Just How Bitter, Petty, and Tragic Was the Comic-Strip Genius Al Capp?
Writing a definitive biography of the Li’l Abner creator meant coming face to face with just how shockingly mean, and just how perplexingly kind, the controversial artist could be.
In the 43-year run of his satiric comic strip Li’l Abner, Al Capp not only launched iconic American characters (Abner, Daisy Mae, Mammy Yokum, Pappy Yokum, the Shmoos) and places (Dogpatch, Lower Slobbovia), but introduced lingo like hogwash, natcherly, and double-whammy into the lexicon. His legacy, though, is more complicated than that. A controversial TV and radio personality whose life took a tragic spiral downward, Capp is the subject of a spicy new biography, Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary (Bloomsbury, USA). Its authors, the veteran biographer Michael Schumacher and the underground comics pioneer Denis Kitchen, set out to highlight his talents as an artist—but found themselves inevitably also chronicling the man’s dark side.
Both authors, and while Schumacher was too young to understand all the finer points of the strip, years later he became intrigued with Capp’s story. “The good and the bad was gripping, and it appealed to the biographer in me,” he wrote in an email to me. Kitchen also loved Capp’s unpredictable plots, his sexy women, and his uncouth, often grotesque cast. But as a college student, Kitchen told me, he witnessed Capp’s transformation “from a progressive figure to a student-hating, pro-Vietnam War pal of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. And not long afterward saw sex scandal headlines gut his fame. Almost overnight he lost everything.” This intense love-hate feeling toward Capp and his work is what led Kitchen to want to understand the man better.
