Al Capp
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| Al Capp | |
| Born | September 28, 1909 New Haven, Connecticut |
|---|---|
| Died | November 5, 1979 (aged 70) South Hampton, New Hampshire |
| Occupation | Cartoonist |
Al Capp (September 28, 1909 – November 5, 1979) was an American cartoonist best known for the satiric comic strip, Li'l Abner. He also wrote the comic strips Abbie and Slats and Long Sam. He won the 1947 National Cartoonist Society Reuben Award for the comic strip Li'l Abner, and their 1979 Elzie Segar Award posthumously.
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[edit] Early life
Born Alfred Gerald Caplin of Jewish heritage, Capp was the eldest child of Otto and Tillie Caplin, and a native of New Haven, Connecticut. He lost his right leg in a trolley accident at the age of nine.
Capp spent five years at Bridgeport High School in Bridgeport, Connecticut without receiving a diploma. The cartoonist liked to tell how he failed geometry for nine straight terms.[1]
Ten years later, A. G. Caplin went to New York and found work drawing Mister Gilfeather, a one-panel, AP-owned property. He did this long enough to hate the feature and meet Milton Caniff before leaving town abruptly, moving to Boston and marrying Catherine Wingate Cameron (whom he had met earlier).
Leaving his new wife with her parents in Amesbury, Massachusetts, he subsequently returned to New York. There he met Ham Fisher, who hired him to help on Joe Palooka.
During one of Fisher's extended vacations, Capp's Joe Palooka story arc featured a stupid, strong hillbilly named Big Leviticus, a prototype for Li'l Abner. And, during this period, Capp was also working on samples for the strip that would become Li'l Abner.
Leaving Joe Palooka, Capp sold Li'l Abner to the United Features Syndicate and the feature was launched on Monday August 13, 1934.
His younger brother Elliot Caplin also became a comic strip creator, best known for writing the soap opera strip The Heart of Juliet Jones.
[edit] Li'l Abner
The comic strip starred Li'l Abner Yokum, the lazy, not terribly bright, but good-natured and strong hillbilly who lived in Dogpatch with Mammy and Pappy Yokum. Whatever energy he had went into evading the marital goals of Daisy Mae, his well-endowed girlfriend, until Capp finally gave in to reader pressure and allowed the couple to marry. This was such big news that the happy couple made the cover of Life magazine.
Abner's home town of Dogpatch was peopled with an assortment of memorable characters, including Marryin' Sam, Wolf Gal, Lena the Hyena, Indian Lonesome Polecat, and a host of others, notably the beautiful, full-figured women Stupefyin' Jones and Moonbeam McSwine. Perhaps Capp's most popular creations were the Shmoo, creatures whose incredible usefulness and generous nature made them a threat to civilization as we know it. Another famous character was Joe Btfsplk, who wanted to be a loving friend but was "the world's worst jinx", bringing bad luck to all those nearby. Btfsplk always had a small dark cloud over his head.
Li'l Abner also featured a comic-strip within the comic-strip, Fearless Fosdick (a parody of Dick Tracy).
The Dogpatch residents regularly combatted the likes of city slickers, business tycoons, government officials and intellectuals with their homespun wisdom and ingenuity. Situations often took the characters to other parts of the globe, including New York City, tropical islands, and a miserable frozen land of Capp's invention, "Lower Slobbovia."
At its peak, Li'l Abner was read daily by 70 million Americans (when the US population was only 180 million). Many communities, high schools and colleges staged "Sadie Hawkins Day" events, patterned after the similar annual event in the strip.
[edit] The 1940s and 1950s
During and after World War II, Capp worked without pay going to hospitals to entertain patients, especially to cheer recent amputees and explain to them that the loss of a limb did not mean an end to a happy and productive life.
In 1940, a motion picture adaptation starred Granville Owen (later known as Jeff York) as Li'l Abner, with Buster Keaton taking the role of Lonesome Polecat. A successful musical comedy adaptation of the strip opened on Broadway November 15, 1956 and had a long run of 693 performances. The stage musical was adapted into a motion picture in 1959 by producer Norman Panama and director Melvin Frank with several performers repeating their Broadway roles.
In one run of strips in 1957, Capp lampooned the comic strip Mary Worth as "Mary Worm", depicting the title character as a nosy do-gooder. Allan Saunders, the creator of the Mary Worth strip, returned Capp's fire with the introduction of the character "Hal Rapp", a foul-tempered, ill-mannered cartoonist. Later, it was revealed to be a collaborative hoax that Capp and Saunders had cooked up.[2]
[edit] Feud with Ham Fisher
After Capp quit his assistant's job on Ham Fisher's "Joe Palooka" in 1934 to launch his own strip, Fisher badmouthed him to colleagues and editors, claiming that Capp had stolen his idea. Capp had worked on a hillbilly sequence during his "Joe Palooka" days. For years, Fisher would bring the characters back to his strip, billing them as "The Original Hillbilly Characters," and advising readers not to be "fooled by imitations."
The Capp-Fisher feud was well-known in cartooning circles, and it was personal. Even as Capp's strip eclipsed "Joe Palooka" in popularity, Capp did not forgive. In the 1930s, Fisher hired away Capp's top assistant, Mo Leff. After Fisher underwent plastic surgery, Capp once included a racehorse in "L'il Abner" named "Ham's Nose Job." Travelling in the same social circles, the two men engaged in a 20-year mutual vendetta, as described by the Daily News in 1998: "They crossed paths often, in the midtown watering holes and at National Cartoonists Society banquets, and the city's gossip columns were full of their snarling public donnybrooks."[2]
In 1950, Capp wrote a nasty article for The Atlantic entitled "I Remember Monster." The article recounted Capp's days working for an unnamed "benefactor" with a miserly, swinish personality, whom Capp claimed was a neverending source of inspiration when it came time to create a new unregenerate villain for his comic strip. The thinly-veiled boss was understood to be Ham Fisher.
Fisher retaliated clumsily, falsely accusing Capp of sneaking obscenities into his comic strip. Fisher submitted examples of "L'il Abner" to Capp's syndicate and to the New York courts in which Fisher had identified pornographic images that were hidden in the background art. However, the X-rated material had actually been drawn there by Fisher himself. Capp was able to refute the accusation by simply showing the original printed strips.
In 1954, Capp was applying for a Boston television license, the FCC received an anonymous packet of pornographic "L'il Abner" drawings. The National Cartoonists Society convened an ethics hearing, and Fisher was expelled from the same organization which he had helped to found. Fisher's scheme had backfired in spectacular fashion. Around the same time, his mansion in Wisconsin was destroyed by a nor'easter.
On September 7, 1955, Fisher committed suicide in his studio. Such was his professional isolation that his body was not discovered until December 27 of that year.
[edit] The '60s & '70s
Capp and a platoon of assistants kept the strip and all of its advertising, promotional, and specialty work going throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. No matter how much help he had, Capp insisted on drawing and inking the faces and hands- especially of Abner and Daisy Mae- himself, and his distinctive touch is often discernible. As is usual with collaborative efforts in comic strips, his name was the only one credited, although- sensitive to his own experience working on Joe Palooka- Capp frequently drew attention to his own assistants in interviews and publicity pieces. Frank Frazetta, later famous as a fantasy artist, worked as a "ghost-artist" on the strips from 1955 to 1962, primarily tight-pencilling the Sunday pages from studio roughs. This work was recently collected by Dark Horse Books in a four-volume hardcover series titled Al Capp's Li'l Abner: The Frazetta Years. After 1962, Capp wanted to have Frazetta continue work on the strip for a pay cut of 50%. "[Capp] said he would cut the salary in half. Goodbye. That was that. I said goodbye." (Frazetta: Painting with Fire). Frazetta returned briefly a few years later to draw a public service comic book called "Li'l Abner and the Creatures from Drop-Outer Space".
In the '60s, Capp's politics swung from liberal to conservative, and instead of caricaturing big business types, he began spoofing counterculture icons such as Joan Baez (in the character of "Joanie Phoanie", a wealthy folksinger who offers an impoverished orphanage one million dollars' worth of "protest songs"[3]). He also attacked student political groups, such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) as "Students Wildly Indignant About Nearly Everything" (SWINE). Another target was Senator Teddy Kennedy, parodied as Senator O. Noble McGesture, resident of "Hyideelsport." The town name is a play on Hyannisport, Massachusetts, where a number of the Kennedy clan have lived.
Capp became a popular speaker on college campuses during the era, attacking anti-war protesters and demonstrators. The cartoonist visited John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their Bed-In for Peace, and their testy exchange later appeared in the documentary film "Imagine." Introducing himself with the words "I'm a dreadful Neanderthal fascist. How do you do?", Capp sardonically congratulated Lennon and Ono on their nude album cover: "I think that everybody owes it to the world to prove they have pubic hair. You've done it and I tell you that I applaud you for it." Lennon sung an impromptu version of his The Ballad of John and Yoko song with a slightly revised lyric: "Christ, you know it ain't easy / You know how hard it can be / The way things are going / They're gonna crucify Capp."[3]
In a televised faceoff on the Dick Cavett Show, Capp taunted iconoclastic musician Frank Zappa about his long hair, asking Zappa if he thought he was a girl. Zappa replied, "You have a wooden leg; does that make you a table?" Capp's increasingly angry ad libs at his campus speeches and during TV appearances cost him his semi-regular spot on NBC's Tonight Show.
In 1968 a theme-park called Dogpatch USA opened at Marble Falls, Arkansas based on Capp's work and with his support. The park was a popular attraction during the 1970s but was abandoned in 1993 due to financial difficulties. As of late 2005, the area once devoted to a live action facsimile of Dogpatch has been heavily stripped by vandals and souvenir hunters and is today slowly being reclaimed by the surrounding Arkansas wilderness.
In 1971, Capp was charged with attempted adultery by a female student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Capp pleaded no contest to a reduced charge and withdrew from public speaking. The resulting bad publicity led to hundreds of papers dropping his comic strip [4].
Years later on Inside the Actor's Studio, Goldie Hawn said that Capp had sexually harassed her during her auditions for the 1964 New York World's Fair. Other actresses who have made similar allegations include Grace Kelly and Edie Adams.[citation needed]
Li'l Abner lasted until 1977, when Capp retired. A lifelong smoker, Capp died two years later from emphysema, at his home in South Hampton, New Hampshire.
Besides his use of the comic strip to voice his opinions and display his humor, Capp was a popular speaker at universities and on television, including frequent appearances on The Tonight Show from the 1950s to the 1970s. One memorable story, as recounted to Johnny Carson, was about his meeting with then-president Eisenhower. As he was ushered into the Oval Office, his prosthetic leg collapsed and he entered the room in a pile of mechanical rubble on the floor. The president immediately turned to an aide and said, "Call Walter Reed (Hospital), or maybe Bethesda," to which Capp replied "Hell no, just call a good local mechanic!"
[edit] For further reading
- Sheridan, Martin, Comics and Their Creators (1942)
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ [1]"Al Capp" Web page of Bridgeport Central High School Web site, accessed August 13, 2006, cited Comics and Their Creators by Martin Sheridan (1942)
- ^ http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/1998/09/18/1998-09-18_spitting_on_pictures_funny_p.html
- ^ http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/i/imagine-john-lennon-script-transcript.html
