The Frank Godwin and Bud Fisher rejections suddenly made a lot of sense. New York was home to a number of the most successful artists in the business, and Caplin had no doubt that Ham Fisher would be talking to each and every one of them. The feud was on, and Fisher was firing the first shots.
Capp’s plan for counterattack was brilliantly nasty, even by his standards. It began with an almost tearful, regret-filled meeting with Fisher at the Parc Vendome. Capp told Fisher that he’d made a terrible mistake, and now, unable to find work in New York, he had no choice but to move back to Massachusetts.
Fisher, as Caplin anticipated, took pity and offered him his old job back—at a reduced salary, of course, and on the condition that Caplin sign a one-year contract agreeing to a ten-hour workday, a relinquishing of all rights to anything he created on the job or at home, and total secrecy about his employment. Caplin might not have predicted Fisher’s exact terms, but he’d worked for him long enough to know that, first, Fisher still needed him as an assistant, and, second, he would make Caplin pay dearly for what Fisher considered to be nothing less than insubordination when he quit the first time around. Still, even more importantly, Caplin knew that Fisher was too tightfisted to pay an attorney to draft a legally binding contract.
It worked precisely as planned. A young attorney stopped by Fisher’s apartment, drew up a boilerplate as dictated by Fisher, and agreed to have the contract prepared in short order. The cost, he assured Fisher, would not be too high. Fisher exploded, as Caplin knew he would, and weeks passed without his consulting another attorney. In the meantime, Caplin worked and collected his pay. When, later, the first “Li’l Abner” strips appeared in the papers, Fisher voiced no objection. “Li’l Abner” was excellent, and Fisher could see himself as part of its future success. After all, hillbillies had initially been part of his “Joe Palooka” strip, even if they weren’t the same hillbillies, and this new strip’s talented creator was still his assistant, ostensibly under his guidance.
It was now time for Caplin to break the bad news. When a contract from Ham Fisher hadn’t materialized, he explained, he’d gone to United Feature and agreed to an exclusive contract with them. He had no alternative but to leave Fisher and focus solely on “Li’l Abner.”
If Fisher had any inkling that he’d been taken, he didn’t let on. “Li’l Abner,” as he saw it, was no threat to him. If the kid wanted to strike out on his own, that was fine with him. He wished Caplin well, and the two parted ways.
Fisher’s goodwill would last only so long—until “Li’l Abner” became a sensation and boasted a larger circulation than “Joe Palooka.”
Then the real war would begin.
* A week after firing Caplin, Fisher spoke to another young artist who hoped to work as his assistant. Although the meeting had been arranged, Fisher angrily dismissed the would-be collaborator, saying he’d just fired a similar assistant and wanted nothing to do with hiring another one. The young artist’s name was Will Eisner, and he would become one of the most influential comics and graphic novel artists in comics history.
7 Li’l Abner
When giving the background of “Li’l Abner,” Al Capp would have preferred that people believe that his comic strip came close to being an overnight success. There was a rather slow introductory period, he claimed, during which readers learned what they needed to know about the characters and subscribing newspapers learned what they needed to know about the comic strip’s commercial potential. The timeline on this period, however, was longer than Capp wanted to remember. The first daily strip appeared on August 8, 1934, and the first Sunday strip appeared half a year later, on February 24, 1935. Only eight newspapers carried it in the beginning, well below any minimal threshold of success, but the numbers rose steadily until, as Capp boasted, “all hell broke loose.”
He began signing the strip “Al G. Cap,” a shortened version of his given name. By the twenty-fifth daily he changed it to “Al G. Capp,” and by the second week of January 1935 he permanently dropped the initial and settled on “Al Capp.”
The early strips bore little resemblance to the outrageously funny satires and parodies of the future. For all the personal and professional animosity that he’d worked up against Ham Fisher, Capp had learned a great deal from him, and he borrowed heavily from this knowledge when he created “Li’l Abner.” Capp wanted nothing to do with writing material for kids and adolescents, nor did he wish to create the joke-a-day strips that took up so much room on the comics pages of newspapers. He aimed for a large adult audience, the kind that would almost anxiously turn to “Li’l Abner” every day, wondering what was going to happen next to the characters from Dogpatch. For this, he needed strong, continuing stories.
Ham Fisher and “Joe Palooka” had provided him with the model for continuity and technique. Each strip would stretch out for a period of several weeks, carefully plotted in a way that guaranteed the readers’ return to the strip. Cliffhangers brought them back after a weekend away; action sequences kept them returning from weekday to weekday. Other popular strips, such as “Dick Tracy” and “Little Orphan Annie,” which featured extended, continuing stories known as continuities, with idiosyncratic nonrealistic styles, served as additional models. “Li’l Abner,” although humorous, began more as a typical adventure strip placed in an unusual setting.
Looking back on his early “Li’l Abner” entries, Capp would state, with obvious irritation, that he wasn’t interested in creating serious material, that he was more or less pushed into the mainstream of the times. Adventure and suspense strips were becoming the next big thing, and Capp complained that he had no choice but to follow the trend.
“Suspense was what editors wanted when I was ready to create my own comic strip,” he’d say, “but all I wanted to do was fun and fantasy.”
The problem, he’d insist, was that suspense characters were one-dimensional, dualistic good guys vs. bad guys, and that he saw the human race in much different terms.
“I simply couldn’t believe in good guys and bad guys—as I drew them,” he said. “I discovered good things in the bad guys, and vice versa. So my hero turned out to be big and strong like the suspense-strip heroes, but he also turned out to be stupid, as big, strong heroes sometimes are.”
There was no doubting the growing popularity of the adventure or suspense strip. In the three-year period between 1931, when Chester Gould introduced “Dick Tracy” to the world, and 1934, when “Li’l Abner” made its first appearance, Martha Orr’s melodramatic “Apple Mary” (which, under new writers and artists, would become “Mary Worth”), Alex Raymond’s “Flash Gordon,” Lee Falk and Phil Davis’s “Mandrake the Magician,” and “Secret Agent X-9,” written by Dashiell Hammett and illustrated by Alex Raymond, made their initial appearances as syndicated comic strips. Milton Caniff, Capp’s former colleague at Associated Press, was already working on “Dickie Dare” before his landmark strip, “Terry and the Pirates,” hit the newspapers in 1934. There was plenty of funny stuff to read, like the enormously popular “Blondie” (1930), but change was in the air. A new creation—the comic book—joined the comics market the year “Li’l Abner” hit the newsstands, and while the early going was slow and plodding, at first essentially just reprinting newspaper strips, the upstart cousin hung on and slowly gained in popularity until Superman blew the lid off the market with the superhero’s appearance in Action Comics #1 in 1938.
Capp would grumble that he had to cut some of his humorous material from his early “Li’l Abner” strips, and there might be no contesting that, though he did manage to add strong elements of humor to those early entries. The main characters in “Li’l Abner,” including Abner Yokum, his parents, and Daisy Mae Scragg, were with the strip from the beginning. Their physical appearances would change as the strip evolved, with Mammy and Pappy Yokum becoming half-pints rather than the average-sized people they were in the beginning, and Daisy Mae becoming much more voluptuous, but they changed very little as characte
rs over the strip’s forty-three-year run. Their backwoods ways would be a constant source of humor.
The first story cycles are strong examples. Mammy Yokum hears from her long-lost sister, Bessie, who ran away from home and, unlikely as it seems, met and married a wealthy duke, who left her a fortune when he passed away. “The Duchess of Bopshire,” as she is called, never had children, and she wants to spend some of her fortune on cultivating Li’l Abner. All he needs to do is move into her Park Avenue apartment in New York. Everyone is thrilled by the news—except, that is, Daisy Mae, who’s madly in love with Li’l Abner, despite the fact that he’d rather spend time with Salomey, the family pig, than court any woman.
The hillbilly-in-New-York setup offered Al Capp almost endless material for both drama and humor. Bessie, a pretentious gasbag, tries to introduce her nephew to the finer points of the high life, including its wealthy, available young women, but Abner bumbles along: it’s a successful setup, similar to that of the popular Beverly Hillbillies television program, which would appear three decades later.
When Li’l Abner becomes unwittingly engaged to a young socialite, the announcement of the pending nuptials draws the attention of a couple of thugs, who hatch a kidnapping plan. They succeed in “kidnapping” Abner, but only because he views it as a means of freeing himself from the clutches of his engagement; he disarms his two captors and winds up trussing the two up while he goes out for sandwiches for all of them.
It took a while for the style and characters of “Li’l Abner” to fully develop. In this second strip (August 14, 1934), Capp’s pen strokes are thinner, Mammy and Pappy Yokum are relatively tall, Mammy’s bonnet has not yet acquired its trademark squared-off visor and shape, and Abner is not yet the robust youth with the arching shock of hair readers came to know. The signature, “Al G. Cap,” quickly became “Al Capp.”
The kidnapping is big news, and when it makes its way back to Dogpatch, Mammy Yokum decides to head to New York and rescue her son, leading to a series of funny misadventures, from Mammy’s beating up a train conductor because he has the audacity to ask for fare, to a similar altercation with a New York cabdriver taking her to her sister’s Park Avenue digs. Mammy eventually conjures up a vision and finds Li’l Abner, not in the clutches of villains but working as a dishwasher in an upscale restaurant. Unfortunately, he has run up a big bill and is trying to work it off, but he can’t stop eating the restaurant’s food and is now the captive of his appetite, dishwashing by day and sleeping in the restaurant at night. The story reaches its happy ending when Abner is freed and Mammy confronts his fiancée and sees to it, in her inimitable way, that the engagement is broken off.
The story cycle ran six days a week, from Monday through Saturday, from August 13 to October 29, 1934. The strip became a family affair, with Al Capp penciling and inking the principal action and Catherine filling in a lot of the backgrounds. They kept it as simple as possible. As Catherine would note, neither could draw vehicles or machines of any sort, so most of the panels from each day’s entry focused on the characters and dialogue balloons. Catherine lettered on the early strips, but Al wasn’t satisfied with it and soon took over. A slow, deliberate artist, Capp managed to hit his deadlines, but it didn’t come easy.
It became even more challenging when Catherine announced that she was pregnant with their second child. As before, she returned to Amesbury to stay with her parents during her pregnancy, leaving Al on his own in New York City, creating the strip and wondering what he had to do to boost its lagging circulation figures.
Worried that “Li’l Abner” wasn’t being picked up by enough newspapers to justify its existence, Capp asked for permission to personally pitch his strip to newspapers. He’d visit offices in New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, often on side trips when visiting Catherine in Amesbury. Capp proved himself to be a good salesman: his critical first sale was to the Boston Globe, which became his flagship paper. He was encouraged by a steady if modest increase in subscribing newspapers. United Feature ballyhooed “Abner’s” spike in popularity in trade publication ads. The word was getting out.
The syndicate, encouraged by the growing response to the strip, awarded Capp with a full-color Sunday entry beginning on February 24, 1935. Accompanying the strip, as was customary when Sunday strips filled an entire page, was a smaller substrip called “Washable Jones,” featuring the title character, a young hillbilly boy, and a ghost he accidentally pulls from the water while fishing. Both ran independent of the “Li’l Abner” weekday continuity, and both featured stories that continued from Sunday to Sunday, though sometimes the Sunday “Li’l Abners” were completed in just one segment. Syndicate sales of the strip accelerated, and by August, the first anniversary of “Li’l Abner,” over one hundred newspapers were on board, a truly meteoric rise for a new feature.
According to Capp, one unintended offshoot of this new development was the renewal of hostilities with Ham Fisher—or, perhaps more accurately, new stakes being brought to a feud that Capp believed had long ended. Fisher had offered nothing but encouragement for him after the first appearance of “Li’l Abner”—or so Capp claimed—but when the Yokum family turned up in the Sunday papers, including a paper in New York, the “Joe Palooka” creator resumed his efforts at discrediting Capp whenever and wherever possible. Capp would inevitably get wind of Fisher’s bad-mouthing him to a features editor in Detroit or some other city removed from New York, Fisher would always deny it when Capp confronted him with what he’d heard, and then it would happen again. Capp couldn’t understand why Fisher didn’t seem to realize that there was plenty of room for both strips in the comics universe, and he did his best to ignore him.
He had other concerns on his mind. He wanted to get out of New York City, and with the Globe representing his most prestigious subscriber, he began planning a move to Boston. He’d always loved the city, which had a strong artistic community and offered the benefits of large-city life without the stifling population and daily grind of Manhattan. The city was steeped in history, and with Harvard nearby he would be living in proximity of an Ivy League school. After Catherine delivered their second child, Cathie, on September 19, 1936, he moved his family to Beantown.
He also hired an assistant, a young but experienced cartoonist named Moe Leff, to assure that he’d still meet deadlines and continue the high standards he’d set for “Li’l Abner.” The “Washable Jones” strips demanded more time and attention than the black-and-white “Abner” dailies, and while Capp had little difficulty in coming up with storylines for both strips, which he recorded meticulously on yellow legal paper, his mind raced ahead of his ability to draw and ink the art. Leff, who had worked as an assistant on various strips over the years, became an invaluable assistant until he, too, was eventually sucked into the vortex of the Al Capp/Ham Fisher storm.
Al Capp took great pride in his abilities as an artist and a writer.
“No artist who can write should avoid words,” he’d say. “No author who can draw should avoid drawing.”
This wasn’t just the typical pontificating on Capp’s part. He strongly believed from the very beginning that his comic strip required more than good art and a passable story, and he viewed his identity in the business as something more than an artist illustrating gags for readers looking for a daily laugh.
“I don’t think of myself as a cartoonist, or of ‘Li’l Abner’ as a cartoon,” he stated. “I think of myself as a novelist and of ‘Abner’ as a novel, a page of which is published every day. At the end of the year, I’ve written 365 pages, fully illustrated.”
Capp mined the literary world when he shaped his new comic strip, turning to one of his childhood favorites. Charles Dickens had created memorable characters that appealed to the masses, if not his harshest critics, and Capp used Dickens as a model for his Appalachian characters. The strip, he realized, would not rise to the level that he desired unless his characters were the type of people his readers might identify with. The early c
ontinuities, designed to familiarize readers with the Yokum clan, Daisy Mae, and a handful of others, were deliberately kept simple, but as time passed and more characters—and humor—were added to “Li’l Abner,” the storylines became more complex, taking a meandering path.
“At times,” he explained in 1935, “I fall in love with some secondary character in the Li’l Abner story and I feature him or her for days, neglecting the principal of the tale. Then I will get a wire from my syndicate editor, something like this: ‘Sequence O.K., but don’t forget that Li’l Abner is the hero.’ Then I realize I must get down to earth and give the strip the focus which is consistent with its title.”
In future years, “Li’l Abner” would be recognized as much for its memorably named secondary characters—Moonbeam McSwine, J. Roaringham Fatback, Evil-Eye Fleegle, Joe Btfsplk, Lena the Hyena, Available Jones—as for the Yokum family. Capp would return to his favorites from time to time, featuring them in new stories, sometimes with altered names and appearances. Being exact was never his main concern. The goal was to entertain.
The characters’ unique names also owed something to Dickens.
“We work damned hard on them,” Capp said. “We’ll spend four hours to come up with just the right name for a character who will pass in and out of the strip and never be seen again. I want a name to describe the character, as Dickens does. So when I name a girl Moonbeam McSwine, you don’t need to be told that she’s a beautiful and unsanitary character.”
Then there were the words he put into his characters’ mouths. Capp’s characters spoke their own language, rooted in English but enunciated in choppy syllables, like the uneven whack of an ax splitting wood. It was the sound of the hills, as Capp remembered it. Over the years, journalists and breathless scholars would insist that the language was straight-on accurate, but Capp never made a claim to it. The dialect was simply intended for humor. Later, when he was surrounded by assistants, everyone spoke the language nonstop in the studio until it rolled off their tongues with the ease of any native language. Even if it was fabricated, it had its own natural rhythm.
Al Capp Page 9
