Li'l Abner by Al Capp (No. 77)

Li'l Abner (1934-1977)

by Al Capp 

REVIEW BY R.C. HARVEY:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Al Capp extended the boundaries of permissible satire in syndicated comic strips by applying the principles of burlesque to the adventure genre, which, when Li'l Abner started in August 13, 1934, was the rage. Capp's comedic effort was not so much to end his daily strips with punchlines as it was to finish with outlandish cliffhangers. Li'l Abner Yokum, a red-blooded country boy with the physique of a body-builder and the mind of an infant, is Capp's Candide, fated to wander often into a threatening outside world beyond his hillbilly home, where he encounters civilisation - politicians and plutocrats, scientist and swindlers, mountebanks, bunglers, and love-starved maidens. By this conceit, Capp contrasts Li'l Abner's country simplicity against society's sophistication - or, more precisely, his innocence against its decadence, his purity against its corruption.

Capp ridiculed humanity's follies and baser instincts - greed, bigotry, egotism, selfishness, vaulting ambition - which the satirist saw manifest in many otherwise socially acceptable guises. And he undertook to strip away the retentions that masked those follies revealing society (all civilisation perhaps) as mostly artificial, often shallow and self-serving, usually avaricious, and ultimately, inhumane. Li'l Abner is the perfect foil in this enterprise: naive and unpretentious (and, not to gloss the matter, just plain stupid), Li'l Abner believes in all the idealistic preachments of his fellowman - and is therefore the ideal victim for their practices (which invariably fall far short of their noble utterances). He is both champion and fall guy. A protean talent, Capp invented a host of memorable Dickensian characters and introduced a number of cultural epiphenomena, all grist for his satiric mill.

FURTHER READING:

Al Capp at The Library of American Comics

TCJ Review: Al Capp - A Life to The Contrary

TCJ Article: How Lil' Abner Kayo'd Joe Palooka & Both Their Creators Came to Grief
Print Mag: Lil' Aber's Al Capp - A Monstrous Creature, A Masterful Cartoonist