The Press: No Vent

Reader Terrence O’Toole of Moorhead, Minn, was troubled. Why had Al Capp’s comic strip, Li’l Abner, been missing from the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune for four weeks in a row? Wrote Reader O’Toole: “Censorship? Slow mail service? Forget to pay the syndicate?”

The missing Capp sequence concerned one Happy Vermin, the self-described “world’s smartest cartoonist,” who had hired Li’l Abner to draw Vermin’s comic strip in a dimly lighted closet. Instead of using Vermin’s tired characters, Li’l Abner had inventively peopled the strip with hillbillies. Cried bighearted Vermin to his slaving assistant: “I’m proud of having created these [hillbilly] characters!! They’ll make millions for me!! And if they do—I’ll get you a new light bulb!!”

Among Li’l Abner fans, it is common knowledge that Capp and Cartoonist Ham Fisher, who draws Joe Palooka, have long feuded. One of the big Capp-Fisher arguments concerns the birth of Li’l Abner: Fisher charges that Capp stole the idea from a Palooka sequence involving a hillbilly named Li’l David; Capp says he invented the hillbillies while working as Fisher’s assistant on the Palooka strip.

Explained the Tribune’s editors to Reader O’Toole and other disappointed Capp fans: the omitted strips “constituted a personal attack upon another prominent cartoonist. The Tribune does not allow its reporters, editors or columnists to vent personal malice . . . and it believes the same rule ought to apply to comic-strip artists . . .”