Li'l Abner: The Complete Dailies and Color Sundays, Vol. 4: 1941–1942

Li'l Abner: The Complete Dailies and Color Sundays #4

by Al Capp

-The Library of American Comics is the world's #1 publisher of classic newspaper comic strips, with 14 Eisner Award nominations and three wins for best book. LOAC has become "the gold standard for archival comic strip reprints...The research and articles provide insight and context, and most importantly the glorious reproduction of the material has preserved these strips for those who knew them and offers a new gateway to adventure for those discovering them for the first time.” - Scoop

Genres: Comic Strips, Humor

272 pages, Hardcover

First published February 7, 2012

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Dominick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, the humour here hasn't aged well. Just reading all the "hillbilly" dialect stuff gets tiresome. Much is made not only of their ignorance but also their stupidity, which is often so extreme as to beggar belief. In one storyline near the end, the Yokums' well-meaning attempt to provide hospitality to a random visiting snob leads to an idiotic sequence in which their ignorance of his linguistic differences from theirs leads to a bunch of strained punny failures (e.g. he asks for a spot of tea, rather than a cup of tea, so Mammy Yokum pours a little tea on the tablecloth--yuk yuk yuk), culminating in a conclusion in which he says he'd like to retire to his room with the bard (i.e. Shakespeare), which they read as asking to be locked in a room with a "bear"--by which he is eaten. Laff riot! And of course, it's sexist as hell. As for the stories, stuff happens for no reason other than plot necessity. For example, in an early plot line, dead ringers for the Yokum family turn up without explanation (unless there is said explanation in the previous volume) and rob the bank, tripping a camera while they do so. Meanwhile, Mammy Yokum has suspiciously skulked off to do something that will secure the family fortune. Hijinks ensue. When they are resolved, do we learn what mysterious thin Mamma was doing to make the family fortune? No, we do not. Presumably, we are expected simply to forget that plot point. Capp actually recycles the basic idea for this plot within the year by having another narrative in which a woman named Maisie Day has surgery that makes her identical to Daisy Mae. Even more egregious is the recycling within mere weeks of the plot gimmick in which Abner attempts to duplicate one of Fearless Fosdick's impossible escapes (for different reasons both time--so there's that touch of originality) to figure out how he did it. There is also some amusing stuff, such as entrepreneur Available Jones being willing to do just about anything for money (the signs in his office provide most of the humour: "Babies minded. Dry: 5 cents. Damp: ten cents"), and Capp's visual flair is at times impressive (especially with the cheesecake--see "sexist" above), though he is still not at his peak, six years into the strip's run. He did have a flair for designing visually distinctive characters. Mostly, though, the stories are silly (if not outright stupid) rather than funny.

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man, comic strips used to be amazing. This is brilliantly funny. Capp was an amazing humorist.