Al Capp

by Denis Kitchen

  There was also the issue of the syndicates’ expectations for the life and success of any given strip. Comic strip artists were offered contracts based on the belief that a strip had a limited life span.

  “There was an unwritten law that a successful strip had a life span of 12 years,” Capp explained in an interview late in his life. “I think that was Bill Conselman’s rule—he wrote ‘Ella Cinders’—and it was figured that a strip had had it after a dozen years. Of course after 10 years I was going better than ever.”

  Throughout his research, Capp was busy putting together a strategy for his next move. United Feature was aware of his querying editors, publishers, and salesmen about business practices, and the higher-ups at the syndicate had heard him voice at least halfhearted threats about withholding a couple of weeks’ worth of strips until he was better compensated, so he had to develop a new approach if he expected to overcome the odds and wrest control of his creative work before his contract with United Feature expired in 1954.

  Capp consulted with his attorneys and, on July 10, 1947, filed suit against the United Feature Syndicate and United Press International, the syndicate’s parent company. In the suit, Capp charged the syndicate with failing to use its best efforts in selling the “Li’l Abner” strip and failing to obtain prices “consonant with its popularity and commercial value.” The suit sought $14 million in compensation and damages and, more important, the reassignment to Capp of all rights to “Li’l Abner.”

  As daring as the lawsuit seemed—a syndicate might have removed a lesser-known artist from his strip and continued it, using a replacement artist—Capp was told that he had a good chance of winning the suit or at least settling it out of court. United Feature couldn’t afford to take a $14 million hit, and even if it felt like gambling, the attendant publicity would be a public relations nightmare.

  Capp went on the offensive in his strip, too. In two Sunday installments of “Li’l Abner,” Capp struck back at the comics industry in a scalding parody of Siegel and Shuster’s problems (and, to those in the know, his own trials at United Feature), in which two young comic strip artists, creators of the immensely popular “Jack Jawbreaker” comic strip, were being used and abused by the heartless Squeezeblood Syndicate.

  It was either a courageous or foolhardy move. Capp was not only ripping his syndicate, but he was also expecting the syndicate to distribute his parody to its hundreds of subscribing newspapers and thus tens of millions of readers.

  United Feature distributed the strips.

  Comics, particularly comic books, were coming under attack at this time, largely due to the efforts of Fredric Wertham, a German-born psychiatrist whose anticomics crusade received widespread media attention. In 1948, he was just beginning a relentless attack that would culminate in the 1954 publication of Seduction of the Innocent, a book-length screed that attempted to connect comic books with juvenile crime. A natural storyteller, Wertham used anecdotes, rather than statistics and scientific methods, to underscore his points. In the March 27, 1948, issue of Collier’s, journalist Judith Crist, in an article titled “Horror in the Nursery,” gave Wertham his first significant forum in a mass-circulation periodical, and he spun his stories about how comics had influenced all kinds of delinquent behavior. Wertham was not interested in hearing from those in his profession who didn’t share his feelings; he was a self-appointed opponent of comics, spokesman for concerned parents, and advocate for immediate action against those producing these offensive materials. “The time has come to legislate these books off the newsstands and out of the candy stores,” he proclaimed.

  This was hardly the first time that an individual or group called for government intervention against perceived dangers in comics. Opposition had been around since the advent of comic strips in newspapers and, more recently, the wide distribution of comic books. Because of careful scrutiny by cautious syndicates and the watchful eyes of subscribing newspaper editors, comic strips were largely sanitized. But the comic book industry, not subject to such screening, had managed to produce huge quantities of bold and unfettered content with impunity. By the late forties and early fifties America’s newsstands proliferated with “true” crime and horror comic books replete with bloody and explicitly violent images, walking decomposing corpses, and similar content, which most parents, if they were paying attention, would have certainly found unsuitable for their children. But comic books retailed for only ten cents, there were no age restrictions on their sale, and children of any age had easy access to them.

  While such comics had been a source of some concern for a while, Wertham was a skilled writer and pop psychiatrist, and his articles over the next few years, many appearing in popular magazines, touched off a national debate, leading to the 1954 establishment of a comics code that oversaw the content of every comic book appearing on the market.

  On the evening of Tuesday, March 2, 1948, Capp appeared on America’s Town Meeting of the Air, a weekly radio program broadcast by ABC. A four-member panel, moderated by George V. Denny, addressed the topic “What’s Wrong with the Comics?” The audience packed into New York’s Town Hall for the live broadcast, anticipating a spirited discussion, was not shortchanged.

  John Mason Brown, a drama critic, author, and columnist for the Saturday Review of Literature, spoke first, and he minced no words.

  “I deplore them and, to continue the understatement, I abhor them,” he said of comics. He had read them, he conceded, and he’d gone as far as to permit his two sons to read them whenever it would “subdue” the boys on train rides, or when he needed peace and quiet at home. He hated doing this, he confessed, because reading comics was a poor substitute for reading books. Comics were a form of trash, and even if he had to allow that trash was “part of every healthy diet,” comics were “the lowest, most despicable, and most harmful and unethical form of trash.”

  He was only warming up.

  “Most comics, as I see them, are the marijuana of the nursery!” he exclaimed, to the merriment of his audience. “They are the bane of the bassinet! They are the horror of the home, the curse of the kids, and a threat to the future!”

  George J. Hecht, publisher of Parents magazine, as well as several educational comics geared to young readers, followed Brown. Comics, he pointed out, were exceedingly popular: 91 percent of boys and girls between six and seventeen read comics. In a measured speech, he argued that comics had been used as educational tools for children and military personnel and that there were “good comic magazines and bad comics just as there are good books and bad books, good motion pictures and bad motion pictures.” He suggested that the comics industry should police itself.

  “There is nothing wrong with comics that good publishing cannot and will not correct,” he concluded.

  Hecht had already done his part to back his words. Back in 1941, he had launched his comic book series, True Comics, to offer an exciting yet wholesome alternative to the action and superhero comics that had burst on the market since the creation of such phenomenal superheroes as Superman and Batman. In its first issue, True Comics had offered stories of Simón Bolívar and Winston Churchill. But Hecht hadn’t been satisfied with simply offering interesting content that parents would approve of: he created advisory boards for the comic book, with such child movie stars as Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple on board to keep him informed as to what kind of materials kids wanted to see. Later that same year, another publisher started up Classic Comics, a series of comics adaptations of classic literature. The title would be changed to Classics Illustrated in 1947.

  Journalist Marya Mannes was up next, with more fearmongering about the link between comics and juvenile delinquency, backed by outlandish statistics.

  “Comic books are the addiction of three out of four American homes,” she stated, without bothering to mention where she obtained this statistic. “In one out of three American homes they are virtually the only reading matter. Repeat, the ONLY reading matter.”

  Comics, in
her mind, were killers: “I believe that a steady, uncontrolled and indiscriminate diet of comic books can stunt a child’s mental and spiritual growth just as much as a steady malnutrition can stunt his physical growth.”

  This was familiar territory for Mannes. A year earlier, in “Junior Has a Craving,” an essay published in the February 17, 1947, issue of New Republic, Mannes had submitted a similar approach in condemning the effects the growing interest in comics was having on young readers. Comics, she wrote, were “the greatest intellectual narcotic on the market,” and the time that children spent reading them was time in which “all inner growth is stopped.”

  By the time Al Capp finally had his say, he was fully prepared for battle. He began by noting that, as a drama critic, Brown possessed no special qualifications to talk about comics.

  What, Capp wondered, would kids say if the topic of the evening had been “What’s Wrong with Drama Critics?”

  “Drama critics are not only the bane of the bassinet,” he suggested, mocking Brown’s earlier statement, “they’re the didey service of the nursery …

  “Of course,” he went on, “as any fool can plainly see, these kids would be wrong because kids just aren’t the best judges of dramatic critics. And this point occurred to me during Mr. Brown’s speech: dramatic critics just aren’t the best judges of kids.”

  Capp asked the audience to envision a father, mother, and their eleven-year-old son sitting in a living room and discussing what they’d read in the day’s newspaper. No one had to guess where Capp was heading with this anecdote. The parents, objecting to their son’s reading comics, order him to look at the news.

  “I did, Pop,” the kid replies. “And oh boy, it’s full of murder and crime and violence and S-E-X, too, Pop.”

  Perhaps, the father counters, it might be best if his son put down the paper in favor of a classic book. He pulls books from the shelves—Oliver Twist, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Alice in Wonderland, even Shakespeare. All contain violence and mayhem. By the time the father has destroyed all the objectionable books in the house, all that remains is the phone book.

  Outraged by Capp’s comparing the violence in comics to that in great literature, and by Capp’s assertion that Dickens might have written comics if he were alive today, Marya Mannes used much of her allotted rebuttal time to attack Capp personally. “I’d just like to say that Mr. Capp has plenty of humor but little humility,” she told the audience. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t speak of himself and Dickens in the same breath, because Dickens is a creative artist and Mr. Capp is a conveyor belt.”

  The debate touched off a furious reaction. ABC received more than six thousand letters—the most ever received by the program. It was covered in Newsweek and the Saturday Review of Literature, which also published an essay entitled “A Half-Century of Comic Art,” a snarky piece that played into the argument that comics were inferior art for inferior minds. “As drawing comic art is of the same genre as the doodles or sketches schoolboys pencil on the margins of geography books, or ebullient sales men on restaurant menus,” the essay’s author wrote. As for those reading comic strips, “one is not required to be either a child or a dolt, although conceivably it helps. One is required, however, to relax for the fun of it, to turn off the intellect like a faucet so as not to dampen the comics’ earthy vivacity.”

  Comments such as these annoyed Capp no end. Comics, he insisted, then and always, were fine art, whether critics wanted to acknowledge it or not. If young people enjoyed “Li’l Abner,” that was fine, but the stories and commentary were aimed at older readers.

  Capp was fired up, inspired enough to create a brief “Li’l Abner Fights for His Rights” strip, in which Li’l Abner, horrified to learn that the Dogpatch Mammys’ Club had declared “Fearless Fosdick” “bad fo’ chillen on account they is full o’ crime,” argues that fairy tales like “Jack and the Beanstalk” and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe are full of violence, mayhem, and crime. The Dogpatch Mammys’ Club, after hearing Li’l Abner’s argument, concludes that “those psy-cho-logists is jest trying to make a soft dollar by frighten’ us pore mammys.”

  This was the kind of skirmish that Capp relished. Comics’ opponents, who could be pompous, self-righteous, sanctimonious, paranoid, overly protective, and mean-spirited, were ideal targets for ridicule, Dogpatch style. Capp’s following had bestowed upon him, by sheer numbers, a power that he was happy to wield.

  The war, however, was only beginning.

  When readers turned to their newspaper’s August 29, 1948, comics section and saw the beginning of a new “Li’l Abner” story, they could not possibly have been prepared for the response that one little strip would face in the following months. Al Capp himself couldn’t have predicted it.

  The story began with Li’l Abner awakening from a dream in Ole Man Mose’s cave. The sound of “strange moosic” brought him out of the cave and eventually to the Valley of the Shmoon, home to millions of creatures capable of making the sound Li’l Abner had heard. Ole Man Mose had attempted to describe the shmoo to Li’l Abner, cautioning that the creature was “th’ greatest menace to hoomanity th’ world has ever known,” and explaining that it was dangerous because of its goodness. Abner, naturally, was too stupid to listen.

  “Why did I call it a shmoo?” Capp wrote later. “You wouldn’t call a moose anything but a moose, would you? I called the shmoo a shmoo because that’s what it was. I didn’t have any message—except that it’s good to be alive.”

  The lovable shmoo, introduced in “Li’l Abner” on August 29, 1948, captured the public’s heart in unprecedented fashion. This strip ran September 10 of that same year.

  The story was one of the most convoluted Capp would ever tell, full of twists and turns, interrupted narratives, non sequiturs, and just plain nonsense, all serving to introduce the reader to a lovable creature that, in years to come, would earn Capp millions of dollars. The shmoo was a little animal that rose out of another one of Capp’s “what if” ideas: what if humans never had to work again, if their needs for food, shelter, and clothing were guaranteed without their having to lift a finger to earn them?

  Shaped like a bowling pin, with feet (but no hands), whiskers, big eyes, and an endearing smile, the shmoo was a creature designed to serve. It could lay eggs, bottled milk, cakes, sticks of butter, and any number of other foodstuffs with no effort. If a human looked at a shmoo as if he or she were hungry, the shmoo would die of joy and serve as the person’s meal. If you broiled them, they tasted like steak; if you fried them, they tasted like chicken. They were boneless, so there was no waste. Their whiskers could be used as toothpicks, their eyes as buttons. Their hides could be made into cloth or leather, depending upon how you sliced them. They could also be cut into lumber. They didn’t eat, so their upkeep was absolutely free. Best of all, they reproduced faster than they could be used.

  Li’l Abner was thrilled when he saw their sheer numbers in the Valley of the Shmoon.

  “Wif these around, nobody won’t nevah hafta work no more!” he shouted, kicking up his heels. “All hoomanity kin now live off th’ fat o’ th’ land—namely shmoos!!”

  The joyful reception of the shmoo in Dogpatch was offset by the concern they caused businesses. What would become of Soft-Hearted John, whose general store had been ripping off Dogpatchers for as long as anyone could remember, or, more to the point, J. Roaringham Fatback, the pork tycoon? Meanwhile, in the larger world, the shmoo continuity was being debated almost as soon as it appeared in the papers. What was Capp really saying? Was he promoting socialism with these creatures? Capitalism? Time, Life, Newsweek, and other publications weighed in with their analysis.

  The public reaction to the shmoo, sudden and combustible, was unprecedented in comic strip history. Fan mail overwhelmed the United Feature mailroom; members of the media fell over each other in a rush to find the next angle to the overnight sensation. It was an election year, and Thomas Dewey, the Republican hoping to unseat Harry S. Truman as presid
ent, accused the incumbent of promising “everything including the Shmoo” in exchange for the vote. Simon & Schuster offered Capp a bundle for the rights to reprint the story (selling over a million copies of a paperback collection); Capp Enterprises, a newly created family company, formed after Capp’s successful battle with the syndicate, negotiated with manufacturers clamoring for the rights to market a wide range of shmoo-related merchandise. Within a year, Capp would be standing alongside Harry Truman as the newly elected president presented a special savings bond certificate decorated with the shmoo—an enterprise that Capp devoted an entire Sunday “Li’l Abner” strip to advertise. The “Capp-italist Revolution,” as Life called the shmoo phenomenon, had begun.

  The shmoo even became involved in international politics. The Cold War was just beginning, and in April 1948 the Soviet Union had blocked the roads leading into Berlin, in response to the Marshall Plan—a plan designed to help Europe recover from the ravages of World War II while holding Communism at bay. The Berlin blockade might have looked like a bold political move on the international chessboard, but it meant much more than that to the people in Berlin, trapped without food, medicine, clothing, and other provisions. Truman responded to the blockade with a massive airlift that parachuted tons of food and provisions into Berlin every day.

  The Seventeenth Military Air Transport Squadron, responsible for the airlift operations, approached Capp in September. Besides its regular duties, the squadron privately sponsored the morale-boosting Operation Little Vittles, which involved dropping candy to the city’s children. The bags of candy would float down on specially designed parachutes.

  Operation Little Vittles hoped Capp would contribute plastic shmoos filled with chocolates to the cause—a proposal Capp gladly accepted—and a plane, bound for Frankfurt and carrying about one hundred candy-filled shmoos, left LaGuardia Airport on October 13.