Capp was the intellectual and comedy darling of his day.Ĭapp is currently the subject of Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen’s new biography, Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary (Bloomsbury, $30), and IDW’s Library of American Comics is reissuing the entire run of Li’l Abner, a project now in its fifth volume and focusing on the start of the strip’s peak decade with the years 1943–44. Buckley Jr., Alain Resnais, Chaplin, Gilbert Seldes, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Avowed Abner fans included John Kenneth Galbraith, Sinatra, William F. John Updike saw Li’l Abner as “Capp’s hillbilly Candide,” a work in which “the richness of social and philosophical commentary approached the Voltairean.” Updike got to know Capp in later years, and wrote a memorial poem to him, “The Shuttle.” In one love triangle involving authors William and Carol Saroyan (the woman upon whom Truman Capote based his Breakfast at Tiffany’s protagonist, Holly Golightly), Carol quite literally fell for Capp-jumping out of his Boston studio window in her nightgown to elude detection. the best writer in the world.” Statements like that about cartoonists are often dust-jacket blurbage or a highbrow’s calculated “regular Joe” moment, but Steinbeck said it for the record more than once. “I think of myself as a novelist,” Capp said of himself, and indeed, prominent fiction authors agreed. Later, when he shocked his public by turning conservative, he lampooned the pop folk movement with Joanie Phoanie-a clear dig at the antiwar folk chanteuse Joan Baez. Wilson, President Eisenhower’s secretary of defense) or isolationist senator Jack S. Bullmoose (based on former GM executive Charles E. He made his liberal political leanings clear in characters such as industrialist General Bashington T. Dogpatch talk-which had Capp’s characters tossing the adverb “naturally” or “natch” into conversation, or using phrases like “as any fool kin plainly see,” “writ by hand,” “Lower Slobbovia,” and “double whammy”-became incorporated into standard American slang.Ĭapp rarely touched partisan politics-at least not explicitly. In his day, Capp helped shape the national idiom. Abner’s constant pursuit by his just-a-friend Daisy Mae Scragg is where the tradition of Sadie Hawkins Day dances comes from, introduced in a November 1937 Abner story. Their characters live in a town that stands in for America they feature a central little family (literally or extended) that stands in for everyone’s family and when they’re done right, they have offered decades’ worth of popular and topical humor.Ĭapp’s star was a big hunk of hillbilly, not too bright, living at home with Mammy and Pappy Yokum, irresistible to women, yet too childlike to return the interest. Pogo, Doonesbury, Bloom County, South Park, The Simpsons all came after-and all follow the Li’l Abner model. Taking the long-form comics storytelling introduced in dramas such as Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie, Capp merged it with the joke-per-day gag humor of Blondie or Krazy Kat. The shmoo typified Capp-slapstick funny, philosophically challenging our high-consumption way of life, and so adorably cute that the most dire threat to the American empire yet seen on a comics page became a marketing sensation as big as any Disney princess.Ĭapp’s Li’l Abner was published from 1934 to 1977, and over the course of that run its creator invented a new cartoon genre. Fatback sends an exterminator to wipe out the shmoos, to the delight of businessmen, from CEOs to Dogpatch’s greedy grocer. Roaringham Fatback, “the pork king,” sees the national economy plummet, as no one needs any longer to buy or sell anything. They lay edible eggs, give milk, taste like chicken when fried and pork when roasted. Shmoos, which look like marshmallow quail, are miracle creatures. The strip’s hero, teenager Abner Yokum, brings the lovable creature back to his hillbilly village of Dogpatch, and nearly ends the United States as we know it. In late 1948, Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip introduced, innocently enough, its merchandising gold mine, the shmoo. A panel from Ham Fisher’s comic Joe Palooka, 1933, ghosted by his assistant Al Capp.
0 kommentar(er)
