The Press: Die Monstersinger

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Al Capp, the cartoonist-creator of Li’l Abner, probably has a sharper eye for slobs, monsters, hags and fiends than anyone alive. This means that his eye is very sharp indeed, for the modern slob seldom slobbers and in the 20th Century even monsters are apt to use both Vitalis and Zip, grease themselves liberally with Mum or Dew, and consult a dentist twice a year. Capp is not fooled. At times, in fact, he seems to suspect that the world is peopled exclusively by bloated big businessmen, brainless editors, venal politicians, sadistic cops, cruel stepmothers and shambling, leaping legions of lesser knaves, oafs and fools.

Capp loves them, each and every one. Which is not to say that they please him; they reduce him to a frenzy of rage and exasperation—punctuated with hoots of laughter. In moments of gloom he is certain that this ubiquitous medley is on the brink of ruining 1) the world in general and 2) Al Capp in particular. In such moods his conversation often implies that he is a sort of modern General Custer, facing hordes of murderous madmen and cut off from civilization with no weapon more deadly than India ink.

Toads & Bloodworms. But at the same time he finds villainy of all kinds wildly entertaining. He is convinced that man’s inhumanity to man—whether expressed in a simple hotfoot or an atomic explosion— is the basis of all humor, and he can discuss grafters, murderers and wife-beaters as delightedly as a zoologist describing a sporty specimen of toad or bloodworm. Capp is a large-framed, large-headed, exuberant man with a shock of black hair, bottomless energy and a bullfrog voice. He often climaxes a denunciation of some awful piece of skulduggery by bursting into ribald laughter and bawling, “Charming! Charming!” at the top of his lungs.

This odd marriage of attitudes, plus his endless enchantment with yokels and pretty girls, has made him one of the best-read, best-paid and most widely celebrated humorists in U.S. history. His comic strip is a rarity among the “comics” in being really, and deliberately, funny. At 41, after 14 years of drawing Li’l Abner, Capp makes $300,000 a year, is read by 38 million fans in 700 U.S. newspapers, and has been favorably compared not only to such classic cartoonists as Rube Goldberg, but to such writers as Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens and Voltaire.

Smoke-Bursts & Soot-Falls. As a comic strip, Capp’s Li’l Abner is not the most popular in the U.S.: it can be accurately described only as one of the top five—a group which also includes Little Orphan Annie, Blondie, Dick Tracy and Joe Palooka. At least two of them, Blondie and Dick Tracy, claim more readers, but the promotion departments of national syndicates fire off such billowing smoke-bursts of conflicting claims that the truth of the matter has long since been buried under a soot-fall of verbiage.

But comparing the average comic strip to Li’l Abner is like comparing an ordinary cocktail to a dipperful of Capp’s own Kickapoo Joy Juice, a liquor of such stupefying potency that the hardiest citizens of Dogpatch, after the first burning sip, rise into the air, stiff as frozen codfish. Capp tries to give his readers not only a daily belly laugh, satirical Cappian comment on politics, sex, law enforcement, the housing situation and human rapacity, but surrealistic gobbets of action, mystery, horror and adventure as well.

He is firmly convinced that nothing makes a reader turn to a comic strip faster than the belief that one of its characters is about to be disemboweled, and the actors who tread his narrow stage are continually being starved, frozen, bilked, shot, or flattened out by the frequent upheavals of Capp’s pulsating planet.

Dogpatch, the hill-bound heartland of Capp’s mad empire, is a bewilderingly portable affair. Capp continually changes it to suit either his current story line or his own fancy, and it has been variously situated in a deep valley, on a desert beside a high mountain (“Onnecessary Mountain”), and on top of the same peak.

Crash! The uncertain hamlet of Dogpatch is equipped with standard but movable props, all of them hazardous in the extreme. One of the oldest is the West Po’kchop Railroad, which runs almost perpendicularly up one side of Onnecessary Mountain and straight down the other. A stiffnecked industrialist named Stubborn J. Tolliver built this suicidal grade to satisfy a boyish dream of his son, Idiot J. Tolliver. To keep “his drooling boy happy, Tolliver still starts one train a week up the tracks. Except in those instances when Capp installs switchbacks in the line, each train falls back with a crash, killing all its passengers.

Another Dogpatch institution, the Skonk Works, is almost as lethal—scores have been done in by the fumes of the concentrated skonk oil which is brewed and barreled by its proprietor, Big Barnsmell, and his “outside man,” Barney Barnsmell. Of the devices which are employed to make life horrible for Capp’s characters, these are simply the more rudimentary.

The dismal, Arctic citizens of Lower Slobbovia are forever doomed to stand buried to their chins in snow, bitten from behind by sempiternally voracious bears and wolves. The luckless victims of Fearless Fosdick, the fiendish detective (Capp’s caricature of Dick Tracy), who is a dead shot and trigger-itchy, always end up perforated as neatly as so many slices of Swiss cheese. No true Abner fan (classified by Capp as a “slobbering” fan) can forget the magnificent moment when J. Roaringham Fatback, the hog tycoon, ordered Onnecessary Mountain tilted sideways with enormous jacks to keep its shadow from falling on his breakfast egg. The hovels of Dogpatch naturally sailed off into the abyss below.

Passions of Slobberlips McJab. Capp also sees to it that his readers are fed liberal quantities of sex, Dogpatch style—a style which incorporates the absurder aspects of mayhem and dementia. On occasion the woomanship of Appassionata Van Climax, the Wolf Gal, Adam Lazonga and Slobberlips McJab has resembled the more vehement techniques of Lizzie Borden and Strangler Lewis.

The original citizens of Dogpatch—Li’l Abner Yokum, his unbathed parents, and that delectable hill filly, Daisy Mae Scragg —are human enough to have their own poor but burning ambitions and prejudices. They are also so incredibly innocent that they can be duped by a child. The man or woman who does not gain some sense of superiority from their gullibility probably does not exist; and millions of red-blooded young men have clenched their fists with exasperation at Abner’s failure to respond to the lovesick Daisy Mae.

Capp’s characters speak in odd dialects. Dogpatch folks do not talk like real hillbillies but as Capp feels a hillbilly would probably talk if he lived near the Skonk Works all his life; his Lower Slobbovians speak a language flavored with Bronxian gutturals.

Idiot’s Delight. The triple-headed chauffeur (a creature with strains of Martian blood) who transported Li’l Abner from Earth to El Passionato in a flying saucer furnished Capp with a straight man for some fine Panglossian dialectic. After taking a certain amount of triple-headed needling, Li’l Abner cries: “Yo’ claims us earth-folks is in th’ Idiot Era. Wal—ef we is sech IDIOTS, HOW could we whomp up [pointing earthward] a factory like THET?”

“What does it make?” asks his friend, Tripledome.

“ATOMIC BOMBS, to blow each other UP, natcherly,” replies Abner. “Purty soon ALL o’ us—east an’ west—will have ’nuff of ’em t’ blow up th’ WHOLE DAWGONE EARTH!”

Many an Abner fan can still recite the poem with which Liddle Noodnik, the shivering infantile princeling of Lower Slobbovia, welcomed Senator Phogbound to his wretched kingdom:

“Welcome, Hammericans, from

Across the Sea

‘You hotts are in the right places,

You gung to make happy liddle Kits like me—

And put smiles on our pinched liddle faces!!

Stinkers you’re not, nor are

You louses,

You wouldn’t riffuse us a few rotten

bocks

Not even a crust brad we Got in our houses—If you dun’t come across we all aredad docks!”

Who Ate Pappy? Unlike most comic artists, Capp seems to attract readers in well-defined layers, each stratum as distinct as the segments of a pousse-café. Not all of them love him—some of the most virulent prose of the last decade has come from outraged Abner readers who have written to complain that he is undermining 1) the U.S. mind, 2) the nation’s morals or 3) the Constitution itself.

On occasion, the editors and publishers who buy his strip also become bitterly critical. A few, like the editor of the Seattle Times, who kept Abner out of the paper because he seemed to be eating Pappy (in reality he was eating chicken), object to Capp’s taste. But more of them criticize his political opinions, observable or suspected, as being out of place in a comic strip. Capp’s reaction to such censors is violent. He is apt to cry that neither Mark Twain nor Will Rogers would be allowed to say a word today, and that any man who jokes about anything but his own idiosyncrasies risks being tarred, feathered, dissected by a bribed autopsy surgeon and buried in quicklime.

But his rage is usually supplanted by a mood of hilarity and revivified cunning. When the pro-Republican Pittsburgh Press protested that his venal, pompous and reactionary politico, Senator Jack S. Phogbound, was a calculated libel on the reputation of the U.S. Senate, Capp had a soft and devilish answer. He replied that he knew nothing of politics but what he read in the Pittsburgh Press, that Phogbound had been suggested by that newspaper’s editorial attacks on Democratic politicians, and that he was not only hurt but genuinely amazed to find the Press damning instead of applauding his creation.

The Bosom of the Masses. Critics, carping or constructive, loom very small, however, in Capp’s public. Millions feel that he can do no wrong. He has not only been clutched to the bosom of the masses but has been nominated as a genius by fragments of the intelligentsia. Britain’s Princess Elizabeth is a “slobbering” Abner fan; so are Novelist John Steinbeck, Comedian Harpo Marx, Lawyer Morris Ernst and NSRB Boss W. Stuart Symington.

Catchwords and phrases from Li’l Abner such as “amoozin but confoozin,” “as any fool can plainly see,” “natcherly” and both “sob” and “gulp” used as spoken expletives, have become immovably anchored in American idiom. His Shmoos and Kigmies are as easily identifiable to most Americans as cantaloupes and cows.

Capp has created something very like a national festival—Sadie Hawkins Day—which on Nov. 18 will be celebrated for the 14th time on campuses from coast to coast. Chicago will be the epicenter of this year’s celebrations. Capp himself will crown the winner of a Sadie Hawkins Chase. To qualify for the final scramble, adolescents of both sexes, in “full Dogpatch regalia,” will first race on a treadmill.

The Sad Part. All this wealth, recognition and acclaim is in dramatic contrast to the record of Capp’s earlier years. Li’l Abner’s creator, who was born Alfred Gerald Caplin in New Haven, Conn., in 1909 (he shortened his name to Capp in signing the strip, changed it legally in 1949), grew up amid a ferocious struggle with poverty. His father, Otto Caplin—a glib, cheerful, optimistic man who studied law at Yale, had a dilettante’s interest in art and nursed continual schemes for making his fortune—managed to eke out only the barest living. It was largely his mother’s courage and resourcefulness that kept the family a going concern.

Mrs. Caplin led her four children in an endless tactical retreat from one shabby rented house to the next. She worked out complicated trade agreements with butchers and merchants, refused to deal with a grocer who would not hire one of her three sons, and charmed bakers into parting with stale bread. She summoned up an awesome queenliness when facing unpaid and threatening landlords. There were times when she went out, late at night, and rummaged through neighbors’ ash barrels for fragments of usable coal.

To Al, as to all the children, this scrounging existence seemed normal enough at the time. But when he was nine everything ceased to be normal: an accident befell him that marred and made his life. While hooking a ride on an ice truck, he slipped, and was run over by a streetcar. His left leg had to be amputated. It was two years before he relaunched himself into the world on a wooden leg.

“I was indignant as hell about that leg,” he says. “It was hard to handle, and it squeaked.” But neither the wooden leg, the limp with which he still walks, nor his chronic state of poverty kept him from growing into a brash, fast-talking, reckless, restless youth. Perhaps they even helped.

Wheedler in a Haystack. During his teens, he often vanished from home without a dime, to make long, ride-thumbing expeditions. Once, with a boyhood chum named Don Munson, he got as far south as Memphis. During the early stretches of the journey they got along by dint of Capp’s ability to wheedle free hamburgers, and by Munson’s deftness at snatching milk bottles from porches. But later they wandered through the Cumberland Mountains, sleeping in haystacks and living on the hospitality of farmers.

The ignorance and kindness of the people who took them in touched off the first, vague stirrings of Li’l Abner. Capp had already decided to become a cartoonist. “I heard that Bud Fisher (the creator of Mutt & Jeff) got $3,000 a week and was constantly marrying French countesses,” he says. “I decided that was for me.”

When he got home, he kept his mother’s dining-room table littered with embryo cartoons, and cajoled neighbors’ daughters into posing for portraits—usually alienating them forever by drawing them with pop eyes, big noses and teeth like alligators. In anticipation of fame, he sported an ancient camel’s hair coat and a derby hat. He also developed a flair for cultivating “dopes who owned cars” and for dazzling pretty girls (located by consulting high-school annuals in public libraries) by telephone.

When he was 19, the family moved to Boston, and Al attended art schools. He went to three of them in rapid succession, and was thrown out of each for nonpayment of tuition. Then, seething with frustration and a belligerent faith in his own potentialities, he limped out to the highway and thumbed a ride to New York.

Six Months in the Wrong Room. He lived in “airless rat holes” in Greenwich Village, turned out advertising strips at $2 apiece and scoured the city hunting for jobs. Finally, the Associated Press agreed to pay him $50 a week to draw one of their stock cartoons—a one-panel imitation of Major Hoople called Colonel Gilfeather. Capp lasted only six months. But by the time he was fired he had discovered—by working 16 hours a day—what he needed to learn to become a professional.

It took him another two years to gather himself for his plunge to fame & fortune. Before he plunged, he got married to a pretty art student named Catherine Cameron—but was so completely broke at the time that the bride had to go back to her parents in Amesbury, Mass. after the ceremony. Then he spent a year studying anatomy, perspective and other essentials at the Massachusetts School of Art, hurried back to New York and got a $22.50-a-week job as an assistant to Ham Fisher, the creator of Joe Palooka.

“But,” says Capp, “I wasn’t the assistant type of kid.” He soon fell out with Fisher. With some sample strips of Li’l Abner, he strode into an anteroom at King Features Syndicate and demanded to see Joseph V. Connolly, the Big Boss himself. An office boy demurred. “Tell him,” cried Capp, “that Ham Fisher says I am the most promising young cartoonist he has seen in 25 years.”

Bait Jake—Wrong Hake. This resounding lie brought Connolly sliding forth like a hake heading for herring. He looked at Capp’s work, nodded approvingly and asked, cautiously: “How much is Fisher paying you?” “One hundred dollars a week,” replied our hero.

“I’ll give you two hundred,” said Connolly. “Of course,” he added, “we’ll have to change this strip. Nobody is interested in hillbillies—we’ll put the action in a small town, and put this fellow Abner in regular clothes . . .”

This was probably the most crucial moment in Capp’s life. He was broke, bruised from rebuffs and had a baby daughter as well as a wife to support. But he was as horrified at Connolly’s suggestion as if he had seen a gorilla throttling his firstborn. He backed out, clutching his drawings to his chest, and sold the strip, unchanged, to United Feature—for $50 a week.

It was an almost instantaneous success, and by 1941 Li’l Abner was running in 400 newspapers, and Capp was making $2,000 a week. Terrified by the idea that this flow of riches might be shut off, Capp did everything in his power to lure the eyes of readers away from strips which ran above & below his own. He made his figures big & simple, and clothed them in black whenever possible. His characters screamed things like “She DOESN’T LOVE Dumpington!” in heavy capitals. He also began modeling Daisy Mae, originally a skinny girl, after Silent Screen Star Barbara La Marr. “She may be forgotten now,” says Capp, “but when Barbara La Marr inhaled, boys became men.”

Ho! Ho! Ho!—No! No! No! These techniques—and his stubborn insistence on working for laughs—paid off more & more. Capp began to lose his earlier fears that Abner might fall out of favor with the fickle public. But he was struck with an even more horrifying idea—that the syndicate which owned the rights to the strip “might ask me to step out of my skin some day and invite some jerk to step into it and draw Li’l Abner”

Enraged in advance, and feeling that he was already the dupe of a wily fraud, he took steps to improve his station. But just what steps he took are a matter of conjecture. Capp, a man with such an instinct for the dramatic that he sometimes lapses into purest fiction, swears that he got the copyright from the syndicate by a one-man strike: he quit drawing the strip for two weeks and thus reduced the syndicate to abject submission.

United Feature, however, denies the tale completely. It says it has full title to the copyright. It admits that Capp has much more control over his creature than most cartoonists, but claims that he did not get it until 1947—when he sued the syndicate for a ringing $14 million, and then, with calculated magnanimity, settled out of court.

Success, his boundless faith in himself, and his instinct for defending Li’l Abner to the death, involved him in another conflict—a remarkable feud with his former employer Ham Fisher. Capp parted from Fisher with a definite impression, (to put it mildly) that he had been underpaid and unappreciated. Fisher, a man of Roman selfesteem, considered Capp an ingrate and a whippersnapper, and watched his rise to fame with unfeigned horror.

Quick, Henry, the Flit! As the feud developed, Fisher—apparently by studying Li’l Abner with a magnifying glass—decided that it contained minuscule Rabelaisian detail calculated to undermine the morals of American youth. He caused certain frames of Abner to be enlarged and reprinted, and, after ringing suspicious portions in red, sent them to publishers, urging them to drop Capp’s strip.

Capp sniped at Fisher through Li’l Abner. When Fisher had his nose remodeled, Capp gleefully insinuated a horse named “Ham’s Nose-bob” into the strip. Last April he wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly about a cartoonist who had once employed him. He named no names, simply titled his piece, “I Remember Monster.” The sound of battle finally became too loud, and the respective syndicates called for a peace treaty—which was gravely consummated last August by proxies for each side.

Though he obviously enjoys the excitement of such conflicts, Capp gives them little more thought than the average man gives to golf or bowling; few men in the U.S. are so constantly involved in extracurricular activity. Though Capp is a strict teetotaler (mostly because he feels no need to augment his natural exuberance), he is a great man for parties. He talks well, enjoys applause and makes endless public appearances.

Yak Yak Yak. Besides doing his usual chores during the last fortnight, for instance, he gave off-the-cuff talks at two colleges, Wellesley and Holy Cross, and a full-dress formal speech at the New York Herald Tribune Forum at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

He is still restless and is constantly on the move—usually behind the wheel of one of his two Cadillac convertibles—around a self-designed orbit.

His house in New Hampshire, a big, comfortable modernized farmhouse on 65 acres of rolling land, sees him only at irregular intervals. The farm, which he enjoys in a baffled sort of way but can seldom stand for more than a few days at a time, is Mrs. Capp’s particular pride & joy and is headquarters for their three children, Julie Ann, 17, Catherine Jan, 14, and Colin Cameron, 6. Though Capp sometimes talks his wife into spending stretches of weeks in Manhattan, she is a woman “who gets sleepy at n o’clock” and pines for the New England countryside. Capp has mirrored his astonishment at this phenomenon by making her the model for a character named Moonbeam McSwine, a lovely girl but one who “likes to stay down on the farm with the hawgs.”

Food that Fights Back. Capp himself thirsts continually for the uproar and excitement of New York, and spends from ten days to two weeks every month in a suite at Manhattan’s Warwick Hotel. He loves “21,” the Stork Club, and the Sixth Avenue delicatessens. Though he has a delicate stomach, he forces it to accept “food that fights right back” and is constantly chewing soda-mint tablets in an attempt to placate its outraged state.

Manhattan is also the seat of Capp Enterprises, a firm devoted to the vastly remunerative business of commercializing the byproducts of Capp’s comic strips. This odd institution’s headquarters on East 45th Street (it also has a branch office in Montreal) is presided over by brother Jerry and has a desk for brother Elliot, who also runs a publishing firm and writes the action for Abbie & Slats, a strip which Capp originally founded.

Capp Enterprises not only licenses the manufacture of such direct offshoots of the strip as Shmoos and Kigmies, but more than a hundred other products, including Li’l Abner orangeade, Daisy Mae blouses, Li’l Abner corncob pipes and Li’l Abner skonk hats. A good guess at the gross profit for 1950: $200,000.

But Capp’s journeys to New York are basically vacation trips. When it is time to begin producing fresh chapters in the lives of Li’l Abner and his colleagues, he retires to a big, handsomely furnished apartment on Boston’s Beacon Street. One of its back rooms—a bare-walled hideaway fitted up with three drawing boards—is the workroom in which Capp and two longtime assistants, Andy Amato and Walter Johnston, grind out the installments of their never-ending serial.

The Music Was Simply Grand. Capp writes the story the strips tell, and the dialogue in which it is told, and draws the faces of the characters. Amato and Johnston—who each get 10% of Capp’s profits, or about $30,000 a year—produce figures and backgrounds and finish the laborious chore of inking in the finished product. Capp does his work in long, furious bursts. He usually turns out a month’s strips in two weeks.

For all his glee over his wealth and fame, these long, exhausting bouts of creation seem to be Al Capp’s greatest reward. “No matter what else happens to me,” he says, “I’m God himself when I sit down at this drawing board.”

Capp fills a niche in comics comparable to Gershwin’s in jazz, or D. W. Griffith’s in the movies. From an instrument which had seemed as crude and monotonous as a dime-store flute, he produces noisy bass blats of comedy, a skirling of irony and satire such as the comic page had never known.

Some of Capp’s admirers go even further, and vow that he has not only created a genuine 20th-Century folk tale, but told it through a new kind of writing—a mixture of prose and hieroglyphics which simultaneously stings the mind of the intellectual and reduces the simple subway rider to coarse guffaws. The faithful number him among the great men of U.S. art & letters. Whether or not posterity will accept this thesis, the consensus of his contemporaries puts him high among the lively artists of the mechanical age.