Fearless Fosdick

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Fearless Fosdick was a policeman who was the hero of the Li'l Abner character in Al Capp's Li'l Abner comic strip which appeared from 1934 to 1977. Fosdick was therefore the main character of a comic strip within a comic strip.

Fearless Fosdick and Bomb Face, May 30, 1943

Fosdick was inspired by Dick Tracy, a similarly unflappable comic strip hero-cop and plain clothes detective. The strip-within-a-strip at times added much humor as when Abner mindlessly aped his role model (even styling his hair similarly by using the product Fosdick endorsed).

Chester Gould, creator of Dick Tracy, reportedly did not find Capp’s work particularly funny. This was not surprising, since Fosdick was not very bright and behaved like a complete fool. He would regularly shoot innocent bystanders and apprehend the wrong individuals while the real criminals went free. However, Max Allan Collins, who took over the helm of Dick Tracy from Gould, thoroughly enjoyed Fosdick and even wrote a foreword to a recently-published collection of Fosdick cartoons.

Typical Fosdick logic occurs in "The Case of the Poisoned Beans," in which the ever-vigilant detective goes about town shooting everyone he sees eating "Old Faithful"-brand beans in an attempt to prevent them from consuming a poisoned can he knows to exist.

Among Fearless Fosdick's appearances in Li'l Abner are:

Sept. 6, 1942
Nov. 29, 1942
May 30, 1943, featuring Bomb Face.
June 6, 1943
June 13, 1943, featuring Stone Face, a comic character who torments Fosdick cartoonist Lester Gooch.
June 20, 1943
June 27, 1943
June 15, 1944
June 19, 1944, rejecting the romantic advances of Countess Wolfina.
June 27, 1944
June 27, 1946
July 27, 1946
April 24, 1947
May 2, 1947
May 10, 1947
June 22, 1950

The strip satirically referred to other enemies of Fosdick as Banana Face, Spinach Face and Hamburger Face. Other nemeses of Fosdick include the Atom Bum (a vagrant loaded with plutonium and thus deadly if he is jarred), a murderous Chippendale Chair, and even his own parrot Sidney.

Despite the fact that "Fearless Fosdick" was a fictional fictional character from a fictional comic strip, the character was popular enough to be incorporated into a short-lived TV puppet show in 1952 [1], and was licensed for use in an advertising campaign for Wildroot Cream Oil hair tonic.