The Press: Rap for Capp

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As any of his own slobbering fans can plainly see, Cartoonist Al (Li'I Abner) Capp dotes on needle-etched caricatures, e.g., Slobbovian Statesman John Foster Dullnik, curly-haired Pianist Loverboy-nik. As Chester (Dick Tracy) Gould well knows from the strip-within-a-strip Fearless Fosdick, Capp is not even (gasp!) a respecter of funny-paper characters. But last week, while readers watched Capp spoof Cartoonist Allen Saunders' lovable, motherly missus-fixit Mary Worth as a nasty, interfering old harpy named Mary Worm, the worm turned: Capp himself emerged in Mary Worth drawn as a swinish (ugh!), detestable cartoonist named Hal Rapp.

Conceived by Saunders and drawn by his partner Ken Ernst, the take-off on Capp seemed to contain too many dirty digs to be just good clean fun. When Mary Worth pays a visit to the summer home of "Comic Strip Artist Hal Rapp," he proves a coarse cad. "Hey! Who's this old biddy?" he demands. "I was expecting somebody younger! Get the idea?" Soon he is hurling a glass of booze (poured into a tumbler decorated with a Capp-created Shmoo) at one of the peons who turns out his strip Big Abe on the assembly line.

It was more than the Des Moines Tribune could stand. The paper (circ. 136,455) stiffly informed readers last week that it was discontinuing the current Mary Worth sequence because it was a "thinly disguised attack on the creator of another comic strip." Huffed a special announcement: "The editors of the Tribune believe that readers want to be entertained by comic strips and are not interested in the jealousies and rivalries that exist between comic strip creators."

Was Al Capp at last getting his comeuppance? What did he think of the Saunders-Ernst treatment? Said he: "Unpardonable slander. Something disgraceful, humiliating." Then Capp took his tongue out of his cheek and exposed the feud (sob!) as a hoax. He and Saunders cooked it up last fall in Washington at a meeting of the cartooning clan ("a pretty damn dull profession"). Rapp will go on taking raps for a few weeks until, says Capp, Saunders "casually reveals at the end that I'm not a monster." Confirmed Cartoonist Saunders: "Rapp just follows the public concept of Capp, an egotistical, arrogant, unreasonable fellow, which, of course, he's not at all."