Al Capp: Creator of Li’l Abner
Al Capp (September 28, 1909 – November 5, 1979) was an American cartoonist and humorist best known for the satirical comic strip Li’l Abner, which he created in 1934 and continued writing and drawing until 1977. His work reached an estimated 60 million readers in more than 900 American newspapers and 100 papers in 28 countries, and he had a profound influence on the way the world viewed the American South.
Early Life and Education
Capp was born in New Haven, Connecticut, to Otto Philip Caplin and Matilda (Davidson) Caplin, both natives of Latvia whose families had migrated to New Haven in the 1880s. His father was a failed businessman and amateur cartoonist; his brothers Elliot and Jerome also became cartoonists, and his sister Madeline was a publicist. The family was indigent, and Capp recalled his mother sifting through ash barrels at night for reusable coal.
In August 1919, at age nine, Capp was run over by a trolley car and had his left leg amputated above the knee. He was eventually given a prosthetic leg but adopted a slow, increasingly painful way of walking. In a 1950 Time magazine interview, Capp said: “I was indignant as hell about that leg.” The disability likely shaped his cynical, sardonic worldview, darker than that of most newspaper cartoonists of his era.
His father introduced him to drawing as therapy, and Capp became proficient largely on his own. Early influences included Punch cartoonist Phil May and American comic strip cartoonists Tad Dorgan, Cliff Sterrett, Rube Goldberg, Rudolph Dirks, Fred Opper, Billy DeBeck, George McManus, and Milt Gross. He was a voracious reader who had finished all of Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw before age 13, and later favored Dickens, Mark Twain, and Robert Benchley.
Capp spent five years at Bridgeport High School in Connecticut without receiving a diploma, joking that he failed geometry for nine straight terms. He attended three art schools in rapid succession—the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Designers Art School in Boston—but was thrown out of each for nonpayment of tuition. In early 1932, he hitchhiked to New York City, living in Greenwich Village and creating advertising strips for $2 each. At age 23, he found work at the Associated Press drawing Colonel Gilfeather, which he retitled Mister Gilfeather before leaving in September 1932. Before departing, he met Milton Caniff and the two became lifelong friends.
Capp moved to Boston and married Catherine Wingate Cameron, whom he had met in art class. He returned to New York in 1933 during the Great Depression and met Ham Fisher, who hired him to ghost on Joe Palooka. During one of Fisher’s vacations, Capp introduced a crude prototype character, “Big Leviticus,” a stupid, coarse mountaineer. While working on Joe Palooka at night, Capp developed samples for Li’l Abner, basing his characters on authentic mountain-dwellers he had met while hitchhiking through rural West Virginia and the Cumberland Valley as a teenager. He sold Li’l Abner to United Feature Syndicate, and the strip launched on August 13, 1934, in eight North American newspapers, including the New York Mirror, becoming an immediate success. The syndicate changed his name from Alfred G. Caplin to “Al Capp” because the original would not fit in a cartoon frame; he had it changed legally in 1949.
Career and Achievements
Beyond Li’l Abner, Capp wrote the comic strips Abbie an’ Slats from 1937 to 1945 and Long Sam in 1954. Li’l Abner evolved from a hillbilly burlesque into one of the most imaginative and popular comic strips of the twentieth century, featuring vividly outlandish characters, bizarre situations, and a blend of suspense, slapstick, irony, satire, black humor, and biting social commentary.
The strip centered on Li’l Abner Yokum, a simple-minded but good-natured hayseed living in the fictional Southern town of Dogpatch, Kentucky, with his parents Mammy and Pappy Yokum. Capp spent 43 years writing about Dogpatch, describing it as “an average stone-age community” of ramshackle log cabins and pine trees. The strip’s memorable characters included Daisy Mae Scragg, Abner’s girlfriend; Marryin’ Sam; Hairless Joe; Evil-Eye Fleegle; General Bullmoose; Lena the Hyena; Senator Jack S. Phogbound; Fearless Fosdick (in a strip within the strip); and the Shmoos, creatures whose usefulness made them a threat to civilization. Another famous character was Joe Btfsplk, described as “the world’s worst jinx.” Capp’s beautiful, full-figured female characters—Daisy Mae, Wolf Gal, Stupefyin’ Jones, and Moonbeam McSwine (a caricature of his wife Catherine)—appeared on the nose art of bomber planes during World War II and the Korean War.
The marriage of Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae, which occurred after Capp yielded to reader pressure, made the cover of Life magazine on March 31, 1952. Through Li’l Abner, Capp made a large personal fortune and profoundly influenced the way the world viewed the American South.
Awards and Honors
Capp won the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award in 1947 for Cartoonist of the Year. He received the 1979 Elzie Segar Award posthumously for his “unique and outstanding contribution to the profession of cartooning.”
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