Columnist and critic Mark Squirek takes a detour to Dogpatch, USA…

Al Capp’s Li’l Abner Complete Sunday and Daily Comics 1939-1940
IDW Publishing; $39.95

At the end of January 2013, The Library of American Comics is getting ready to release Volume Five in their ongoing series of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner Complete Sunday and Daily Comics. Volume Four hit book and comic stores last year. Both books are essential to any comic lover’s collection.

With this in mind, we take a quick look back at Volume Three in the series. For some reason it kind of slipped by us when it first hit the shelves and the richness of Capp’s storylines found inside point the way for what he brought us in the next few collections in the series.

With the stories found in Volume Three, Capp was starting to bring the then-current media and popular sensations directly into the strip on a much larger scale than he had before. He was finding deep laughs among such diverse works such as The Grapes of Wrath and Gone With the Wind as well as the film Topper.

In addition to this, he was satirizing the attendant fame of these works as well. Capp’s ability to provide different layers and levels of depth to his satire really comes to life in Volume Three.  His parody of The Grapes of Wrath is one for the ages. When you read it you can understand why so many critics compare the best of Capp to the work of Mark Twain.

Capp, a very experienced artist and writer when he started the strip, hit the ground running when Abner first appeared in 1934. To start any strip (or book) with such a strong cast of characters such as Abner, Daisy Mae, Mammy and the rest of the residents of Dogpatch is an amazing feat.

His first four years really shaped the “Abner Universe” and also introduced some wildly popular ideas such as The Sadie Hawkins Day Dance. The public went crazy for the strip (Snuffy Smith, possibly the most popular hillbilly strip after Abner, appeared in the wake of Abner’s success).

While hillbilly humor had been a staple of American entertainment for ages, newspaper comic strips had seldom acknowledged the rural population of America in the way Abner had. With so many of the syndicates being centered in the North, newspaper readers in the South, and by extension the rural components of all America, seemed to be forgotten as big city editors wanted comic strips that reflected their readers. When Abner hit in 1934, those editors were proved wrong.

There are a lot of reasons to enjoy Li’l Abner. The artistic style of Al Capp (and those who ghosted for him) is always amazingly detailed. His line is always crisp, easy to understand and very direct. His panels may be crowded with action and dialogue, but they are easy to understand and read. The cast of characters Capp created is well rounded, very often fully developed and in almost every instance highly entertaining and very funny.

As enjoyable as his art is, Capp had a way of making hillbilly dialogue easily understood by the every day reader. Effectively conveying a dialect on the printed page is one of the most difficult challenges that a writer can face.  Capp was gifted.  When Daisy Mae reminds Abner that he once said “Oh Mah Darlin’ ” and he replies “(Gulp!) Did Ah? – Ah don’t remembuh-” you not only know exactly what he is saying, you hear it exactly as Capp intended.  On top of that, whether you want to or not, you almost have to laugh as you read it.

Even with his skill at language and art, Capp had a way with a storyline that may have only been equaled by Milton Caniff and his work on Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. Few artists and writers working in comic strips could juggle such a large cast, keep such relatively complex plots as Capp created coherent and still keep the average reader fully engaged and entertained.

This included bringing in the newly emerging personality of Hollywood itself into the picture. While movies had helped many get through the Great Depression (which was still going on when these strips first appeared), by the late 1930s, the public’s obsession with Hollywood was growing larger every day.

As Bruce Canwell reminds us in his highly informative introduction, film itself was still relatively new at the time these strips first appeared. Also the America of the day approached books and literature differently than they do today. In general the culture of the time was not as broken into small, specialized segments (sub-cultures?) as it is in 2013.

Capp seemed to understand that referencing film and books inside Li’l Abner brought the different mediums into a sharper focus in the public’s eye. He knew that by referencing books and film it not only broadened the appeal of his strip, it also brought those who read these books and saw these films to his strip.

Those who followed films also went looking for Abner in their newspapers because they had heard he did a short series on the casting of the film itself. Intentional or not, this is cross-media marketing at its best.

In spring of 1939 Capp not only references the popular film Topper, he also follows it with a slight swipe at America’s obsession with the casting of the film adaptation of Gone With The Wind. In the Abner universe it has become “Pfft With the Breeze” and the actress up for the role of “Heartless O’Tara” is about to blow her big chance at the role because, instead of being the world’s number one star, she would rather be the world’s number one bride.

Both the Topper and Gone With the Wind references set the stage for Capp’s take on The Grapes of Wrath. In one brilliant move Capp takes the westward journey of those displaced by the horrific conditions of the Dust Bowl and reverses it.

Instead of going to California for the jobs, the residents of Dogpatch are conned into heading towards Boston to pick oranges. In a bit of fortuitous timing the backwards version of the Grapes storyline was running in Abner just as the film was premiering across the country.

In Volume Three Capp doesn’t just use novels and Hollywood as inspiration, he covers gangsters, crime and even acknowledges The Flash in one storyline centered on speed!

This is a wide ranging set of stories that show Capp beginning to approach a faster comedic style and bring the world around the reader into the world of Abner. Over Volume Four we would see parodies of Superman and even more takes on Hollywood. Volume Five brings in parodies of teen idols like Frank Sinatra and we see Fearless Fosdick start to appear inside the strip as well.

The world that Capp has created is brimming with inventiveness and insight. Capp’s humor may be period specific, but due to the wide appeal of the characters and the quality of his writing, the humor transcends the period in which it first appeared. You don’t need to know about the wide casting search for the right actress to play Scarlett O’Hara as the foibles and weakness and self-absorption of actors has now entered into our collective minds. The humor of the situation has become timeless making the situation hilarious even if you know nothing about Gone With The Wind.

As with every volume produced by The Library of American Comics, the colors are incredible. Using the best original source possible, the density of content found in so many of the word balloons is very easy clear and very easy to understand. The decision to publish these strips and Sundays in an oversized hardcover was a wise one as having five dailies to a page almost automatically pulls us along Capp’s narrative with little effort on our part.

This is another magnificent series from a publisher that clearly loves what they are doing. Their care and attention to detail comes through on every page but we never see their hard work.