Fearless Fosdick
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fearless Fosdick is a police officer who is 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.
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. Gould also was probably not enamored of his own unflattering portrayal in the character of Fosdick's creator, the mentally deranged cartoonist "Lester Gooch." 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. 7, 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 (Fosdick admonished him, "You're going to get the chair, Chair!"), and even his own parrot Sidney. His ultimate foe was "Anyface", who was a parody of Plastic Man.
Despite the fact that "Fearless Fosdick" was a 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.
