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But comparing the average comic strip to Li'l Abner is like comparing an ordinary cocktail to a dipperful of Capp's own Kickapoo Joy Juice, a liquor of such stupefying potency that the hardiest citizens of Dogpatch, after the first burning sip, rise into the air, stiff as frozen codfish. Capp tries to give his readers not only a daily belly laugh, satirical Cappian comment on politics, sex, law enforcement, the housing situation and human rapacity, but surrealistic gobbets of action, mystery, horror and adventure as well.
He is firmly convinced that nothing makes a reader turn to a comic strip faster than the belief that one of its characters is about to be disemboweled, and the actors who tread his narrow stage are continually being starved, frozen, bilked, shot, or flattened out by the frequent upheavals of Capp's pulsating planet.
Dogpatch, the hill-bound heartland of Capp's mad empire, is a bewilderingly portable affair. Capp continually changes it to suit either his current story line or his own fancy, and it has been variously situated in a deep valley, on a desert beside a high mountain ("Onnecessary Mountain"), and on top of the same peak.
Crash! The uncertain hamlet of Dogpatch is equipped with standard but movable props, all of them hazardous in the extreme. One of the oldest is the West Po'kchop Railroad, which runs almost perpendicularly up one side of Onnecessary Mountain and straight down the other. A stiffnecked industrialist named Stubborn J. Tolliver built this suicidal grade to satisfy a boyish dream of his son, Idiot J. Tolliver. To keep "his drooling boy happy, Tolliver still starts one train a week up the tracks. Except in those instances when Capp installs switchbacks in the line, each train falls back with a crash, killing all its passengers.
Another Dogpatch institution, the Skonk Works, is almost as lethal—scores have been done in by the fumes of the concentrated skonk oil which is brewed and barreled by its proprietor, Big Barnsmell, and his "outside man," Barney Barnsmell. Of the devices which are employed to make life horrible for Capp's characters, these are simply the more rudimentary.
The dismal, Arctic citizens of Lower Slobbovia are forever doomed to stand buried to their chins in snow, bitten from behind by sempiternally voracious bears and wolves. The luckless victims of Fearless Fosdick, the fiendish detective (Capp's caricature of Dick Tracy), who is a dead shot and trigger-itchy, always end up perforated as neatly as so many slices of Swiss cheese. No true Abner fan (classified by Capp as a "slobbering" fan) can forget the magnificent moment when J. Roaringham Fatback, the hog tycoon, ordered Onnecessary Mountain tilted sideways with enormous jacks to keep its shadow from falling on his breakfast egg. The hovels of Dogpatch naturally sailed off into the abyss below.
Passions of Slobberlips McJab. Capp also sees to it that his readers are fed liberal quantities of sex, Dogpatch style—a style which incorporates the absurder aspects of mayhem and dementia. On occasion the woomanship of Appassionata Van Climax, the Wolf Gal, Adam Lazonga and Slobberlips McJab has resembled the more vehement techniques of Lizzie Borden and Strangler Lewis.