This volume features two separate Fearless Fosdick adventures. In one, our favorite bumbling detective moonlights as female officer Phyllis Fosdick. Paramount successfully released their Li'l Abner movie in 1959, but here Li'l Abner makes a separate film... with disastrous results. Years before Japan invaded the American auto market, Capp presciently depicts the success of the $19.95 Japanese Nomotocar (it has no motor), and Capp foresaw the cross-breeding of animals long before DNA manipulation. Also featured in this jinx Joe Btfsplk, pilot Captain Eddie Ricketyback, corrupt Senator Jack S. Phogbound, and criminal Abner doppelganger Gat Garson! Each quarterly volume contains extensive story-by-story annotations by Li'l Abner and Al Capp expert Denis Kitchen.
Alfred Gerald Caplin (1909-1979), better known as Al Capp, was an American cartoonist and humorist. He is best known as the creator, writer and artist of the satirical comic strip Li'l Abner, which run for 43 years from 1934 to 1977.
Capp was born in 1909 in New Haven, Connecticut, of a poor family of East European Jewish heritage. His childhood was scared by a serious accident: after being run over by a trolley car, nine years old Alfred had his left leg partially amputated. This early trauma possibly had an impact on Capp's cynical humour, as later represented in his strips. His father, Otto Philip Caplin, a failed businessman and an amateur cartoonist, is credited for introducing Al and his two brothers to making comics. After some training in art schools in New England, in 1932 Al Capp moved to New York with the intent of becoming a newspaper cartoonist. The same year he married Catherine Wingate Cameron. In the first couple of years of his career Capp worked as an assistant/ghost artist on Ham Fischer's strip 'Joe Palooka', while preparing to pitch his own comic strips to the newspaper syndicate. His strip Li'l Abner was launched on Monday, August 13, 1934, in eight American newspapers to immediate success. The comic started as an hillibilly slapstick, then shifted over the year in the direction of satire, black humor and social commentary. The strip run until 1977, written and mostly drawn by Capp. A lifelong chain smoker, All Capp died in 1979 from emphysema at his home in South Hampton, New Hampshire.
It’s hard to believe in all the time that Frazetta ghosted the Sunday strip, that he did not have the opportunity to draw Fearless Fosdick until the end of his run.