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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Al Capp, the creator of "Li'l Abner," one of America's greatest comic strips, brilliantly combined comedy and commentary, until he lost it over the '60s counterculture and championed Nixon.
Sep 30, 2002 | In times of travail and confusion, when the beacon of faith dims and separating right from wrong poses a fearful challenge, I often find solace in a line from Al Capp: "Good is better than evil, because it's nicer."
This aphorism, which makes an end run around whole libraries full of ethical treatises, came from the mouth of Pansy Yokum, the doyenne of Dogpatch, Ky., and more important, the mother -- or, rather, mammy -- of a naive, bottomlessly good-hearted 19-year-old hillbilly called Li'l Abner. He, in turn, was the namesake of one of the 20th century's three greatest comic strips. The other two, for my money, were George Herriman's "Krazy Kat" and Chester Gould's "Dick Tracy," but "Li'l Abner" may have stood alone. "Krazy Kat" was cleverer, and "Dick Tracy" led to more chewed fingernails, but in "Li'l Abner" Capp mixed comedy and suspense in a daily cocktail that no one else has come close to duplicating.
We'll get to Capp's sense of humor soon enough, but I want to linger for a moment over his ability to intrigue readers. The mainstay of the adventure strip is a hero who gets tossed into predicaments we can scarcely imagine him scrambling out of -- how in blazes will Dick Tracy escape from that pit in which he is caught beneath that boulder slipping inexorably down those earthen walls? Capp saw that a trap could be metaphysical, taxing our brains whether or not it strained the protagonist's muscles.
In a memorable 1944 episode, a gypsy fortuneteller predicts that Li'l Abner will never leave a certain New York City tearoom. The gypsy has never been wrong, but the lad can hardly stay cooped up in that room for the rest of the strip's life, so what's going to give? After several days of teasing, Capp springs his surprise. The tearoom is destroyed by an explosion, so the gypsy was right -- Li'l Abner didn't leave the room, the room left him. Over time, watching the cartoonist set and then negotiate these snares became one of the strip's chief pleasures.
That pleasure is still available because, a quarter-century after the end of its 43-year run, "Li'l Abner" is very much with us. Abner himself -- bumpkin, hunk and Dogpatch's most eligible bachelor -- is still eluding the voluptuous Daisy Mae Scragg, whose self-effacing flame for him burns eternal (or at least until about midway through the saga, when the pair get "hopelessly, permanently married"). Moon Beam McSwine still lies down with hogs, Fearless Fosdick is still perforated with bullet holes, Lower Slobbovia remains the planet's smelly armpit, Joe Bftsplk has yet to shake the rain cloud that squats over his hapless head, and what's good for General Bullmoose is still good for the USA.
The handiest way to access this world is via the Web site where it's posted, one day's worth at a time, looking better than ever thanks to an on-screen resolution far superior to what you find in newspapers even today. About two-thirds of the "Abner" oeuvre came out in 27 volumes published by Kitchen Sink Press in the 1980s and '90s; though out of print, these books are not hard to find in comics shops and used bookstores. And now two related episodes from the strip have been collected in a new book, "The Short Life and Happy Times of the Shmoo."
The Shmoo, you may recall, was the species that had everything and couldn't wait to give it away. It laid eggs, it gave milk, it provided meat -- indeed, "it dropped dead, out of sheer joy, when anyone looked at it hungrily." Plus, "the eyes [made] wonderful suspender buttons, and there [were] absolutely no bones." Such a godsend was bound to infuriate capitalist bosses pushing rival commodities, notably pork king J. Roaringham Fatback (roasted shmoo tasted "exactly like pork"). As Abner summed it up, "Th' reason shmoos is the worst thing thet kin happen to hoomanity is, wif shmoos around, nobody has to fight nobody else -- nor cheat nobody else, nor work thar hearts out for nobody else! An' wifout them sports, th' whole world would come to a stop!!" Shmoos became a nationwide craze, appearing on the cover of Time and racking up $25 million in sales of shmoo-related merchandise.
