Background

Capp was born Alfred Gerald Caplin in New Haven, Connecticut, on September 28, 1909. He was of East European Jewish heritage, Capp was the eldest child of Otto Philip and Matilda (Davidson) Caplin. Capp's parents were both natives of Latvia whose families had migrated to New Haven in the 1880s.

In August 1919, at the age of nine, Capp was run down by a trolley car and had to have his left leg amputated, well above the knee.

Education

He became quite proficient, learning mostly on his own. Among his earliest influences were Punch cartoonist–illustrator Phil May, and American comic strip cartoonists Tad Dorgan, Cliff Sterrett, Rube Goldberg, Rudolph Dirks, Fred Opper, Billy DeBeck, George McManus and Milt Gross.

At about this same time, Capp became a voracious reader. According to Capp's brother Elliot, Alfred had finished all of Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw by the time he turned 13.

Capp spent five years at Bridgeport High School in Bridgeport, Connecticut, without receiving a diploma. The cartoonist liked to joke about how he failed geometry for nine straight terms. His formal training came from a series of art schools in the New England area. Attending three of them in rapid succession, the impoverished Capp was thrown out of each for nonpayment of tuition—the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and Designers Art School in Boston—the latter before launching his career.

Career

After working for other cartoonists, Capp launched his own strip in 1934, succeeding on his first try. "Li'l Abner" was carried by only eight newspapers at the outset but soon became wildly popular. Before long it was giving Capp a yearly income of 150, 000 solid gold depression-era dollars.

Set in the mythical hillbilly village of Dogpatch, with excursions to such places as Lower Slobbovia, "Li'l Abner" chronicled the adventures of a 19-year-old male of limited intelligence but much brawn who was relentlessly pursued by the beauteous Daisy Mae. Thanks to reader demand she caught up with him in 1952, when they were finally married. Other celebrated characters in the strip included Hairless Joe; Lonesome Polecat, distiller of the infamous "Kickapoo Joy Juice"; seductive Moonbeam McSwine; and the piteous Joe Btfsplk, whose life was lived beneath a cloud that perpetually rained down misfortune. Another creation, Evil-Eye Fleegle, possessed the dreaded triple whammy, a phrase that passed into the language. Perhaps his most unusual character was the shmoo, a ham-shaped but lovable herbivore that regularly fell dead at the feet of human beings, oven-ready and delectable. Sadie Hawkins Day (when women asked men for dates), an important event in the Dogpatch calendar, was observed not only in Capp's strip but at thousands of high schools and colleges.

Many Capp characters were loosely based on well-known personalities. Marryin' Sam bore some resemblance to New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. One Fault Jones reminded readers of President Herbert Hoover. By the 1950s, when Capp's strip reached its apex, even the names were similar. The columnist Drew Pearson was mocked as Drusilla Pearson. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was immortalized as John Foster Dullnik. Capp's great popularity in the 1950s owed much to his deft social and political satire. Liberals particularly relished his sendups of Eisenhower appointees and his cartoon war against McCarthyism. Everyone who read the "funnies" delighted in his parodies of other comics, the most famous being his strip within a strip, "Fearless Fosdick, " inspired by Chester Gould's "Dick Tracy. "

Capp's strip generated many by-products, as "Li'l Abner" became a motion picture in 1940 and a Broadway musical comedy hit in 1957. It was followed by a film of the musical comedy in 1959. There were also numerous published collections of his work. Together with the strip itself, which was carried by more than 900 newspapers at the height of his reputation, Capp's ventures earned him more than half a million dollars annually.

During the 1960s Capp became blatantly conservative. He also began to take himself more seriously—too seriously many thought—as a champion of traditional values. Senator Phogbound gave way to Joanie Phoanie—a character based on the liberal folk singer Joan Baez—while such organizations as Students for a Democratic Society were lampooned as S. W. I. N. E. , Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything. Although the number of papers carrying his strip declined as a result, Capp developed a second career as, oddly enough, a speaker at college campuses. Student organizations were willing to pay his very high fee (for the times) of $3, 000 despite, or because of, the verbal abuse with which he showered them.

After four students at Kent State University were killed by a National Guard unit during a 1970 demonstration Capp expressed sympathy for the guardsman. At the same time, in an apparent effort to justify his view, he noted that the only students who were afraid to appear at their own college graduations were David and Julie Nixon Eisenhower.

In 1971 the fun came to an end when Capp pled guilty to the charge of attempted adultery when a woman student accused him of propositioning her. He subsequently gave up the talk-show and campus lecture circuits, becoming something of a recluse. Six years later he gave up "Li'l Abner" as well, explaining that for several years he had been losing his edge.

He died on November 5, 1979, at the age of 70.

Achievements

• Al Capp is best known for the satirical comic strip Li'l Abner, which he created in 1934 and continued writing and (with help from assistants) drawing until 1977. He also wrote the comic strips Abbie an' Slats (in the years 1937–45) and Long Sam (1954). He won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award in 1947 for Cartoonist of the Year, and their 1979 Elzie Segar Award, posthumously for his "unique and outstanding contribution to the profession of cartooning. "
  
  Li'l Abner was one of 20 American comic strips included in the Comic Strip Classics series of USPS commemorative stamps. Al Capp, an inductee into the National Cartoon Museum (formerly the International Museum of Cartoon Art), is one of only 31 artists selected to their Hall of Fame. Capp was also inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2004.
  
  Sadie Hawkins Day and double whammy are two terms attributed to Al Capp that have entered the English language. Other, less ubiquitous Cappisms include skunk works and Lower Slobbovia. The term shmoo has also entered the lexicon, defining highly technical concepts in no less than four separate fields of science, including the variations shmooing (a microbiological term for the "budding" process in yeast reproduction), and shmoo plot (a technical term in the field of electrical engineering). In socioeconomics, a "shmoo" refers to any generic kind of good that reproduces itself, (as opposed to "widgets" which require resources and active production. ) In the field of particle physics, "shmoo" refers to a high energy survey instrument, as utilized at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to capture subatomic cosmic ray particles emitted from the Cygnus X-3 constellation. Capp also had a knack for popularizing certain uncommon terms, such as druthers, schmooze and nogoodnik, neatnik, etc. In his book The American Language, H. L. Mencken credits the postwar mania for adding "-nik" to the ends of adjectives to create nouns as beginning—not with beatnik or Sputnik—but earlier, in the pages of Li'l Abner.
  
  Al Capp's life and career are the subjects of a new life-sized mural commemorating his 100th birthday. Created by resident artist Jon P. Mooers, the mural was unveiled in downtown Amesbury on May 15, 2010. According to the Boston Globe (as reported on May 18, 2010), the town has renamed its amphitheater in the artist's honor, and is looking to develop an Al Capp Museum. Capp is also the subject of an upcoming WNET-TV American Masters documentary, The Life and Times of Al Capp, produced by his granddaughter, independent filmmaker Caitlin Manning.
  
  Since his death in 1979, Al Capp and his work have been the subject of more than 40 books, including three biographies. Underground cartoonist and Li'l Abner expert Denis Kitchen has published, co-published, edited, or otherwise served as consultant on nearly all of them. Kitchen is currently compiling a biographical monograph on Al Capp. Several unsuccessful attempts to resurrect the Li'l Abner comic strip by new hands never advanced past the initial planning stage. Paramount Studios retained its option for a remake film or sequel until 1999.
  
  At the San Diego Comic Con in July 2009, IDW announced the upcoming publication of Al Capp's Li'l Abner: The Complete Dailies and Color Sundays as part of their ongoing Library of American Comics project. The comprehensive series, a reprinting of the entire 43-year history of Li'l Abner spanning a projected 20 volumes, began on April 7, 2010.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Li'l Abner: The Complete Dailies and Color Sundays, Vol. 3: 1939–1940

    ( • IDW's The Library of American Comics invite you to (g...)

  • Li'l Abner: The Complete Dailies and Color Sundays, Vol. 2: 1937-1938

    ( • The big news in the second volume of the complete Li'...)

  • Li'l Abner: The Complete Dailies and Color Sundays Volume 8: 1949–1950

    (“Start the day right?kick a Kigmy and avoid a fight!” Int...)

  • Li'l Abner: The Complete Dailies and Color Sundays, Vol. 6: 1945–1946

    (Beware, readers, beware! Amidst such buxom beauties as Da...)

  • Li'l Abner: The Complete Dailies and Color Sundays, Vol. 9: 1951-1952

    (To millions of daily readers spanning five decades, Al Ca...)

  • Li'l Abner: Dailies, Vol. 1: 1934-1935

    (Description from back cover: On Monday, August 13, 1934, ...)

  • My Well Balanced Life On A Wooden Leg

    (Essays and anecdotes recount cartoonist Al Capp's career ...)

  • Li'l Abner: Dailies, Vol. 25: 1959 - Abner Goes to Hollywood

    (In 1959 Li'l Abner exploded on movie screens across Ameri...)

  • The Short Life and Happy Times of the Shmoo

    (More than fifty years ago, America was taken by storm whe...)

  • The Best of Li'l Abner

    (Cartoonist Al Capp presents 26 of his favorite sequences ...)

  • Dailies: 1947 (Li'l Abner in Lower Slobbovia)

    (This is the 13th volume in the complete reprinting of Al ...)

  • Fearless Fosdick

    (SC, TPB, VF+, Used-Very Good, Cover Wrinkle, Story and Ar...)

  • Fearless Fosdick: The Hole Story

    (SC, TPB, VF, Used-Good, Cover Crease, Story and Art by Al...)

  • Li'l Abner: Dailies, Vol. 11: 1945

    (In 1945, World War II ended and a new age dawned. In Li'l...)

  • Li'l Abner: Dailies, Vol. 15: 1949

    (SC, TPB, Used-Like New, Unread from Pvt. Coll., By Al Cap...)

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

    ( • In Volume 4 in The Complete Li'l Abner...You'll Belie...)

Views

Quotations: "The more I see of students, " he once remarked, "the more I dislike them. "

He compared students to Nazi Brownshirts and attributed the spread of campus disorders to official leniency. When students "rip up one campus and all that happens is that their right to use the ice-cream bar machine is revoked for one hour, what do you expect?" Yet he appeared to enjoy these encounters, during which students would jeer while he delivered such observations as: "A concerned student is one who smashes the computer at a university, and an apathetic student is one who spends four years learning how to repair that computer. " When asked if marijuana should be legalized, Capp said, "by all means. Also murder, rape and arson—then we could do away with all crime. "

Membership

He was a fellow of the National Cartoonists Society.

Personality

Although he was often considered a difficult person, some acquaintances of Capp have stressed that the cartoonist also had a sensitive side; in 1973, when learning that the son of his political rival Ted Kennedy had had his right leg amputated, Capp wrote the boy a letter of encouragement, giving candid advice as to how to deal with the loss of a limb, which he himself had experienced as a boy. One of Capp's grandchildren recalls that at one point, tears were streaming down the cartoonist's cheeks while he was watching a documentary about the Jonestown massacre. Capp is also reported to have given money anonymously to charities and "people in need" at various points in his life.

In her autobiography, American actress Goldie Hawn stated that Capp sexually propositioned her on a casting couch and exposed himself to her when she was nineteen years old. When she refused his advances, Capp became angry and told her that she was "never gonna make anything in your life" and that she should "go and marry a Jewish dentist. You'll never get anywhere in this business. "

In 1971, columnist Jack Anderson reported that Capp had made unwelcome sexual advances to four female students at the University of Alabama. Subsequently, Capp was charged with indecent exposure and sodomy following a visit to the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He pleaded guilty to attempted adultery and paid a $500 fine. A 1987 biography of Grace Kelly, quotes Kelly's manager saying that Capp tried to rape Kelly.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Neither the strip's shifting political leanings nor the slide of its final few years had any bearing on its status as a classic; and in 1995, it was recognized as such by the U. S. Postal Service, " according to Toonopedia.

Interests

• Writers

  Among his childhood favorite writers were Dickens, Smollett, Mark Twain, Booth Tarkington, and later, Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman.

Connections

Capp moved to Boston and married Catherine Wingate Cameron, whom he had met earlier in art class. She died in 2006 at the age of 96.

Father:

Otto Philip

Mother:

Matilda (Davidson) Caplin

Spouse:

Catherine Wingate (Cameron) Capp

(1932–1979)

Daughter:

Catherine Jan Peirce

Daughter:

Julie Ann Cairol

Son:

Colin Cameron Capp

(adopted)

References

• Enigma of Al Capp
• Ring Lardner's You know me Al: The comic strip adventures of Jack Keefe (A Harvest book)