
Capp weighed in with a “Li’l Abner” sequence featuring Joanie Phoanie, an obnoxious self-centered folksinger, whose songs “Let’s Riot Tonight on the Old Campus Ground,” “Let’s Conga with the Viet Cong,” and “On a Hammer and Sickle Built for Two” had made her a major attraction on college campuses and lined her pockets with a ton of cash. The story began with Joanie visiting an orphanage, promising neither money nor food for the orphans but “something to fill their starved little minds”: protest songs. When the kids complain that they hate protest songs, the headmistress shuts them up by saying, “You’ll take her protest songs and like ’em, you ungrateful li’l brats!!—she gets $10,000 a concert.”
Joanie Phoanie was the epitome of the limousine liberal, espousing the cause while being chauffeured around town, bemoaning the starving children while feasting on roast beef and caviar in the back of the limo. Over the course of a six-week story, Joanie runs into Li’l Abner, falls madly in love with him, and vows to win him in an upcoming Sadie Hawkins race, though he is, of course, already married. She winds up trying to adopt Abner’s son, Honest Abe Yokum, and hires Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae as servants.
Capp left little doubt about the real-life identity of the model for Joanie Phoanie. Joan Baez had begun her career playing the coffeehouses and clubs in Boston and Cambridge and had risen to the top of the folksinging ranks by the early sixties, when she was very young and singing traditional folk songs. By the mid-sixties, she had become a vocal antiwar activist and a powerful voice in the quest for social change.
Although she bore no physical resemblance to Joanie Phoanie, Baez was clearly the person Capp had in mind when he created the character. Not surprisingly, she reacted angrily when she saw her depiction in the “Li’l Abner” strip.
“The whole thing is disgusting,” she said. “He can say anything about me—that is his right and privilege—but he takes a jab at the whole protest movement, students and everyone he can get his hands on … Either out of ignorance or malice, he has made being against the war and for peace equal to being for communism, the Viet Cong and narcotics.”
Like Margaret Mitchell before her, Baez considered her legal options in dealing with the strip.
Asked for his response, Capp shrugged off Baez’s statements. He had never listened to her records, he claimed, and he had no idea what she looked like. Joanie Phoanie was grotesque—six feet tall and large-boned, with long, straight blond hair; she wore a perpetually dazed expression, as if she were lost in the corridors of her own ego. If Baez remotely resembled Joanie Phoanie, Capp said, he felt sorry for her.
“I’ve never seen Joan Baez but I understand that she’s a rather slight brunette, and Joanie Phoanie is a big, virile blonde,” Capp told Newsweek magazine. “If Joanie Phoanie looks like any singer, she looks like Nelson Eddy.”
In its coverage, Time magazine ridiculed Baez’s sensitivity, quoting Capp’s counterpunch to her objections to the strip—“She should remember that protest singers don’t own protest. When she protests about others’ rights to protest, she is killing the whole racket”—and noting that, like Joanie Phoanie, Baez was earning a bundle of money plying her trade. Time claimed she was earning $8,500 at each of her stops on her current tour of Japan; Baez countered that it was $5,000 an appearance.
Like most satire, Capp’s was fueled by anger, resentment, and even sorrow. Behind his savage commentary lay contempt for antiwar activists that grew with the escalation of the war itself. Capp supported the war effort, and he was damned if he was going to remain silent while young Americans lost their lives in defense of the very rights the protesters were demanding.
His own son was of draft age. Kim, much more liberal than his father, had no enthusiasm for joining the fighting but, as he would later remember, Capp “told me he wouldn’t do a damn thing to get me out of it.” He had no objection, he said, to Kim’s staying out of Vietnam, as long as he did so legally.
Capp’s ridicule of Baez was consistent with his scorn for all young people who demanded the benefits of a free country as if it were their birthright.
“Joan Baez refuses to pay her taxes because of the war effort,” he pointed out, “but she travels all over the world guarded by a passport which means something because the armed might of this country is behind it. A helluva lot of kids are in uniform so Joan Baez can travel on that passport.”
The Joanie Phoanie story ran to its conclusion, without retraction, though the syndicate did convince Capp to soften his originals in five of the daily strips, taking a slight edge off his commentary.
Baez, who would say that she never really intended to sue Al Capp, dropped the issue. Capp moved on as well, though he continued to take occasional potshots at her long after the Joanie Phoanie continuity had faded from readers’ memories. She was, he quipped, “the greatest war-time singer since Tokyo Rose” and “in the same Olympic league as such thinkers as Jane Fonda.” The war in Vietnam was escalating to such an extent that it would cost Lyndon Johnson the presidency in 1968, the student protesters were now strong voices influencing the country’s policies, and more bloodshed lay ahead. Capp found it intolerable that those demanding to be heard thought nothing of trying to silence those who did not share their opinions.
“Nobody is going to tell me who and what I can satirize,” he said.
For more than three decades, Capp had been a master at overseeing the way his “Li’l Abner” characters were used for commercial gain. There had been comic books, toys, clothing, watches, board games, drinking glasses, candy, and Sadie Hawkins marriage certificates. The shmoo products alone were a small industry.
For years, however, he had resisted all offers to use his “Li’l Abner” characters in theme parks. Park proprietors, he said, just didn’t understand what he was trying to do with his comic strip.
This stance ended on October 3, 1967, when he and Catherine traveled to the Deep South and attended a formal groundbreaking ceremony for a Dogpatch theme park in Marble Falls, a small Arkansas town located between Jasper and Harrison and, more significantly, a short drive to the entertainment vacation spot of Branson, Missouri. Marble Falls was so excited by th
e new influx of tourists and capital into its impoverished town that the city renamed itself Dogpatch—a name it would keep until 1997.
The idea for the theme park had been the brainchild of Oscar J. Snow, a real estate broker. Snow, along with nine other investors, bought a thousand acres of undeveloped land in 1967. With its rolling topography, complete with plenty of trees and water, it offered a lot of possibilities. At first, Snow considered a pioneer-village theme. The Dogpatch idea came while he was sitting on a rock and looking down at the waterfall in the valley below.
“It suddenly occurred to me that this was Bottomless Gorge,” he explained, referring to the Bottomless Canyon in “Li’l Abner.” “I could see Dogpatch and its people and I knew I had to call Mr. Capp.”
Capp liked what he heard. The ambitious plans for the park involved two distinct phases. Landscapers and construction workers would initially convert the wild, rustic property into a natural setting for Dogpatch, complete with nine small lakes, streams, and even a hollow. A Swiss tram would wind through the property, taking visitors from the parking area into the theme park below. An existing old mill would grind corn for use in the Dogpatch restaurant. The center of the village would feature a series of shops, including Soft-Hearted John’s General Store. A statue of Jubilation T. Cornpone, Dogpatch’s dubious war hero, would stand in the square. An assortment of amusement park rides would be stationed around the grounds. The second phase involved the construction of a ski chalet and skating rink near the parking lot. Log cabin lodging would give visitors the option of staying overnight.
At the groundbreaking, Capp spoke enthusiastically of the park’s potential and his enthusiasm about seeing his characters used to create a new kind of Disneyland.
Al Capp Page 22