Fearless Fosdick: The Hole Story!

Fearless Fosdick #2

by Al Capp

Genres: Humor, Comics

125 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1992

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

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fosdick, as Daisy Mae points out in this volume, is but "a crudely drawn pitcher in a comical strip," so there's not much point complaining, but the second volume of his collected adventures isn't as funny as the first. I think that's because the strips here seem aimed mostly at mocking Dick Tracy, not cop drama in general, so your enjoyment could depend on how well you know Chester Gould's original. What's worse, fewer perfectly round, see-through bullet holes perforate the characters than in volume one, despite the cover. On the plus side, there's the rampage of the Electronic Detective Substitute, a merciless forerunner of Robocop whose ability to detect crime in progress wipes out Police Department corruption, along with much of the department. The saga of a mob boss, "the Enforcer," who has every officer in town on his payroll except the virtuous, $22.50-a-week Fosdick is another highlight.