Al Capp

Cartoonist and writer

• Born: September 28, 1909
• Birthplace: New Haven, Connecticut
• Died: November 5, 1979
• Place of death: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Capp wrote and drew the syndicated newspaper comic L’il Abner, one of the most popular and highly regarded strips of its day. L’il Abner had a variety of licensing products and media spin-offs, and several characters and concepts introduced in its panels became catchphrases and fads.

Early Life

Al Capp (kap) was born to a family of Latvian Jewish immigrants. His father, Otto Caplin, was an unsuccessful salesman who relocated frequently, and his mother, Tillie, was the daughter of a grand rabbi of were chosen. The family lived in extreme poverty in Capp’s youth. Capp was the eldest of three brothers, the others being Jerome and Elliot, and Capp had one sister, Madeline. The family moved to the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn when Capp was eleven and then to Bridgeport in Connecticut. On August 21, 1919, Capp lost most of his left leg in a trolley accident. He wore a wooden leg, which gave him a limp and caused immense pain.

Capp moved to Boston at the age of nineteen. He studied art there and in Philadelphia, without taking a degree, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Designers Art School in Boston and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In Boston he met his future wife, Catherine Wingate Cameron, the daughter of a Massachusetts politician. The couple married in 1929. In 1932, he moved to New York, hoping to find work as a newspaper cartoonist. He worked for six months drawing an established property called Colonel Gilfeather for the Associated Press, changing its name to Mister Gilfeather. In 1933, he was hired as an assistant to Ham Fisher, creator of the popular Joe Palooka strip. In a strip created while Fisher was on vacation, Capp introduced the villainous hillbilly character, Big Leviticus, and his family. Fisher would later claim that Leviticus, Fisher’s property, was the basis of Capp’s hillbilly character, Abner Yokum, despite the many differences between the two. The ugly feud between Fisher and Capp would last until Fisher’s suicide in 1955. On his own, the ambitious Capp was working on a strip based loosely on characters he had met while hitchhiking through West Virginia as a teenager.

Life’s Work

Eager to strike out on his own, Capp sold L’il Abner to syndication giant United Feature Syndicate. The first strip appeared in the New York Daily Mirror on August 13, 1934. Its setting was the fictional backwoods community of Dogpatch, and its central character was the lazy and stupid but good-hearted and patriotic hillbilly, Abner Yokum. Other central characters included Abner’s formidable mother, Pansy Yokum, known as “Mammy,” always shown with a corncob pipe; his overmatched father, Lucifer Yokum, known as “Pappy”; and the family pig, Salomey. There were also numerous attractive women, demonstrating the exuberant physicality that was a hallmark of Capp’s art. Women were often competing for Abner’s favors, but his true love was the buxom blond Daisy Mae Scragg. In the early days of the strip, Abner’s rival for Daisy’s affections was massive wrestler Earthquake McGoon. Despite his mockery of his Dogpatch creations, Capp took their side against outsiders, including greedy capitalists. Ethnic stereotypes were a mainstay of Capp’s humor, and Jews, often portrayed as big-nosed, greedy hustlers, were not exempt. The denizens of the Eastern European country that Capp’s family had left were also mocked in the fictional country of Slobbovia. Humor based on the unique sounds of Yiddish was also part of Capp’s arsenal, as in the famous “Shmoos,” vaguely phallic fictional creatures that could supply every human need, voluntarily dying when humans needed food. The shmoos were introduced in 1949 and set off a national craze.

By the late 1940’s, Capp had gained control over L’il Abner from the syndicate. The strip was produced by a team under Capp’s leadership working out of a studio in Boston’s Beacon Hill. He devised the story lines and characters, worked on the pencil drafts, and inked the main characters. He adopted the name “Al Capp” with which to sign his comics; he legally changed his name to Al Capp in 1949.

Abner and Daisy Mae eventually married—the wedding made the cover of Life magazine—and had a child, honest Abe, part of a deliberate turn, on Capp’s part, away from political satire, which he viewed as too dangerous in the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hunt for Communists and other subversives, to domestic comedy. He returned to politics with a vengeance in the 1960’s, when Capp, until then a liberal Democrat who had supported the presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy, took a sharp turn to the right. His increasing rage at the culture of the left seems to have gone along with an increasing self-identity as a Jew; he joked that the reason he had not received the Nobel Prize was anti-Semitism. Ironically, his savage mockery of campus radicals and the left generally helped make him a popular speaker on college campuses. Capp also became embroiled in a series of sexual scandals. Following an incident at the University of Wisconsin, Capp was convicted of attempted adultery in February, 1972. It was a disaster for L’il Abner, which was dropped by hundreds of newspapers. Capp grew more bitter and isolated, and he retired from cartooning in 1977. The last L’il Abner daily strip appeared on November 5, 1977, and the final Sunday color strip days later on November 13. Capp died of emphysema in 1979.

Significance

Capp was a master of a distinctly twentieth century art form, the newspaper comic strip. L’il Abner transcended the form to enter comic books, films, musical theater, and even a theme park, Dogpatch USA, outside Harrison, Arkansas. The strip also became a licensing giant and made Capp a celebrity. Such concepts as Dogpatch, Lower Slobbovia, Shmoo, and Sadie Hawkins Day, all Capp creations, entered the lexicon. Capp was a leader in the cartoonist community, receiving the Rube Goldberg Award from the National Cartoonist Society in 1947 and advocating the cause of the individual cartoonist against the giant syndicates that ruled the comic-strip industry. Posthumously, Capp received the Elzie Segar Award from the National Cartoonist Society in 1979; L’il Abner was included in the U.S. Post Office’s series of stamps of classic cartoon characters in 1995; and Capp was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2004.

Bibliography

Berger, Arthur Asa. L’il Abner: A Study in American Satire. 1970. Reprint. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. This monograph was one of the earliest critical studies of an American comic strip.

Buhle, Paul, ed. Jews and American Comics: The Illustrated History of an American Art Form. New York: New Press, 2008. Examines Jewish artists’ roles in the history and development of American comics; includes discussion of Capp.

Caplin, Elliot. Al Capp Remembered. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1994. Memories of Capp by his brother and business associate, also a comic-strip creator.

Capp, Al. My Well-Balanced Life on a Wooden Leg: Memoirs. Santa Barbara, Calif.: John Daniel, 1991. A collection of cartoons and autobiographical pieces, focusing on Capp’s disability.

Theroux, Alexander. The Enigma of Al Capp. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 1999. A biographical sketch by a fan, with numerous illustrations of panels and entire strips from L’il Abner.