Al Capp

Al Capp
File:Al Capp Time Cover.jpg Al Capp, Li'l Abner, and Daisy Mae on a 1950 cover of Time Magazine
Born
September 28, 1909 New Haven, Connecticut
Died
November 5, 1979 South Hampton, New Hampshire

Al Capp (September 28, 1909 – November 5, 1979) was an American cartoonist best known for the satiric comic strip, Li'l Abner. He also created the comic strips Abbie and Slats and Long Sam. The National Cartoonist Society awarded him the 1947 Reuben Award for the comic strip Li'l Abner and the 1979 Elzie Segar Award.

Capp used his humorous strip to expose greed, corruption and social injustice to around 60 million readers for more than 40 years. His Dogpatch community became a symbol of mainstream America and its values.

In the '60s Capp changed his politics from liberal to conservative and he came to be characterized by his critics as a bitter, disillusioned, conservative extremist. He was a paradoxical American icon, who was one of America's highest-paid and best known entertainers. He was also a columnist for the Daily News syndicate and a regular syndicated radio and TV commentator. He appeared on the cover of Time and many other magazines. He was also very successful in franchising Li'l Abner into film, theater, and radio and became a pioneer in character merchandising.

Early life

Born Alfred Gerald Caplin in New Haven, Connecticut, he was the eldest child of Otto and Matilda (Tillie) Caplin, immigrant Jews from Latvia. He lost his right leg in a trolley accident at the age of nine but his artistic father encouraged young Alfred to develop drawing skills as a form of therapy. With books and supplies provided by his family he began his journey to becoming one of the wolrd's premier cartoonists.

Capp spent five years at Bridgeport High School in Bridgeport, Connecticut without receiving a diploma. The cartoonist liked to tell how he failed geometry for nine straight terms.

In the early 30's A. G. Caplin went to New York City and found work drawing Mister Gilfeather, a one-panel, AP-owned property. At 19, he became the youngest syndicated cartoonist in America. He soon quit to become an assistant to Hammond Fisher, creator of "Joe Palooka," one of the most popular strips of its time.

Before leaving New York City he met and later became friends with Milton Caniff, who took over Mister Gilfeather after he left. Caniff would later become famous on his own when he created the comic strips Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon.

File:Al Capp Self-portrait April 1951.JPG

"I do Li'l Abner!!", a self-portrait by Al Capp, excerpted from the April 16-17 1951 Li'l Abner strips.

During one of Fisher's extended vacations, Capp's Joe Palooka story arc featured a stupid, strong hillbilly named Big Leviticus, a prototype for Li'l Abner. During this period, Capp was working on samples for the strip that would become Li'l Abner.

Leaving Joe Palooka, Capp sold Li'l Abner to the United Features Syndicate and the feature was launched on Monday August 13, 1934.

Li'l Abner

In 1934 L'il Abner was syndicated to eight newspapers, but his destitute and uneducated characters struck a nerve in Depression-era America. By 1937 it was published in 253 newspapers, reaching more than 15,000,000 readers, and by the early '50s it was in 1000 papers with more than 60 million readers.

The comic strip starred Li'l Abner Yokum, the lazy, dumb, but good-natured and strong hillbilly who lived in Dogpatch with Mammy and Pappy Yokum. Whatever energy he had went into evading the marital goals of Daisy Mae, his well-endowed girlfriend, until Capp finally gave in to reader pressure and allowed the couple to marry. This was such big news that the happy couple made the cover of Life magazine.

Abner's home town of Dogpatch was peopled with an assortment of memorable characters, including Marryin' Sam, Wolf Gal, Lena the Hyena, Indian Lonesome Polecat, and a host of others, notably the beautiful, full-figured women Stupefyin' Jones and Moonbeam McSwine. Perhaps Capp's most popular creations were the Shmoo, creatures whose incredible usefulness and generous nature made them a threat to civilization as we know it. Another famous character was Joe Btfsplk, who wanted to be a loving friend but was "the world's worst jinx", bringing bad luck to all those nearby. Btfsplk always had a small dark cloud over his head.

Li'l Abner also featured a comic-strip within the comic-strip Fearless Fosdick (a parody of Dick Tracy).

The Dogpatch residents regularly combatted the likes of city slickers, business tycoons, government officials and intellectuals with their homespun wisdom and ingenuity. Situations often took the characters to other parts of the globe, including New York City, tropical islands, and a miserable frozen land of Capp's invention, "Lower Slobbovia."

By 1947 Capp had become so wealthy that he was able to purchase his own contract back from United Features Syndicate. He initially sued them and won the right to a profit sharing arrangement and not the original 50/50 split. Wisely, Capp kept all merchandising rights. At a time when syndicates owned the copyrights, trademarks and merchandise rights to comic strips Capp was one of three cartoonists (Milton Caniff and Wil Eisner were the others) who were able to pioneer this type of deal.

The 1940s and 1950s

In 1940, a motion picture adaptation starred Granville Owen as Li'l Abner, with Buster Keaton taking the role of Lonesome Polecat. A successful musical comedy adaptation of the strip opened on Broadway November 15, 1956 and had a long run of 693 performances. The stage musical was adapted into a motion picture in 1959 by producer Norman Panama and director Melvin Frank with several performers repeating their Broadway roles.

He introduced the Shmoos in a four-month run of Li'l Abner in 1948. He used the small 'blobby' creatures as a symbol of ultimate consumerism. Providing all of life's necessity's on demand the highly reproductive creatures made work and shopping unnecessary. In this Shmoo series he created a "Shmooicide squad" to exterminate the little economic threats. Capp returned to the Shmoos in 1959. His running theme in this series, that capitalism and utopianism are not compatible, was somewhat prophetic of today's modern consumer society. The Shmoo evan became the star of a short-lived 1970s animated TV series. In an ironic twist, Shmoo-related merchandise became a huge consumer success.

During and after World War II, Capp worked without pay going to hospitals to entertain patients, especially to cheer recent amputees and explain to them that the loss of a limb did not mean an end to a happy and productive life. A U.S. Treasury Bond Certificate that was issued in 1949 was bordered with Al Capp cartoon characters and featured the Shmoo.

In one run of strips in 1957, Capp lampooned the comic strip Mary Worth as "Mary Worm", depicting the title character as a nosy do-gooder. Allan Saunders, the creator of the Mary Worth strip, returned Capp's fire with the introduction of the character "Hal Rapp", a foul-tempered, ill-mannered cartoonist. [1]

The '60s & '70s

Capp and a platoon of assistants kept the strip going throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. No matter how much help he had, Capp insisted on drawing the faces and hands himself, and, as is usual with collaborative efforts in comic strips, his name was the only one credited. Frank Frazetta, later famous as a fantasy artist, drew the beautiful women in the strip's later years.

In the '60s, Capp's politics swung from liberal to conservative, and instead of caricaturing big business types, he began spoofing counterculture icons such as Joan Baez (in the character of "Joanie Phoanie", a wealthy folksinger who offers an impoverished orphanage one million dollars' worth of "protest songs"[2]). He also attacked student political groups, such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) as "Students Wildly Indignant About Nearly Everything" (SWINE). He became a popular speaker on college campuses during the era, attacking anti-war protesters and demonstrators, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their Bed-In for Peace. [3] "The left eventually broke his heart," wrote John Updike of Capp.

In 1971, he was charged with attempted adultery by complaint of a female student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It developed that there were similar allegations from other campuses. Capp pleaded no contest and withdrew from public speaking. The resulting bad publicity led to hundreds of papers dropping his comic strip [4].

Li'l Abner lasted until 1977, and Capp died two years later from emphysema, at his home in South Hampton, New Hampshire.

Marriage and family

Leaving his new wife with her parents in Amesbury, Massachusetts, he subsequently returned to New York.

moving to Boston and marrying Catherine Wingate Cameron

An important Saroyan archive of essential biographical import. In 1943, Armenian-American author William Saroyan, at the peak of his success and fame, married the 17-year-old socialite Carol Marcus. They had two children, Aram (b. 1943) and Lucy (b. 1946), but by 1949, as this archive painfully documents, the marriage was clearly breaking up. In July, 1949, the couple agreed to separate; in September of that year they divorced; and Marcus, as an important letter here reveals, began an affair will the cartoonist AL CAPP.

His younger brother Elliot Caplin also became a comic strip creator, best known for writing the soap opera strip The Heart of Juliet Jones.

Legacy

Many communities, high schools and colleges staged "Sadie Hawkins Day" events, patterned after the similar annual event in the strip.

In 1968 a theme-park called Dogpatch USA opened at Jasper, Arkansas based on Capp's work and with his support. The park was a popular attraction during the 1970s but was abandoned in 1993 due to financial difficulties and remains unused and in disrepair.

Al Capp designed the sculptures of Flintabbety Flonatin that grace the city of Flin Flon, Manitoba.

The expression "double whammy" first appeared in a cartoon strip, which was quite popular in America in the 1920s. Al Capp, the author of the comic strip "Li'l Abner" used this expression to refer to an intense stare, which had a withering effect on its victims. It's meaning has undergone a considerable amount of change since then. This is how slang dictionaries define "double whammy" — "double the portion of something, especially something troublesome

Author's works

• Capp, Al. 1991. My Well-Balanced Life on a Wooden Leg: Memoirs. John Daniel. ISBN 0936784938
• Capp, Al. 1988. Li'l Abner: Dailies. Kitchen Sink Press. ISBN 087816037X
• Capp, Al. 1990. Fearless Fosdick. Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press. ISBN 0878161082
• Capp, Al. 2002. The Short Life and Happy Times of the Shmoo. Overlook Press. ISBN 1585672165

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Capp, Al, Frank Frazetta, and Denis Kitchen. 2004. Li'l Abner, the Frazetta Years. Dark Horse Comics. ISBN 1593071337
• Theroux, Alexander. 1999. The Enigma of Al Capp. Fantagraphics Books. ISBN 1560973404
• Berger, Arthur Asa. 1994. Li'l Abner: A Study in American Satire. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 0878057129
• Caplin, Elliot. 1994. Al Capp Remembered. Bowling Green State University Popular Press. ISBN 0879726296
• Sheridan, Martin. 1977. Comics and Their Creators: Life Stories of American Cartoonists. Hyperion Press. ISBN 0883555255

External links

• http://www.lil-abner.com/ Official Capp website. Retrieved March 10, 2007.
• Kitchen, Denis. 2004. http://www.deniskitchen.com/docs/new_shmoofacts.html Steve Krupp's Curio Shoppe. Shmoo (not Schmoo) Facts & Info. Retrieved March 15, 2007.
• Drabelle, Dennis. 2002. http://dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2002/09/30/capp/index.html Salon.com. Dogpatch Confidential. Retrieved March 15, 2007.
• http://bridgeport.ct.schoolwebpages.com/education/components/scrapbook/default.php?sectiondetailid=5111 Web page at Bridgeport Central High School devoted to Capp. Retrieved March 10, 2007.
• Greyfield, Donald. April 30, 1998. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=2841 Findagrave.com. Retrieved March 10, 2007.

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