Al Capp by Denis Kitchen

Author:Denis Kitchen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2013-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

After stretching the central tension of his comic strip for nearly twenty years, Al Capp did the unthinkable in 1952: he married Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae.

The wedding story was greeted with great fanfare. Time magazine gave it the full treatment, complete with two panels from the story and an explanation from Capp. Life went much further. The wedding was its cover story, and Capp wrote a lengthy essay, “It’s Hideously True: Creator of Li’l Abner Tells Why His Hero Is (Sob!) Wed.”

Capp blamed a national climate of fear for forcing his decision. “Li’l Abner” had, by that point, evolved from a suspense strip to a no-holds-barred satire unlike anything the funny papers had ever seen. He’d been free to lampoon anyone and anything, from politicians to the movies. “I was exhilarated by the privilege this gave me to kid hell out of everything,” he wrote.

But times had changed. Criticism of the government was frowned upon. Communism was found lurking in the most innocuous places. Even something as seemingly innocent as the shmoo or the kigmy was under attack in some quarters, where critics saw them as negative criticism of the American way of life. In Capp’s opinion, the fifth freedom—“the freedom to laugh at each other”—was under siege.

“That was when I decided to go back to fairy tales until the atmosphere is gone,” Capp told Life readers. “That is the real reason why Li’l Abner married Daisy Mae.”

Capp hoped this would open new creative possibilities for the strip. Li’l Abner had never held a job; now, as head of the household, he’d have to find a way of supporting Daisy Mae and, God forbid, any children they might have. Would Daisy Mae’s attitudes about Li’l Abner change, now that she had finally won him over? And what would become of Pappy and Mammy Yokum, now that their only child had moved away and left them alone together? Capp looked forward to exploring these new storylines.

Not everyone felt the move was a good creative choice. Charles Schulz, creator of “Peanuts” and one of the comics industry’s rapidly rising stars, thought the marriage was “probably the biggest mistake ever made in comic-strip history.” Comics readers, he said, weren’t open to such drastic change; they were comfortable with the characters that initially attracted them to the strip and could only take change a little at a time. With the marriage of Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae, “the premise of the strip collapsed.”

These were not thoughts that Capp wanted to hear, especially since he felt he was pushed in that direction by circumstances beyond his control. It didn’t help, either, that “Peanuts” was on its way to pushing past “Li’l Abner” in readership.

Capp Enterprises, under Bence Capp’s guidance, was constantly searching for new ways to expand its operations. It continued to profit from the strip’s international popularity, but aside from the disastrous feature-length motion picture in 1940 and a series of insipid animated cartoons a few years later, “Li’l Abner” failed to crack the potentially lucrative film and television markets.

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