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Al Capp, the cartoonist-creator of Li'l Abner, probably has a sharper eye for slobs, monsters, hags and fiends than anyone alive. This means that his eye is very sharp indeed, for the modern slob seldom slobbers and in the 20th Century even monsters are apt to use both Vitalis and Zip, grease themselves liberally with Mum or Dew, and consult a dentist twice a year. Capp is not fooled. At times, in fact, he seems to suspect that the world is peopled exclusively by bloated big businessmen, brainless editors, venal politicians, sadistic cops, cruel stepmothers and shambling, leaping legions of lesser knaves, oafs and fools.
Capp loves them, each and every one. Which is not to say that they please him; they reduce him to a frenzy of rage and exasperation—punctuated with hoots of laughter. In moments of gloom he is certain that this ubiquitous medley is on the brink of ruining 1) the world in general and 2) Al Capp in particular. In such moods his conversation often implies that he is a sort of modern General Custer, facing hordes of murderous madmen and cut off from civilization with no weapon more deadly than India ink.
Toads & Bloodworms. But at the same time he finds villainy of all kinds wildly entertaining. He is convinced that man's inhumanity to man—whether expressed in a simple hotfoot or an atomic explosion— is the basis of all humor, and he can discuss grafters, murderers and wife-beaters as delightedly as a zoologist describing a sporty specimen of toad or bloodworm. Capp is a large-framed, large-headed, exuberant man with a shock of black hair, bottomless energy and a bullfrog voice. He often climaxes a denunciation of some awful piece of skulduggery by bursting into ribald laughter and bawling, "Charming! Charming!" at the top of his lungs.
This odd marriage of attitudes, plus his endless enchantment with yokels and pretty girls, has made him one of the best-read, best-paid and most widely celebrated humorists in U.S. history. His comic strip is a rarity among the "comics" in being really, and deliberately, funny. At 41, after 14 years of drawing Li'l Abner, Capp makes $300,000 a year, is read by 38 million fans in 700 U.S. newspapers, and has been favorably compared not only to such classic cartoonists as Rube Goldberg, but to such writers as Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens and Voltaire.
Smoke-Bursts & Soot-Falls. As a comic strip, Capp's Li'l Abner is not the most popular in the U.S.: it can be accurately described only as one of the top five—a group which also includes Little Orphan Annie, Blondie, Dick Tracy and Joe Palooka. At least two of them, Blondie and Dick Tracy, claim more readers, but the promotion departments of national syndicates fire off such billowing smoke-bursts of conflicting claims that the truth of the matter has long since been buried under a soot-fall of verbiage.