Al Capp

by Denis Kitchen

  So, during the wartime years, he forced himself to walk with a more natural gait that was actually quite painful for him. He would walk into an amputee ward, look at a group of silent, sullen faces, set up an easel, and begin drawing.

  “I’m Al Capp,” he’d say. “I draw ‘Li’l Abner.’ I’m supposed to entertain you slobs.”

  He would say very little while he sketched. Eventually, he would tell his own story about how he lost his leg as a boy, how it had been amputated far above his knee. He would pull up his pantleg and expose his wooden leg. Only then would he engage in any dialogue with the wounded soldiers. He’d ask each one which leg he’d lost. When he had finished this exercise, he’d go into his pitch.

  “Everybody is worried about you slobs,” he’d go on. “The Red Cross, your doctors, the Pentagon, all worried because you’re just lying there. Well, I’m not worried because I know what they don’t know and what you don’t. I know you’re men.

  “M-E-N. That’s what worries you guys. You’re lying there, thinking you can’t get the girl. Well, your worries are over. You’re men, whether you’ve got one leg or two. I’m married. I’ve got two daughters and a son. Any questions?”

  Capp would finish his speech, hand each man a drawing, and move on. He was convincing, especially when he walked away, confident and seemingly without effort. In his book, Remembering Al Capp, Al’s brother Elliott wrote about how the veterans were inspired, unaware that Capp had to take a “rigorous course in walking” taught by an expert in the use of prosthetic legs.

  As Elliott recalled, when the war ended, Al “resumed his starboard sway when he walked. He said he was vastly more comfortable that way.”

  Capp used his art to deliver a similar message to injured veterans when he created an autobiographical comic book, Al Capp by Li’l Abner. He took license in the telling—he portrayed himself as losing his leg as a teenager, for instance—but the story was entertaining and, more important, poignant. The comic book, distributed by the Red Cross, did not attempt to sell false hope to those whose lives had been permanently altered by the cruelty of war. Instead, by setting himself up as an example, Capp showed how one needn’t be disabled by the loss of a limb. He was living proof.

  Al and Catherine Capp completed their family late in 1944, when they adopted their son, Colin Cameron Capp. Named after Catherine’s father but called “Kim” or “Kimmy” by the family, Colin was eight years younger than Cathie—to the day. Both had been born on September 19, Cathie in 1936, Kim in 1944. The Capps had wanted a son, but it wasn’t going to happen after Catherine had to have a hysterectomy. They chose to adopt.

  As an adult, Kim would speak fondly of his childhood, though he was never comfortable being the son of a celebrity, to such an extent that as a teenager he tried to keep his identity a secret.

  The Capp family was easygoing, with Catherine and her staff running the household and Al acting as the reluctant disciplinarian. Every day, around five thirty, Al would return home from work, and the family would gather around the dinner table and eat their evening meal together. Catherine and the kids could almost immediately tell if Capp’s work was going well: he could be moody and quiet if things were going poorly, but more often than not, he’d be boisterous and jovial.

  “He would narrate what he had written for the day in Li’l Abner’s dialect,” Julie recalled, adding that he was “very theatrical in his presentation.” He laughed uproariously at his own jokes; for the children, not yet old enough to understand the nuances of their father’s satire, Capp’s laughter was a cue for them to laugh along. As both Julie and Kim would recall, they thoroughly enjoyed the stories and their father’s funny presentations. Family time, to all in the household, was invaluable.

  This was the only aspect of his job that he brought home. Business deals and money were never discussed.

  Capp encouraged his children to think freely, and he insisted that they treat their education very seriously. They were going to graduate from high school and go on to college—something Capp himself had never done. The Capp library housed all the classics, and Al would haunt the area’s secondhand bookstores and antique shops for new additions. If the kids complained that there was nothing to do or, worse yet, that there was nothing on television, Capp ordered them to find a book.

  Besides reading, Capp tried to pass along his love of classical music, movies, and the theater. He relished family vacations, especially those overseas, when the Capps took ocean liners to France or England. He tried to drag his kids through museums and churches, with only marginal success.

  During the war years, this was still part of the future, at least for Kim. Capp might have impressed his readers as being cynical, but as a father he strove to provide his children with the type of childhood denied to him by poverty and the Depression. He bought a home, an elegant New England Georgian house surrounded by a white picket fence, a few blocks from Harvard Square, a short distance from the Harvard campus. Prior to the war he’d also purchased a sixty-five-acre farm in New Hampshire. The property was literally on the state line, a stone’s throw from Amesbury, Massachusetts, where Catherine grew up. The two girls would be raised here, and in the 1950s, after the girls moved to Cambridge, it would be converted into a summer home.

  As much as he doted on his family, Capp valued work above all else; other than his assistants, he had very few close friends, and, as evidenced by his lengthy trips away from home, he had no trouble picking work over family if he was forced to choose.

  In its October 28, 1946, issue Life devoted a three-page spread to a contest in which Al Capp challenged artists to create the ugliest woman ever presented in a comic strip. The winner would receive five hundred dollars—a generous haul for the time—but it was Capp who would benefit most from what, even by his standards, would become a benchmark in product promotion.

  Capp had no equal when it came to self-promotion and the promotion of his strip. For nearly a decade, he had basked in the publicity that Sadie Hawkins Day had brought “Li’l Abner.” He reveled in public appearances. He was a master of working the phones and convincing magazine and newspaper editors that he had a story they needed to report. No other comic strip artist instinctively knew marketing as well. In an article devoted to Capp’s contest in 1946, comics historian Rick Marschall labeled him “the most egomaniacal self-promoter in comics history. Capp “used every trick in the book to boost Li’l Abner and divert attention from other strips,” Marschall explained, “and he dreamed up a promotion that was probably as duplicitous—certainly nefarious and rascally—as it was brilliant.”

  At the beginning of 1946, “Li’l Abner” still held its familiar position among the top five strips in the business, reaching an estimated twenty-five million readers in more than six hundred newspapers. Capp, never satisfied, wanted more, and to boost his numbers he came up with an extended project, beginning in March and ending in November. The scheme involved several loosely connected “Li’l Abner” continuities; promotion on radio and in newspapers and magazines; the writing of an “Abner”-related song, to be performed by some of the most popular recording artists of the day; a contest challenging artists to come up with a character for the strip; and, in one of his most ambitious moves to date, the creation of a fictitious nation that, in time, would become a treasured part of “Li’l Abner” lore. Capp’s work during this period led comics scholar and editor Dave Schreiner to remark that “Li’l Abner” in 1946 was “possibly the strip’s strongest run, period.”

  It began with a story about Lester Gooch, Capp’s creator of “Fearless Fosdick.” Gooch, in response to a fan letter from Li’l Abner, went searching for the world’s ugliest woman. He traveled to a godforsaken country called Lower Slobbovia, a land encrusted in snow and ice, and populated by miserable people continually endangered by starvation and hungry wolves. Capp’s Lower Slobbovia, as revealed over the weeks, had its own national anthem, its own strange dialect (that sounded like a fractured combination of English and
Yiddish, with a dash of Russian), and its own unique laws and customs. Even after Lester Gooch was arrested and jailed for refusing to marry Lena the Hyena, the grotesquely ugly woman he’d been seeking to meet, Capp continued to roam free through this newly created country and offer his unique, satirical observations on a country so poor as to make Dogpatch look like an exemplar of the high life.

  Capp took matters a step further in June, when he finally had Li’l Abner visit Lower Slobbovia and encounter Lena. The notoriously girl-shy Dogpatcher found himself caught in the same predicament that trapped Lester Gooch earlier in the story. Lower Slobbovians kept Lena locked away, lest horrible things happen to those innocents who actually set eyes on her, and according to the law, the first man who cast his eyes on her was obliged to marry her. This was not good news for Li’l Abner, whose hair literally stood on end when he got his first glimpse of her.

  Capp was too clever to allow readers to see just how hideous Lena was. Instead, every time she appeared in a panel, he had her head concealed by a white box emblazoned with the message “Deleted by Editor.” This form of censorship, Capp advised his readers, was imposed by subscribing newspaper editors who judged Lena’s looks to be “too terrifying, depressing or nauseating for family readership.”

  Readers demanded a look at just how ugly this woman was—precisely the response Capp wanted. Lena, he announced to the public, was too hideous for him to draw, but if anyone out there cared to take a whack at it … thus the national contest was born. Artists were encouraged to submit their interpretation of what the world’s ugliest woman might look like, with a $500 prize going to the winner. A panel of three judges would make the final decision. Local newspapers got into the act as well, sponsoring their own contests and awarding prizes to subscribers.

  A 1946 “Li’l Abner” sequence focused on Lena the Hyena, the ugliest woman in the world. An image of her face purportedly had to be censored by newspaper editors, in fact leading to a highly publicized contest to imagine what she might look like. Cartoonist Basil Wolverton won with this monstrosity.

  But Capp was just getting started. Something had to save Li’l Abner from the forced marriage, and for this he came up with another unique form of self-promotion: he created a song, “Li’l Abner, Don’t Marry That Girl”—to be sung on the radio, on programs that Li’l Abner was certain to hear, even in the outreaches of Lower Slobbovia. Capp wrote the lyrics and, through an acquaintance, found someone to write the music. The promotion then hit the airwaves in an unprecedented way. On successive nights, Frank Sinatra, Kate Smith, Jack Smith, Fred Waring, and Danny Kaye sang the song on their popular radio programs. Bob Hope also had the song performed on his show. When a recording of the song became available, “Li’l Abner” readers rushed to stores to purchase it.

  Back in Lower Slobbovia, when Lena heard the song, along with Daisy Mae’s plea for Li’l Abner to stay single, she volunteered to dump Li’l Abner so he would be free to marry the woman who truly loved him. Once again, Abner avoided marriage in the eleventh hour.

  Contest entries flooded into the United Feature offices—a million, according to Time magazine, a half million, according to Life, though the figures were undoubtedly inflated. For his celebrity panel of judges, Capp persuaded Sinatra, actor Boris Karloff, and surrealist painter Salvador Dalí to subject themselves to the stacks of entries. All the women in Lower Slobbovia were homely, Capp instructed his trio of judges; their selection had to set a new standard for the word “ugly.”

  The winner, created by comic book artist Basil Wolverton, fit the description, bearing only the slightest trace of human facial characteristics.

  Lena, of course, would have been the perfect candidate to enter the annual Sadie Hawkins Day festivities, and Capp devised a way to make it happen. Lena wound up visiting Dogpatch and staying as a guest of the Yokums, and she and the Wolf Gal entered the eagerly anticipated Sadie Hawkins race. Thus concluded one of Capp’s most ambitious years in the strip.

  11 The Shmoo, the Kigmy, and All One Cartoonist Could Ever Want

  On November 29, 1947, the New Yorker presented the first installment of a two-part Al Capp profile. Taken as a whole, the biographical and professional retrospective was by far the lengthiest magazine piece to date about a cartoonist. Capp had recently won the prestigious Billy DeBeck Memorial Award (later renamed the Reuben Award, after one of Capp’s heroes, Rube Goldberg), and the New Yorker was intrigued by the overwhelming popularity of the artist.

  The New Yorker’s interest extended beyond Capp himself, to the idea of comics as a pop cultural phenomenon. Writer E. J. Kahn Jr. cited figures that were bound to impress—or alarm—even the stuffiest reader.

  In the decade between 1937 and 1946, Kahn wrote, comics had supplanted motion pictures and radio as the most popular form of American entertainment. “Every month, nearly forty million comic books are bought and presumably read. Every day, seventy million people, or half the population of the country, are reported to read, openly or furtively, comic strips in the newspaper.” Exact figures, Kahn added, were impossible to calculate, given the syndicates’ habit of inflating the numbers of their readers, but in the end, “any analysis of such statistics is apt to bring on a headache.”

  Placed in the context of such a burgeoning business, Capp was an ideal profile subject. He was perceptive, thoughtful and, as always, funny. Capp, for a change, kept his stories within screaming distance of actual fact, although Kahn advised New Yorker readers, early in the profile’s first installment, that Capp’s imagination and memory were always at odds, with his imagination usually winning out at the end of the day.

  “Capp regards himself as a storyteller, not a mere cartoonist,” Kahn wrote, “and he is unable to tell any story, including that of his life, without embellishing his remarks with harmless and diverting fictions.”

  The profile caught Capp in fine form, moving smoothly from topic to topic, whether he was talking about the events of his youth or his fear of losing his hair, his suit with United Feature Syndicate or his background with Ham Fisher. He reflected on the origins of “Li’l Abner” and offered a bird’s-eye view of how the strip was worked out in his studio. Capp would be the subject of many profiles and interviews in years to come, but he would never be as informative and entertaining as he was in this one.

  Capp was well aware of the huge sums “Li’l Abner” was earning for United Feature Syndicate. His contract with the company was much more generous than most comic strip artists would dream of, with an escalating pay scale that made him the highest-compensated cartoonist in the business. Most comic strip artists took 50 percent of what the syndicates took in. By 1947, Capp commanded 65 percent of the take, with an additional 5 percent raise due in January 1949.

  Capp still wasn’t satisfied. The arrangement, he thought, was all wrong. Syndicates viewed comic strip artists as private contractors, but the syndicates held the copyrights on their creations, just as comic book companies owned the work of their artists. There were rare exceptions, such as Will Eisner, who owned all of his nongovernment work, including his popular feature “The Spirit,” or Capp’s old friend Milton Caniff, who quit producing his “Terry and the Pirates” strip over ownership disputes, only to start up “Steve Canyon,” which he owned. For Capp, there were also merchandising perks that very few artists enjoyed: “Li’l Abner” had scored an impressive assortment of commercial endorsements, toys, clothing, comic books, and other merchandise, all of which brought in a substantial monetary reward to Capp and United Feature.

  Capp resented paying the syndicate more than he felt it deserved. Syndicates, he felt, should be treated like agents, rather than owners, and their share of the profits should compare to the percentages taken in by literary agents, typically in the 10 to 20 percent range. After all, they were selling the work, not publishing it.

  The comic book business offered its own examples of the sort of practices that Capp considered to be grossly unfair, most notably in the case of Jerry Siegel
and Joe Shuster, the young Cleveland duo who created Superman, who were struggling with ownership issues over their creation. Siegel and Shuster found themselves trapped in a work-for-hire arrangement that paid them a relative pittance while their publisher earned a fortune on the comic book industry’s most important creation of all time.

  Capp arrived at his conclusions after conducting considerable private research—inquiries and research that went well beyond the usual cartoonists’ kibitzing and complaining at National Cartoonists Society meetings. Capp called publishers and editors of newspapers subscribing to “Li’l Abner” and asked about the terms of business. He haunted publishing parties and conventions, where he talked shop with writers, editors, and agents. When United Feature learned of these activities, it sent its own people to intercept Capp and engage him in conversation before he got too far along with his research. Capp battled back. He started attending these events with a beautiful woman on each arm; their job was to distract the United Feature people while Capp made his getaway.

  The standard business practice, Capp learned, was that sales personnel would offer a comic strip to unsubscribing newspapers or, in the case of exceptionally popular strips like “Li’l Abner,” “Little Orphan Annie,” “Blondie,” and others, newspaper editors would approach United Feature and request syndicate rates. The rates were based on a newspaper’s circulation and location, with large-circulation papers in big cities paying premium prices for the strips (often extracting exclusivity within a geographic radius in the deal) and smaller-circulation papers getting the strips at lower rates. Capp was curious about the sales tactics used by United Feature. Did the syndicate’s sales staff put as much effort into corralling small newspapers, where the money would be relatively small, as they put into the larger circulation papers, where the payoff was substantially greater?