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It took him another two years to gather himself for his plunge to fame & fortune. Before he plunged, he got married to a pretty art student named Catherine Cameron—but was so completely broke at the time that the bride had to go back to her parents in Amesbury, Mass. after the ceremony. Then he spent a year studying anatomy, perspective and other essentials at the Massachusetts School of Art, hurried back to New York and got a $22.50-a-week job as an assistant to Ham Fisher, the creator of Joe Palooka.
"But," says Capp, "I wasn't the assistant type of kid." He soon fell out with Fisher. With some sample strips of Li'l Abner, he strode into an anteroom at King Features Syndicate and demanded to see Joseph V. Connolly, the Big Boss himself. An office boy demurred. "Tell him," cried Capp, "that Ham Fisher says I am the most promising young cartoonist he has seen in 25 years."
Bait Jake—Wrong Hake. This resounding lie brought Connolly sliding forth like a hake heading for herring. He looked at Capp's work, nodded approvingly and asked, cautiously: "How much is Fisher paying you?" "One hundred dollars a week," replied our hero.
"I'll give you two hundred," said Connolly. "Of course," he added, "we'll have to change this strip. Nobody is interested in hillbillies—we'll put the action in a small town, and put this fellow Abner in regular clothes . . ."
This was probably the most crucial moment in Capp's life. He was broke, bruised from rebuffs and had a baby daughter as well as a wife to support. But he was as horrified at Connolly's suggestion as if he had seen a gorilla throttling his firstborn. He backed out, clutching his drawings to his chest, and sold the strip, unchanged, to United Feature—for $50 a week.
It was an almost instantaneous success, and by 1941 Li'l Abner was running in 400 newspapers, and Capp was making $2,000 a week. Terrified by the idea that this flow of riches might be shut off, Capp did everything in his power to lure the eyes of readers away from strips which ran above & below his own. He made his figures big & simple, and clothed them in black whenever possible. His characters screamed things like "She DOESN'T LOVE Dumpington!" in heavy capitals. He also began modeling Daisy Mae, originally a skinny girl, after Silent Screen Star Barbara La Marr. "She may be forgotten now," says Capp, "but when Barbara La Marr inhaled, boys became men."
Ho! Ho! Ho!—No! No! No! These techniques—and his stubborn insistence on working for laughs—paid off more & more. Capp began to lose his earlier fears that Abner might fall out of favor with the fickle public. But he was struck with an even more horrifying idea—that the syndicate which owned the rights to the strip "might ask me to step out of my skin some day and invite some jerk to step into it and draw Li'l Abner"