I was thinking about the old comic strips that are gone now-and rememberd “l’il Abner”. As I recall, it was a fairly inscrutable strip, featuring hillbillies running around in rags, eating fish sanwiches, and drinking moonshine. As I recall, the strip was written by a uy named Al capp-who grew a bit weird in his later years (I think he went to jail or something). Anyway, does anybody ghost the strip now? Ans when did Al Capp pass on?
From here.
Elliott Caplin was Al Capp’s widow AND brother?
Old Al definitely spent too much time thinking about those hillbillies.
Just as a tangential aside: On Sadie Hawkins
The early L’il Abner was a major milestone in newspaper comics. But Capp was right – the last decade or so the strip was just plain horrible.
As for your memory of Capp going to jail, that sounds like the sad case of Ham Fisher (which involved Capp).
Capp got his start writing and drawing for Fisher’s Joe Palooka strip. Fisher had a penchant for hiring young talent and paying them a fraction of what they were worth, and as soon as Capp could, he branched off with Abner.
Once he was established, Capp wrote an article called “I Remember Monster,” talking about his days as a young artist under an exploiting cartoonist. Though he didn’t mention Fisher by name, everyone knew who he was talking about.
Fisher was vain, and thin-skinned and the article pissed him off royally. He first started saying that Joe Palooka featured hillbilly characters like Abner before Capp started his strip, implying that Capp had stolen the concept from him. That was true enough, except that the person who wrote and drew the hillbilly characters (Big Leviticus) in Pallooka was . . . Al Capp. Fisher worked to sue Capp for theft of Fisher’s ideas, but his lawyers told him he had no chance of winning.
Evidently, that only enraged Fisher further. He altered some Abner strips so that there were some explicit sex in the background and sent it to various courts as “evidence” of indecency. It was clearly the act of a man who had lost touch with reality – Capp’s lawyers merely showed the judge newspapers with the actual, unaltered strips.
Fisher was drummed out of the National Society of Cartoonists for this. By then, he had lost it completely and committed suicide.
Once upon a time Li’l Abner was a fine piece of satire – at its best it was as good as Pogo. The simple folk of Dogpatch lived a simple but happy life, until something from the outside, Big Government, Big Business or just modern society in general intruded upon them. The intrusion would eventually collapse under its own size and bureaucratic stupidity and Dogpatch would get back to normal.
Capp eventually got old and bitter and focused his outrage more and more on the young and the left. The strip went downhill in the 1960s. But his strips from the late 1940s and 1950s are classics.
I thought it must be a reference to the early '70s sex scandal. The account in Wikipedia actually sounds pretty innocent:
What I remember hearing at the time was rather more sordid, but could have been just idle rumors.
I remember Lil’Abner from the 70s when I first started to read newspapers, and I enjoyed it, and I knew that something I couldn’t get because of my age was going on. Ah, the Bloomer Fiend! Pogo I got right away.
I just finished Nixonland and Al Capp’s irrational hatred of dirty rotten hippies is referenced several times in the book.
There was a Li’l Abner-themed amusement park in northwestern Arkansas called Dogpatch USA. My maternal grandmother lived in the area, so I went there a couple of times. It was not bad. I still recall Mountain Dew being repackaged as Kickapoo Joy Juice.
I recall when Mountain Dew was first introduced on a national level in the mid-Sixties (it appears to have existed regionally before that). The mascots were hillbillies drinking out of moonshine jugs. The tagline was “Yahoo! it’s Mountain Dew!” and the slogan was “It’ll tickle yore innards!”
Didn’t Frank Frazetta used to draw for Li’l Abner? I could swear I remember seeing some of his work in that strip, but I’m getting old and…well, old, really…
I wonder what the deal was with representations of hillbilly culture in the mid-60s. Were the Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, Mayberry RFD and others all entirely derivative of Lil’ Abner, or was there something else going on that there zeitgeist?
Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction were all produced by Paul Henning. Hillbillies was a massive hit to start, so Henning created the other two. But by the time they were created, it was too late for L’il Abner to be the main influence. That sort of country bumpkin comedy was as old as the US and Abner has peaked in the 50s and was really only a shadow of its former self.
I went to Dogpatch when I was little, and even at 5 or 6 years old I could tell the place was hokey. The rides were so rickety, it really seemed like you were going to die. I loved it, and have a picture of me with Daisy (I think that’s her name? The hot one?). I also remember wanting moonshine sooo bad because it sounded delicious, like something Rainbow Brite would have at a tea party. Dang, now I’m going to spend the rest of the morning researching L’il Abner stuff.
and there were cross-over episodes between Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction, if I remember correctly.
Li’l Abner was produced as a successful Broadway play from Nov 15, 1956 to July 12, 1958, and was turned into a film in 1959, so that was probably fresh in people’s minds. Julie Newmar was a huge hit as “Stupefyin’ Jones” (Google for pictures) in both and that gave her a tv career in the 60’s, most notably as Rhoda the Robot in My Living Doll. (Her giant breasts were needed to house all the circuitry. I was 14. Do the math.)
Where was I before I got so distracted? Oh yeah, Li’l Abner was a big hit and Hollywood copies whatever is a big hit. Fish out of water stories are always fodder for comic hijinks as well (think A Night at the Opera and a zillion others) so the line between them is fairly straight.
Plus, once Beverly Hillbillies had a big hit with one version of that fish out of water scenario–country bumpkins move to the city–it was obvious enough to try the reverse–city slickers move to the country. Voilà–Green Acres.